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.
