is there a best music player on the computer?

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).

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.

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.

What ever I am using at the moment! Which happens to be JRivers.

Aplhifi,

I'm curious as to what settings you use with J River. I use a Windows 7 64 bit laptop, with ASIO4ALL installed (what ASIObuffer do you use?).

I've been using XXhighend for a while now and must say that it sounds very good. I started with playing around with J River today and compared them one on one. And XX still has the slight edge.. The difference is smaller than I thought it would be though. Maybe I'm using the wrong settings? Somewhere I hope that J River will be better because of the user friendliness. At least my wife can put on some music when I'm not home!!!

Thanks!!