Windows Media Player
Love it or hate it thats what Microsoft gives you by default in every windows installation. It may not play a flac or mkv, but you surely can hook up media players to download music at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316992 I found a list of formats in wmp12
namely
- asf
- wma
- wmv
- wm
- asx
- wax
- wvx
- wpl
- dvr-ms
- wmd
- avi
- mpg
- mpeg
- m1v
- mp
- mp3
- mpa
- mpe
- mpv2
- m3u
- mid
- midi
- rmi
- aif
- aifc
- aiff
- au
- snd
- wav
- cda
- ivf
- wmz
- wmf
- mov
- qt
- ra
- rm
- ram
- mp4
Itunes
The De facto by Apple inc available for both windows and mac sadly Linux users have to suffer.
It does not support any format except apple and mp3 and converts windows media files on windows to aac. Support to Open Source formats can be given by third party tools and plugins.
The biggest plus point is iTunes Store which is a music store and database rolled into one, though not available in many countries with full functionality it is largest music store in the whole US since 2008. It features
- Music
- Movies
- Audiobooks
- Podcasts
- University Lectures (iTunes U)
- iPod Games
- iPhone App Store
- iBookstore.
The Store can be accessed from the software only, it also gives automatic downloads functionality
to users and also has the now-well-known cover flow which shows covers flowing through the screen with the scroll of mouse.
It also has the genius functionality which analyses the music library and creates custom playlists and allows you to group similar sounding music in one playlist.
along with it iTunes gives you storage in the cloud and streaming to your iDevices a good package if you own one.
Winamp
IT was developed by American programmer Justin Frankel and Russian programmer Dmitry Boldyrev, and its popularity grew quickly, along with the developing trend of MP3 file sharing.
According to Wikipedia:
Music formats supported are:
It is a cross platform primarily aimed for playing recorded media and uses an underlying open source 'Helix' media engine backend.
version 4.01 of RealPlayer was included as a selectable Internet tool in Windows 98's installation package. Subsequent versions of the software were entitled RealPlayer G2 (version 6) and RealOne Player (version 9), whilst free "Basic" versions as well as paid "Plus" versions, the latter with additional features, have also been offered. For the Windows OS, version 9 subsumed the features of the separate program, RealJukebox.
RealPlayer 15 was released November 18, 2011 and allowed users to transfer video, music and photos between their computers and mobile devices, share links of videos and photos on Facebook, MySpace etc, and download videos from popular sites such as YouTube and Metacafe. It was a media streaming platform until replaced by the kinds of Flash and windows Media Player.
The supported formats according to wikipedia are :
According to ofiicial statement here is what they said
"In order for your browser to display the following paragraph this site must download new software; please wait. Sorry, the requested codec was not found. Please upgrade your system."
"A frustrating inability to play media files--due in part to constantly changing file formats--was only part of Real's problem. RealPlayer also had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying "messages" that were really just advertisements, and so on.
And some of RealNetworks' habits were even more troubling. For example, shortly after RealJukeBox appeared in 1999, security researcher Richard M. Smith discovered that the software was assigning a unique ID to each user and phoning home with the titles of media files played on it--while failing to disclose any of this in its privacy policy. Turns out that RealPlayer G2, which had been out since the previous year, also broadcast unique IDs. After a tsunami of bad publicity and a handful of lawsuits, Real issued a patch to prevent the software from tracking users' listening habits. But less than a year later, Real was in hot water again for tracking the habits of its RealDownload download-management software customers.
To be fair, RealNetworks deserves credit for offering a free media player and for hanging in there against Microsoft's relentless onslaught. We appreciate the fact that there's an alternative to Windows Media Player; we just wish it were a better one."
Clementine
When Amarok one of the best Media players of linux moved on to version 2.0 the dissatisfied users cried for a rollback and as with every open source software there was a new software using the source code of Amarok. Seriously speaking I too hata the three pane layout which makes it hard to shuffle music in amarok, but is useful for creating custom playlists on the fly.
Clementine does away with thatand gives a two pane view with additional useful bar on left which picks up lyrics from songs.wikia.com and artist info from wikipedia. and as with amarok it also fetches media info from internet.
the complere feature list according to Wikipedia is:
It also Lacks Podcast support which may be a big problem for some people for whom Podcasts are a way of discovering artists or learning something new.
AIMP
AIMP or the Artem Izmaylov Media Player is a freeware app for windows platform from the Aimp Development Team and oiginally created by Artem Izmaylov.
It was aimed at being a lightweight, responsive audio player. It had been based on the BASS audio library but since beta version 3.00, has its own audio engine.
