2. digital
  3. 1297468992

is there a best music player on the computer?

I recently bought an HRT MusicStreamer II and have listened to internet radio lately but sometimes the stations have their own player that they prombt you to use but I have had no luck with. For example: KUSF does not work for me, they offer a choice of Flash 2.0 Flash 3.0 and Windows Media Player. When I select one of these in the pop up window it does not work.

What is the best music player for my computer (Windows XP pack 3)?

Is there a way to select one player to use with everything?

What is the best choice for this?

I presume the individual website are to blame in some instances, however, I need a plan of attack.

any help appreciated.

Thanks!

Phil
philjolet
aplhifi
515 posts
 
Hello Simon,

Is JRivers, on your opinion, better then MediaMonkey?

Yes.

If so in what areas, particularly sound quality (WAV/FLAC)?.

Together with ASIO4ALL, JRiver is the only computer based playback I've heard to come so close to the upgraded Esoteric VRDS transport inside my NWO-M.

Best,
Alex Peychev
tbg
5,263 posts
 
Aplhifi, I heard my Mac OS 10.6 with an SSD playing PM 1.72 and also Audirvana and the Weiss 202 connected with FW playing side by side with the JRivers on a new PC USB connected to a dac, that I'm afraid I don't recall.

It is interesting how divided this computer server effort has become. I had a PC server once, but doubt I would ever really consider going back to Micro Soft.
suteetat
435 posts
 
I have not tried JRiver in a long time. I heard the current version is significantly better than previous versions I tried about 2 years ago by quite a bit.

Over the past 2 years, I have been using XXHighend. All I can say is that when I started using XXHighend, it was significantly better than foobar, mediamonkey, Jriver at that time. Since then, it only got better and better. I don't know if Jriver has caught up with it or not. The only weak part of XXHighend is the interface is not nearly as nice as mediamonkey or Jriver and I feel that to get the most of it, low power PC/laptop is not going to work. You really need lots of RAM and seems to sound best at this time with Win7 with service pack 1 (not official release yet but you can get them).
suteetat
435 posts
 
I forgot to add that XXHighend seems to be the only PC program so far that I find to rival Mac Pure Music/Amarra but then again, I have not heard the current version of Jriver.
niacin
70 posts
 
I have tried Winamp, Real, WMP and Media Monkey. The free versions are all compromised in some way and the sound of none were that good. I recently discovered J River Media Jukebox (the free version) and it's excellent. The view and search elements are second to none and unlike many of the free media players, full boolean commands are standard. Unlike the others you can manage the sound to a high degree and it sounds vastly superior in tonal quality. They have a good support forum which is manned permanently by a Beta team as well as admin presence. They do favour their full price player a little more (Media Center)but that's to be expected.
More to discover