On my home desktop, I dual boot Windows and OpenBSD. Under OpenBSD, I have a few good choices for music players. Since I've taken quite some effort to organise my music collection - which resides on a 2T RAID 5 array on my OpenBSD server, served up via NFS / Samba - Xmms, Amarok or even mplayer work fine for me. I tend to listen to music on a per-album basis - and all my music is in a hierarchy of genre/artist/album.
But what about Windows? I really hate the venerable WinAmp these days - I find it bloated, unstable and slow. I also dislike Windows media player for similar reasons. Up till now I've been using VLC for Windows, which is nice because it at least supports all the formats I need out of the box (MP3, Ogg, FLAC).
About a year ago I tried out this new-fangled thing with a lot of hype around it (at least here in SF) called Songbird. Back then, it was horribly poor quality, and just plain didn't work. I distinctly remember the 'exit' button not functioning in the program, and having to manually kill it from the Windows process manager. However, today I decided to give it another try. While its still pretty bloated (12M download), it at least seems to work! Actually its fairly decent. Like Amarok, its essentially an iTunes rip-off. In other words, it allows you to browse your music collection easily whether or not you have it well sorted. Songbird scanned my 102G music collection over Samba in only a few minutes, and so far has been quite stable. So if you are looking for a fairly decent music player for Windows (and apparently it runs on some other platforms too) why not give it a try?
Niall O'Higgins is an author and software developer. He wrote the O'Reilly book MongoDB and Python. He is the co-founder of BeyondFog, Inc which makes Strider Brilliant Continuous Deployment. Strider is a hosted Continuous Integration & Deployment service for Node.JS and Python.
