When the boss read over Part One, he commented that I hadn’t included iTunes. Steven, being the optimist that he is, likely assumed that I’d forgotten that he’d asked me to review it. Silly blogger. Ask my wife just how bloody obedient I am. In all honesty, I spent quite a bit of time with iTunes when I got my first iPod, and still have recurring nightmares. It would be impossible, I reasoned, for me to be anything in the vicinity of unbiased. My literary offerings would be gratuitously laced with horrid profanity and vulgar epithets, for one thing. Come to think of it, I’d prefer to be dragged backwards through the anus of a dead cat than install that pile again. I’m aware that I just alienated a goodly number of our readers, both by trash-talking a popular application and by referring to the nasty end of a feline. I’ve gotten emails and been harassed asked on IRC and other places why iTunes isn’t here, so perhaps there will be a Part Three, and I will apply myself to looking at the application in an objective manner…..

Onward…

Interface and Features

- Continued from Part One

Foobar2000 is one of those programs with “WTF” names, e.g. - Ever hear of Mahalo? Most of us know what “FUBAR” means, and it’s not something we’d generally apply to something that works as well as Foobar200, so I’m going to give Peter Pawlowski the benefit of assuming he was going for irony, unless you’re a coder, and you get the joke. Foobar hasn’t yet reached version 1.0 yet, so I’m going to again give Peter the benefit of the doubt, because Foobar is, compared to the other players, somewhat lacking. There is no minimal or ‘windowshade’ view mode, so either you have to minimize it or select ‘always on top’ and keep moving it out of your way. There are no skins available at this time. There is, however, an 18-band EQ that I screwed with for a while, and blasted ‘Carol of the Bells’ as loud as I could with impressive results.

Sweeeeeet.

XMPlay - I know I spoke of the “placebo effect” with regards to sound quality in media players, and I think I’ve been a victim of this effect. I opened up all the players and loaded the same track in all 5 - “Save a horse (Ride a Cowboy) by Big and Rich”. I must say, with default EQ settings on each of them, XMplay sounded the best to me. This one is Steven’s pick, and I saw his reasons after playing with it for a while. On their website, un4seen states that their output is “smoother than a baby’s arse”. I don’t know what that means, but I guess it’s good. XMPlay’s default interface is useful and configurable, though it could be much more intuitive. It took me a while to figure out how to get the playlist active. The default playlist view is too small, it can’t be expanded to view the whole song title, but other skins, there are about 30 available, address this. There are options galore for file association, DSP, output and more, as well as plugins for playing tracks inside archives, MSN “now playing” scripts, RealAudio and WMA support, and on and on.

System “Friendliness”

We all know what resource hogs some apps can be, so I examine each in turn for this effect. For the record, I’m running a dual-core P4 3.4 with 3gig of RAM. Visualizations, for those players equipped with them, were not taken into account and were not activated, as the resource usage for this depends heavily on system specific items like video card capability.

WiMP - Windows Media Player started out using a little over 15,000k of memory and ramped up to about 17 within a couple seconds. I had started it in minimal mode, upon being expanded, memory usage went well over 21,000k, then over 30,000k when playing an mp3. The jump in memory usage wasn’t as extreme when playing a video file. WiMP commandeered up to 5% of my processing power to play media.

VLC player came up with a footprint of just over 8,000k of overhead. Upon starting up an mp3, it started gobbling memory slowly, eating up another 12,000 by the end of the 4 minute track for a total of 20,000k usage. Unlike WiMP, CPU utilization never even registered.

QCD hovered around 3,000k of memory when idle. This hops up to 12,000k while playing a video file. 5,200k or so was top end for audio files. CPU usage barely registered, touching 2% on occasion.

Foobar2000 presented with an idle memory usage of over 8,000k, increasing to 14,000 or so while playing audio. CPU cycles used was negligible.

XMplay fired up quietly, with about 2300k of memory while idle. This never went over 8,000k and again, CPU usage was barely visible.

Wrap-Up

While VLC gets high marks from me for its versatility and propensity to play any file you throw at it with alacrity, and QCD merits kudos on its great user interface and the sheer volume of skins and plugins, XMPlay impressed me the most. Any issues I had with it can be addressed by choosing a different skin. The sound is great, the features are there, and it’s not a resource hog like a few of the others.

Stay tuned for Part Three: iTunes. By popular demand.

Links:

Graphic Equalizer Tutorial

K-Lite Mega Plugin Pack (Codecs)

Winextra Media Player Review Part One

Conversation Tags: Windows, WiMP, VLC, Videolan, QCD, Foobar2000, XMPlay, iTunes