2012-04-07

MultiMedia Players in Windows and Linux

For MS Windows, my favourite audio player is foobar2000 [official site / Wikipedia]
(I'm tired of Winamp [official site / Wikipedia], and especially of the Windows Media Player [Wikipedia]; some people may like something else, e. g. AIMP [official site / Wikipedia]).

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For playing video, I use VLC media player [official site / Wikipedia], MPC-HC ("Media Player Classic - Home Cinema") [official site / Wikipedia] and (very rarely) MPlayer (incl. forks).

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In GNU/Linux, there are 2 powerful media players I frequently use (mostly for playing video): VLC and mpv [official site / Wikipedia].
mpv is a popular fork of MPlayer [official site / Wikipedia] & mplayer2 (itself a fork of MPlayer; now abandoned); they say it has more features and more rapid development process than the original one.
Sometimes I used mplayer[2] with a (now abandoned) GUI called gnome-mplayer.
BTW, I neither like nor use GNOME Videos (formerly called Totem) [official site / Wikipedia].
And some users also like xine [official site / Wikipedia] and Kodi (formerly XBMC) [official site / Wikipedia].

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There are some pretty console audio players: mpg123 (probably the best MP3 player around) [official site / Wikipedia], cmus ("C* Music Player") [official site / Wikipedia], moc ("music on console") [official site / Wikipedia], mp3blaster (now obsolete) etc., but I prefer mpv there :)

And now about GUI audio players. Some years ago I used XMMS ("X MultiMedia System") [official site / Wikipedia] (now discontinued) and Amarok [official site / Wikipedia] (it was too overweight for me). In the near past, I used Rhythmbox [official site / Wikipedia]; when Banshee [official site / Wikipedia] became the default player in Ubuntu, I was very disappointed (it was much more buggier than Rhythmbox and used that C# / Mono / .NET / etc. stuff); then I tried to use LXMusic (it uses XMMS2 [official site / Wikipedia] backend and has a minimalist GUI) for some time, used Exaile [official site / Wikipedia] a few times...
...and finally switched to Audacious [official site / Wikipedia]
(Audacious is a fork of (now defunct) Beep Media Player [official site / Wikipedia], which itself was a fork of XMMS; BTW, it supports Winamp skins; not to be confused with Audacity [official site / Wikipedia], a popular audio editor).

Some other popular players:
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Last updated: 2016-12-11