Mar 30, 2008
A key component in my whole-house music system [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7] is a media player on Windows. While I run both Windows and Linux (and soon Mac) at the house, Windows XP is my primary OS.
I found that there is no single media player that meets all of my requirements. I tried tons of various media players, including oldies like WinAmp, and cool new ones like MediaMonkey, foobar2000, and KMPlayer. But I ended up going with two predictable choices: Windows Media Player 11 and iTunes. And of the two, I much prefer WMP11.
My choice of media player came down to the following requirements:
- Fast performance and low system overhead
- Support for multiple audio file and codec formats
- Fast and reliable CD ripping
- Support for automatic monitoring of multiple local and shared networked media directories (I keep audio organized in various server directories, to be detailed in a future post)
- iPod synchronization
- Automatic podcast subscriptions (with iPod sync)
- Support for directory-stored album art (folder.jpg)
WMP11 is the clear winner in almost every category:
- For performance and file format support, with various DirectShow plugins along with the WMPTagSupportExtender plugin, WMP11 can handle just about anything. I'm currently using it to manage directories of WMA Lossless, FLAC, and MP3 formatted audio. iTunes is restricted to WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless.
- WMP11 actively monitors shared media folders, automatically adding new media as it is discovered. This is really handy when buying from various online music stores. iTunes is only aware of audio files that have been added manually to iTunes (though there are some 3rd party apps that can solve this).
- WMP11 is positively snappy compared to the bloated and sluggish iTunes, including fast load times.
- WMP11 ripping to WMA Lossless is fast and reliable, though not much more so than iTunes ripping to Apple Lossless.
- iTunes insists on embedding album art into each individual audio file, whereas WMP11 will display art stored in the standard folder.jpg file.
With an iPod/WMP11 plugin such as dopisp, WMP11 can even sync with my iPod nano. However, as I'll explain in a future post, WMP11 can only manage a single "library" at once, which prevents me from using it as my iPod manager. This is fine, as iTunes is still the best iPod manager available, and does a superb job of maintaining podcast subscriptions.
So there you go: my primary media player for my whole-house music solution is Windows Media Player 11… with a little help from iTunes.
Mar 02, 2008
A couple of years ago, I started a series of blog posts detailing my approach to managing digital music (see musicstorage [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7]). To recap, my goals were:
- Bit-perfect copies of my current and future CD collection stored in a universally accessible location
- Ability to access to the music collection from any music playing device made by any manufacturer in any location
- Ability to transcode the music to any proprietary file format as needed by a music playing device
- Ability to transcode the music to a compressed scheme in cases where storage quantity is more important to me than sound quality, such as a portable music player
Since I started the thread, I got caught up in several projects at work, and was unable to make much progress. However, the tenacity of the open source community kept moving, and I can now say that I have a fully functional music management solution. I'll detail the specifics in some pending posts, but here are the components I'm using:
Hardware
- Old Linux server with 750MB drive (running ZenWalk 4.8)
- Various Windows XP machines
- Apple iPod mini and iPod nano
- Roku Soundbridge M500 (2) and M1000
- Buffalo WiFi Bridge (2)
Software
- iTunes
- Windows Media Player 11
- CD Art Display 1.0
- WMPTagSupportExtender
- illiminable Ogg Codecs for Windows
- MPlayer (Linux)
- FLAC (Linux)
- FireFly (aka mt-daapd, Linux)
- Samba (Linux)
Audio CODECs in Use
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