Best Media/Music Player for Windows 7 x64?

[MariosX]

Hello!

I'm currently using Media Player Classic Home Cinema (without any codecs) for any video playback and Winamp v5.61 for music playback.

But I got bored of Winamp, I believe I need a better Music player that can have a better quality playback and as well 5.1 music support for any music file

For the time being I'm good with Media player classic home cinema but I would like to know if there is any better Video player or any codecs you would recommend to increase it's playback quality as well as colors, sharpness and etc.

Please recommend me any players that consider better than Winamp & Media Player Classic Home Cinema including payed and free ones.

[tsupersonic]

I despise iTunes with a passion. It's dog slow even on my i7, it's just garbage. It feels like an extremely poor port of the Mac version.

I do however use Zune for listening to music, goes great with the Zune HD, and manages music pretty well. For video, I just tend to use Windows Media Player or VLC

[thenaes]

You must be overreacting.

I've used iTunes for years and I can't remember the last time I had a even a minor issue with it, and I very much doubt it installs 10 services. At the moment the only slow thing about it is the iTunes store.

I have Windows 7 64bit and it is 100% working with my near 60gb library.

He is. I have been using iTunes for years and I have had any minor issues. It doesn't slow down my computer and I have a huge library.

Some of these gripes were valid in older versions, but since iTunes 8/9 a lot of the slowdown issues with large libraries and other things were fixed.

[nXqd]

I'm not a user who need fancy configs / skins so I use MPC-HC for everything. It's minimal, play audios and it only eat about 3 - 5 mb in minimized mode.

My old combination:

Video: Kmplayer - This one is quite powerful but it's complex, the only thing I want is subtitle draw on the black bar instead of movie screen ( I forget how this is called )

Music: AIMP - minimal and it works. I used to be a foobar lover but somtimes I spend too much time tweaking and playing with foobar but now I don't have that much time so I give up using it :)

[inactive]

for Video (.avi or .mkv) = PotPlayer (i.e. http://goo.gl/GFOrM (download links there for x86 and x64)) (formerly The KMPlayer as the developer switched to PotPlayer. it also has hardware accelerated h264 video on by default (The KMPlayer does not which is a big deal for us with older CPU's but with video cards that can do hardware acceleration) which the popular 'VLC Player' does not and it's overall user interface is just better than VLC Player to)

for audio = Foobar2k (plus this program makes it nice and simple to convert formats. say flac to mp3/mpc/ogg(Vorbis)/aac etc (it does require some initial setup though for converting to mp3 etc etc as you need to download the LAME v3.98.4 encoder and then when you try to convert it will ask for the location of the lame.exe. if your going to use OGG Vorbis i would get the Vorbis AoTuV encoder))

p.s. i was a hardcore WinAMP (lite) user for years but with the ways to convert formats and the little things with Foobar2k i think i prefer that overall more but WinAMP still has the edge for compactness.

as for the whole iTunes thing... i never used it but to me it just seems like extra unneeded software as Foobar2k can do all you need. (i prefer DAP's (like Sandisk Sansa e200 series) that can run Rockbox anyways more than the iTunes bs)

plus a nice little side feature with Foobar2k (with a extension) you can run a ABX test (it's basically a test that can compare your original lossless file to a compressed file like MP3 so see if you can tell the difference in sound. it's basically a nice way for a self test that tests your hearing to see when a lossy file becomes transparent to you so you can basically find the sweet spot for making the smallest files for your digital audio player without you being able to tell the difference between the original and the compressed file.

but in general as far as MP3 goes... ill bet most people won't be able to tell the difference between a 130kbps VBR file made with LAME (mode v5 (default is v2 190kbps VBR)) and the original lossless file. (but with MP3 i can definitely detect a difference if you drop back to 96kbps or 64kbps and i proved it using the ABX test (but each person will vary depending on how good or bad your hearing is)) ... but low bit rate encoding (i.e. under 128kbps) i would recommend Vorbis or AAC as those perform clearly better than MP3 does at low bit rates.

[Arkaic]

J River Media Center or iTunes........... I only use iTunes because of my iPod.

but prefer Media Center too for other things like crossfade burning.

[trag3dy]

If it hasn't been ruled out already gonna throw my vote behind Foobar2000. It's been my music player of choice since it's hit version 1.0. I'd suggest using any configs made by Br3tt.

I prefer Spotifoo.