The audio Formats Supported are:
IT was developed by American programmer Justin Frankel and Russian programmer Dmitry Boldyrev, and its popularity grew quickly, along with the developing trend of MP3 file sharing.
According to Wikipedia:
Music formats supported are:
- Mp3
- MIDI
- MOD
- MPEG1
- AAC
- M4A
- FLAC
- WAV
- WMA
- playing and import music from audio CDs
- optionally with CD-Text, and burning music to CDs.
- The standard version limits maximum burn speed and datarate; the "Pro" version removes these limitations.
- Windows Media Video
- Nullsoft Streaming Video.
- For MPEG Video, AVI and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Microsoft's DirectShow API for playback, allowing playback of most of the video formats supported by Windows Media Player.
- 5.1 Surround sound is supported where formats and decoders allow.
It is a cross platform primarily aimed for playing recorded media and uses an underlying open source 'Helix' media engine backend.
version 4.01 of RealPlayer was included as a selectable Internet tool in Windows 98's installation package. Subsequent versions of the software were entitled RealPlayer G2 (version 6) and RealOne Player (version 9), whilst free "Basic" versions as well as paid "Plus" versions, the latter with additional features, have also been offered. For the Windows OS, version 9 subsumed the features of the separate program, RealJukebox.
RealPlayer 15 was released November 18, 2011 and allowed users to transfer video, music and photos between their computers and mobile devices, share links of videos and photos on Facebook, MySpace etc, and download videos from popular sites such as YouTube and Metacafe. It was a media streaming platform until replaced by the kinds of Flash and windows Media Player.
The supported formats according to wikipedia are :
- ra
- rm
- rmvb
- rv
- rt
- ram
- rmm
- rtsp://
- pna://
- pnm://
- mms://
- sdp
- smil
- smi
- mp3
- mp2
- m3u
- cda
- wav
- mpc
- m4a
- m4b
- mp4
- acp
- m4p
- aif
- aiff
- au
- vob
- dat
- mpg
- mpeg
- mpe
- m2v
- avi
- divx
- swf
- wma
- wmv
- mov
- qt
- flv
- rpl
- xpl
- pls
- bmp
- gif
- jpg
- jpeg
- png
According to ofiicial statement here is what they said
"In order for your browser to display the following paragraph this site must download new software; please wait. Sorry, the requested codec was not found. Please upgrade your system."
"A frustrating inability to play media files--due in part to constantly changing file formats--was only part of Real's problem. RealPlayer also had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying "messages" that were really just advertisements, and so on.
And some of RealNetworks' habits were even more troubling. For example, shortly after RealJukeBox appeared in 1999, security researcher Richard M. Smith discovered that the software was assigning a unique ID to each user and phoning home with the titles of media files played on it--while failing to disclose any of this in its privacy policy. Turns out that RealPlayer G2, which had been out since the previous year, also broadcast unique IDs. After a tsunami of bad publicity and a handful of lawsuits, Real issued a patch to prevent the software from tracking users' listening habits. But less than a year later, Real was in hot water again for tracking the habits of its RealDownload download-management software customers.
To be fair, RealNetworks deserves credit for offering a free media player and for hanging in there against Microsoft's relentless onslaught. We appreciate the fact that there's an alternative to Windows Media Player; we just wish it were a better one."
Clementine
When Amarok one of the best Media players of linux moved on to version 2.0 the dissatisfied users cried for a rollback and as with every open source software there was a new software using the source code of Amarok. Seriously speaking I too hata the three pane layout which makes it hard to shuffle music in amarok, but is useful for creating custom playlists on the fly.
Clementine does away with thatand gives a two pane view with additional useful bar on left which picks up lyrics from songs.wikia.com and artist info from wikipedia. and as with amarok it also fetches media info from internet.
the complere feature list according to Wikipedia is:
- Search, organize and play local music library.
- Listen to Internet radio from Icecast, Grooveshark, Jamendo, Last.fm, Magnatune, SKY.fm, SomaFM and Spotify.
- Sidebar information panes with song lyrics, statistics, artist biographies and pictures.
- Tag editor, album cover and queue manager.
- Download cover art from Last.fm.
- Creation of smart and dynamic playlists.
- Tabbed playlists, import and export as M3U, XSPF, PLS, ASX and Cue sheets.
- Visualizations from projectM.
- Transfer music to iPod, iPhone, MTP or any USB mass-storage player.
- Transcoding music into MP3, Ogg, FLAC or AAC.
- Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
- Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line interface.
It also Lacks Podcast support which may be a big problem for some people for whom Podcasts are a way of discovering artists or learning something new.
AIMP
AIMP or the Artem Izmaylov Media Player is a freeware app for windows platform from the Aimp Development Team and oiginally created by Artem Izmaylov.
