What to look for in a Media Player?

Calibretto

VIP Member
What do you guys think is important when deciding what media player to use (WMP, Winamp, itunes)? What features must you have? What features must stay out?

Throw out some ideas. I'm going to write an article on media players and need something to write about them :D
 
I don't care about how many formats it can play, only interested about .mp3, .wav and some other more common ones. I look after the way it organizes collections and WMP 11 is the best until now, but I look more after the quality of the sound. I use winamp because it has some cool features like fade in/out when pausing, stopping music and so on.
 
Media players should be able to play a large variety of formats, be able to transfer music to a large variety of portabl music players and have some sort of EQ settings.
 
I like it to have many ways to organize music and easy to use as soon as you start it up. Right now I like iTunes and Winamp, also I like it to be fast and make it easy to edit song info
 
It should also have access to an online CD database to retrieve song info/album/art from.
 
I personally like winamp like the others said it just need to play mp3, wave format just the most common ones and to have a good search engine like winamp cuz if you put more than 1000 songs you can use it to play a particular song ... :)
 
Thanks guys. keep them coming. I personally use MediaMonkey which does all the things you guys have already mentioned :)
 
I second what everyone has been saying and I just wanted to add that I like it when watching a video in full-screen mode, the controls automatically hide, but upon moving the mouse, the seek-bar appears at the bottom. I like that better than having to click and having a little box appear somewhere. Seeking on a little box is harder than having the entire bottom of the screen. Look at VLC player's default skin. It drives me crazy that to seek, I have to exit full-screen mode (or at least I don't know of any other way to do it).

I also like the ability to click on the "time remaining" and toggle it from time elapsed to time remaining.

I absolutely LOVE the ability to pan in The Core Media Player. Many players can fit your video to a given aspect ratio, but TCMP goes beyond that and also lets you manually adjust it (via right-click menu options or even better by simply pressing the page-up and page-down keys).

I also really like TCMP's ability to control the volume by simply scrolling the mouse wheel.

I use TCMP to watch videos (it can play just about anything), but for music, I prefer iTunes because of its organizing ability and flip-cover display. The only downside to iTunes is that it won't synch with non-ipods.

Okay, if I think of something else, I'll post it later. :)
 
MediaMonkey so far is the best I have found that fit my needs. It has everything that makes winamp good (it even supports winamp plugins) and it also organizes your music for it (only if you want it to) like iTunes. It also does transcoding to different formats and it supports common lossless formats too.
 
Used to have TCMP on my PDA, but i think its discontinued now,

you know, I was wondering that. By the looks of their website, it seems they did discontinued it probably early 2007. What a shame. I still use it though. The only thing is that Vista reverts to Basic when I use TCMP but after I close it, it returns to home premium.
 
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