Can you recommend an alternative to Winamp, that's both portable and not as bloated as Winamp?
New: Kanri (Oct 09, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
Please donate today
New: Kanri (Oct 09, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
Please donate today
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
https://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/coolplayerp_portable CoolPlayer+ FTW
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
Well, this one is like way too minimalistic, plus it does use some serious memory for its functionality from what I can recall when I tested it.
Last time I used it, it constantly stuttered and couldn't handle even a minor strain on resources.
Vintage!
My big issue with coolplayer is, and I do like it, that it does not like large playlists. Anything over about 350-500 songs and it will error out on start up. Since I use it on a portable hard drive, my media lists do tend to be longer than that. I use VLC or Songbird right now, but am always looking for something else.
VLC doesnt like long playlists as well. it also seems to hate it when you throw a lot of FLAC at it where it starts giving you flack for giving it loads of FLAC. (bad pun intended)
Well for a lot of media, you want a library player. There are basically two kinds of media players. iTunes and Windows Media Player are great examples of library players. You index all your music files and it sorts them and helps you find the needle in the haystack.
Between iTunes forsaking tags altogether for its meta-database and every other library player including iTunes not being able to read half my songs' tags (and some not having tags), I have yet to find a library player that works for me.
So what I do is organize the files themselves and use single-file players. A single-file player can support playlists, often as long as you like, but they're not meant to support your library. CoolPlayer+ and VLC are both single-file players, not library players.
Winamp is also a library player, but it used to be a single-file player, and now, actually, it can't decide what it wants to be, which is why I haven't updated since 2.91.
But it sounds like both of you want library players, not single-file players. Look at that Teen Spirit (now Jaangle, actually; looks like somebody turned 20) app somebody posted above. I took one look at it and realized it wasn't what I want, but maybe it'll serve y'all's purposes.
Nice find! I've been waiting for Jaangle for a while now!
To a point I do use library players, but I actually built a m3u playlist that I use for playing songs on single song players and when I load that playlist into coolplayer it works fine and plays well. The problem is that if I don't clear the playlist before I close coolplayer then coolplayer will crash out when it tries to load the playlist up as part of it's start up routine to load the last constructed playlist. I actually like coolplayer a lot, it just gets to be a little pain if I fail to clear that playlist before exitting.
Teen Spirit is an excellent music player and is portable. It's what I use now.
Homepage: http://teenspirit.artificialspirit.com/
Portable instructions: http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=16401
Highly recommended by me.
http://www.foobar2000.com/
My personal favorite, though I don't like the new UI (I use the 0.9.4.5 UI).
Vintage!
I'm curious about this as well. I actually can't run Winamp at work because these computers are specifically set up to not allow "applications named winamp*.*". How's that for bad luck? I suppose I could rename the .exe's and associated files, but if they went to the trouble to disable it (but they still have Windows Media Player up here) I'm sure there's a good reason. I don't know what a company would consider dangerous about Winamp, but I'm not about to go cheating on their security settings. They let me surf the Net, and CoolPlayer and VLC work alright, so I can't complain.
Well, CoolPlayer is ugly as sin, and how it bundles its features as skins is bordering on the offensive. Plus, I'm not a big fan of red. It's cute that it's imitating the site and default menu, but as it's the only portable app that does, it's useless as a feature. Now if all the portable apps did it, and the color could be changed (I'd make it a green gradient, or at least blue), that would be awesome, but just the one app?
TeenSpirit looks capable, but I'm not looking for a WMP/iTunes type media player, but rather a Winamp-type, like CoolPlayer; I just wish we had a better option than CoolPlayer.
well the style with coolplayer is actually something a portableapps.com member designed
if you say what the app originally looked like then you would change your mind. and to change the style you can open the skin in gimp and make the modifications yourself.
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
songbird!!!!!
http://songbirdnest.com
it's also in beta here, done by Ryan McCue
Lead, Follow, or get out of the way.
Songbird is still fairly bloated and it takes a while to start up. Trout maybe? http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic40645.html
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake,
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
The only open-source media player I've seen with Customizable Global Hotkeys... (an absolute essential for me)
I would say Songbird is the way to go.
PortableApps.com Advocate
XMPlay w/RealAudio plug-in + codecs and a dozen skins at under 3MB.
http://www.un4seen.com/
My second-favorite audio player. I would definitely recommend it.
Vintage!
Simply the best. Small, fast, nice UI, plays everything.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
I like foobar2000 and XMPlay... Foobar's GUI seems to be less intuitive in a way, but otherwise I like it. They both load fast, have all the features one may need, and XMPlay GUI looks pretty much like Winamp so the transition is very easy.
Thanks!
I hate foobar2000's new UI. If you want, I can give you the 0.9.4.5 UI plugin.
Vintage!
That would be very nice, thank you!
Do you want an email to send it or you have it somewhere uploaded?
http://www.digital-signal.net/bahamut/temp/foo_ui_std.dll
Put it in the components folder, overwriting the existing one.
Although the folks at Hydrogenaudio don't recommend using old components, I've been using it for most, if not all versions since the change up to and including 0.9.6.3 beta 2 with no adverse effects.
Vintage!
Thanks a lot my friend!
When you update, you can either just overwrite the UI plugin again, or you can use an archive program like 7-Zip to extract all the other files (don't extract directly to the fb2k folder; open the archive and copy the files).
Vintage!
I don't see what's so much better about the old interface... you can easily configure the new one to look just like it if you want...
No.
$rgb(R,G,B,RS,GS,BS) does not work and there is no way to get rid of the columns bar.
Vintage!
for streaming? Go with Screamer. There's a wrapper lurking in the forums.
Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world