What software do you use to play and manage music on your computer? Include a link if you can, so others may discover great software!
Please, one application per answer. That will allow the votes to bubble the most popular answer/application!
I use foobar2000.
I use iTunes on Mac OS X because I like the integration with everything else, it's default, and I don't have any third-party hardware I need to use with it.
Winamp, because Window Shade mode is the best.
Windows Media Player.
With Windows 7 and Windows Media Player 12, the media sharing options are remarkable, and it syncs perfectly with my old Sansa m250 MP3 player.
Songbird. I especially like the Concerts addon which tells you if any artists in your library are playing gigs where you live.
I mostly use Spotify, and for music not in Spotify's library I use Amarok.
More information here: Spotify.com & Amarok website
I use Rythmbox music player, mostly because it came with Linux Mint. I tried it and it seemed to do what I needed: play music. I don't think it has any fancy features, but I don't use those anyway.
I run Music Player Daemon on an old Apple Cube with a couple of big harddisks in software RAID1 with all my cd's in flac format.
To control the daemon I have hooked up mpc-commands to various F-keys in XEmacs on my desktop machine. Occationally I start the gmpc.
I've written a very rudimentary iPod touch friendly web-frontend that uses mpc to get information and send commands.
Oh, and a simple commandline utility that transfers a music file to the jukebox and queues it for immediate play (i.e. for ad-hoc downloaded podcasts etc.)
So far I miss two things:
Haven't gotten around to solving those two yet.
Banshee on GNU/Linux machines. Fast, simple management of recorded material and podcasts in one place. Banshee is written in C# on the Mono platform using GNOME technologies (Gtk#, GStreamer, etc). It is free software, released under the MIT/X11 license.
When I'm not using Spotify (and on a Windows machine) I always use MediaMonkey to manage my music collection. It sports an impressive list of features (in my opinion of course). I really like the interface for looking up album art and the way you can specify alternative filename schemes when you sync with something.
It has so many awesome features and is also able to use Winamp plugins.
Features from the MediaMonkey website:
- Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface.
- Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata.
- Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down.
- Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.
- Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume.
- Record CDs and convert MP3s, M4A, OGG, FLAC and WMA files etc. into other formats.
- Create playlists and let Auto-DJ & Party Mode take care of your party.
- Sync iPhones, iPods, & MP3 players, converting & leveling tracks on-the-fly.
I use the Zune Software, not because it's really better than anything else, but because it's got a nice interface and it annoys me less than anything else I've tried on Windows.
I finally switched to iTunes on windows when I got an iPhone a year or so ago. I don't know what took me so long: once you get it set up and running, it beats the pants off either Windows Media Player or Winamp. Better searching, playlist creation, cover art, you name it.
And iTunes with the iPhone remote app is just killer.
I use 1by1.
Free, simple and light weight. It's not feature rich like most popular music players but I don't use anything else besides to play music.
1by1 is a small, fast and handy audio player which is not only small: it provides a smart and versatile environment to handle your file collection and listen to your tracks - with no need for playlists or databases.
Windows: I use Windows/Vista Media Center most of the time, but Media Player to do CD ripping.
OSX: I use iTunes.
Linux: Rhythmbox.
Whatever is default is fine. Other than installing iTunes for Windows so I can sync my iPhone on my HTPC, which also holds the media/music library, I don't install 3rd party software for music playback.
I also use Last.fm instead of Pandora, because it just works better for me.
Media Player Classic - http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
Its open source so its free.
Its listed as a video player but is also an audio player.
Clean, uncomplicated and open source.
I used to be a 'use whatever the default player is' type, but I have just discovered Quod Libet and I really like it. It's main mission in life is to make tag-oriented orgainzation of your music library a breeze. What it lacks in flashy UI, it makes up for in speed and search. It will expose tags in you music files you never knew you had, and let you perform regular expression searches on them.
It's GTK+ based and coded in Python, which means it can (possibly) run just about anywhere. This is the best cross-platform solution I have found yet. Finally! I have a player I enjoy on both linux & windows.
I use J. River Media Center. It's commercial, but it has everything you could ever think of. Perfect for extremely picky people like me. :)
My second choice would be Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7, but whenever I use it I still miss some of Media Center's features.
I have a Logitech Squeezebox Boom hardware music player, so most of my music is kept and organised with the free Squeezecenter server software and played through the Squeezebox. It's controlled via the Boom's remote, the web page, or the SqueezeControl app on my Android phone.
For ad-hoc on PC playing I use Vista/Win7 Windows Media Player attached to the same music share.