It was aimed at being a lightweight, responsive audio player. It had been based on the BASS audio library but since beta version 3.00, has its own audio engine.
The audio Formats Supported are:
- CDA
- AAC
- AC3
- APE
- Apple Lossless
- DTS
- FLAC
- IT
- MIDI
- MO3
- MOD
- M4A
- M4B
- MP1
- MP2
- MP3
- MPC
- MTM
- OFR
- OGG
- RMI
- S3M
- SPX
- TAK
- TTA
- UMX
- WAV
- WMA
- WV
- XM
AamroK is something that any Linux user having a KDE Environment needs no introduction to and now it is available for windows too. one of THE coolest media management and playback apps available to Linux.
The new release Moving earth Brings the following features
GPodder.net podcast synchronization.
Re-written USB Mass Storage support.
The Windows version of Amarok is now officially declared stable.
Many bugfixes to the iPod plugin.
An integrated Amazon MP3 store.
personal experiences with AmaroK show that it is good player but the three pane interface takes the toll on the usage experiences and sometimes you hate it when you cant easily shuffle your music but it is gone for now.
A middle (now sidebar) helps the users with lyrics and other materials about artists and I'm surprised how has any native windows player has not managed it so well (itunes gets some info when you have logged into it and clementine a fork of AmaroK does it too).
AmaroK has also got free music playback of Jamendo, LastFM and other web services and uses Phonon as a backend but that can be changed easily
Another nifty feature is saving the music library as an external MySQL database so that it can be accessed using an external client'.
It also has got an moodbar anlyser which analyses the song and gives info about it in now playing notifications.
The VideoLan project was originally started as an academic project in 1996. It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a campus network. VLC was the client for the VideoLAN project, with VLC standing for VideoLan Client. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by the VideoLAN non-profit organization.
Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under the GPL on 1 February 2001. The functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated.[8] The project name has been changed to VLC because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.
Plays everything: Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices and Streams.
Plays most codecs with no codec packs needed:
MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3...
Runs on all platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix...
Completely Free, 0 spyware, 0 ads and no user tracking.
Can do media conversion and streaming.
The new release Moving earth Brings the following features
A middle (now sidebar) helps the users with lyrics and other materials about artists and I'm surprised how has any native windows player has not managed it so well (itunes gets some info when you have logged into it and clementine a fork of AmaroK does it too).
AmaroK has also got free music playback of Jamendo, LastFM and other web services and uses Phonon as a backend but that can be changed easily
Another nifty feature is saving the music library as an external MySQL database so that it can be accessed using an external client'.
It also has got an moodbar anlyser which analyses the song and gives info about it in now playing notifications.
The project was originally started by Mark Kretschmann as a means of improving XMMS due to several usability problems, which interfered with the addition of new files to the playlist due to several user interface elements existing for one task. The original amaroK was created based upon the idea of a two-pane interface seen in Midnight Commander, and the first version of the software released solely by Kretschmann, was based upon the ideal of allowing users to drag-and-drop music into an interface in which the playlist was displayed on the right and information on the left.
After the initial release of AmaroK, several developers joined the project to form the “Three M’s” the first of whom was Max Howell, who acted as an interface designer and programmer for the project, alongside Muesli (Christian Muehlhaeuser), who also provided user interface insight and programming till the late 1.4 versions. Originally named amaroK, it was renamed to Amarok in June 2006.
Amarok 1.4 established a reputation for innovation after its release, but maintaining development with the old framework became more difficult as Amarok grew. With the release of KDE 4 the developers decided to give AmaroK a complete overhaul aesthetically as well as functionally.
On June 3, 2009, version 2.1 was released which reintroduced a few of the 1.4 features which had been missing from the initial 2.0 release, and introduced some features such as native ReplayGain support for the first time.
AmaroK can play following files if they are not encumbered by DRM depending on the system:
- FLAC
- Ogg
- MP3
- AAC
- WAV
- Windows Media Audio
- Apple Lossless
- WavPack
- TTA
- Musepack
The VideoLan project was originally started as an academic project in 1996. It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a campus network. VLC was the client for the VideoLAN project, with VLC standing for VideoLan Client. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by the VideoLAN non-profit organization.
Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under the GPL on 1 February 2001. The functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated.[8] The project name has been changed to VLC because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.
Features
Simple, fast and powerful media player.Plays everything: Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices and Streams.
Plays most codecs with no codec packs needed:
MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3...
Runs on all platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix...
Completely Free, 0 spyware, 0 ads and no user tracking.
Can do media conversion and streaming.
No comments:
Post a Comment