Looking For a Good Music Player

[Pie32]

I've been using Winamp since pretty much teh dawn of time, but lately it hasn't been fully satisfying my needs. Winamp works great, except for its song shuffling. In a playlist of like 300 songs, Winamp just plays the same ten or fifteen songs over and over.

Anybody know any good music players that have a working song shuffle?
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[ClickFanatic]

Have you tried increasing the Shuffle Morph Rate setting to Fast already?
The setting can be found in the Preferences panel under Playlist.

As for your question: I know many media players, but I am not really into Shuffle Analysis.
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[Pie32]

I'd never heard of that setting, but it appears to already be set to 'fast'.
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[drath]

iTunes probably has the best shuffle technology of any media player and is pretty customizable in getting the exact ammount of shuffle to fit your needs.

One of the options is : "Drag the slider to change the likelihood of hearing sequential songs by the same artist or from the same album (when shuffle is on)" and the three points of the spectrum are: more likely, random, and less likely.

If you want purely random tracks, then the random setting is good for that. But there is also three other advanced settings which will shuffle songs, albums, or groupings (set by you) taking into account the setting of the slider above.

If you are dealing with a lot of tracks anyways, you should be using iTunes considering I have close to 25,000 songs most with album art; and it's the only player that has been able to sync up that many tracks/art and still function smoothly.
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[Myst]

That's interesting and kinda cool, I didn't know that iTunes had that type of functionality. However, I'm still not going to use it - I've never really liked it. I've tried for a few months, but got tired of it, and eventually just went back to Windows Media.

I since have got a Zune, so I've been using the Zune Media player (which is free to download), but I wouldn't see any reason to use it other than owning a Zune and needing it to sync it.

[Pie32]

iTunes sounds exactly like what I need, thanks drath...

but I need Windows XP service pack 2, apparently. Dang, I guess I'll have to download that first. iTunes isn't going to have a problem playing songs that weren't downloaded with iTunes, is it? I've never used it before.
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[Rashy]

iTunes works perfectly with songs that you don't download from their store. In fact, not a single one of my songs are from the iTunes store.

The only songs that iTunes can't handle are encrypted WMA files (because of the Microsoft DRM).
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[drath]

Also with iTunes you can choose to disable the music store within the program itself.
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[martinz]

While I like freeware and stuff, there isn't any good ones around so I am sticking to iTunes for the moment.

[LP-SolidRaven]

The issue I see with iTunes is that it's a huge memory hog.
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[Jacky]

Winamp and iTunes are the two better ones out there.

Musicmatch Jukebox used to be quite good until it got acquired by Yahoo! and became Yahoo! Music Jukebox.
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[krt]

You can fix Winamp's flawed shuffling, a quick google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q.....fle+weight
and I found this:
http://www.burnap.net/RoboDJ/
It's abandoned but still should serve you well enough. Note that RoboDJ supports weighted shuffles but I assume you can disable it for near true random shuffling.

If you are looking for a good music player, don't bother. Unless you want to tinker with foobar2000 until it works to your needs or something, stick with Winamp or even Windows Media Player. I have found Amarok to be better than anything on Windows, and it seems to have a Windows port but I heard it is a bit tricky getting it to work.
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[Rashy]

Amarok is a nice media player, but I felt it had a slow response time and it just felt... weird and not solid. But I get those weird feelings about programs. I also think it crashed on me a couple times (but so did most of the other music players I used in Ubuntu).

One port I am really excited for is Banshee. That was my music player of choice on Ubuntu.

One of my friends likes the Windows Media Player Classic and uses it as his only music player. I haven't used it and don't know what features it all has, but you could check it out (I think it comes pre-installed on all windows operating systems...)
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[Xtreme $niper]

I use iTunes religiously, and I don't own and don't plan on owning an iPod.

I just think that the jukebox functionality and the way it organizes my music is the best in any player I have ever used. The shuffle is pretty intelligent. It usually plays a few songs from the same genre back to back just like a real DJ at a party would, and when you import songs into the library you can set it so that it organizes the file structure of the actual files into Artist>Album>Song, which makes it easier to find songs in your file system later on, and makes for great backups.

It can be a bit of a memory hog, but not a lot of programs these days aren't. I think the pros outweigh the cons, and I have never used the iTunes Music Store at all.
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[LP-SolidRaven]