Top 5 Desktop Media Players To Organize Your Digital Media
You’ve collected hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of digital music and videos in the past 10 years, and as your media library has grown, so has the necessity for finding the perfect desktop media player for organizing the data. A perfect music player should not only be capable of playing back digital media , but it also needs to be able to help you search through and find any song or movie you’re looking for at a moment’s notice. Hit the jump for a glimpse at the five best desktop media players.
Songbird
Songbird is developed by a band of experienced, dedicated software developers and designers called the ‘Pioneers of the Inevitable’. Previous software includes Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. The mission of Songbird is to become the first complete web player, to play back audio and video content made available by different medial players across the Internet. You can play back any audio from MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA formats. It enables you to search and import your audio, once imported, you can mix and create new tracks. Songbird is highly customizable, shipping with two themes. You can download or create your own extensions and, as it is cross-platform compatible, you can use the same application on Windows, Mac OS or Linux operating systems.
Download [ SongBird ] (Link to Windows version only)
Winamp
Despite the fact that Winamp isn’t as much at the forefront as it once was, it’s still in active development and still maintains a thriving community of users contributing skins and plug-ins. It has got iPod and other MP3 player support, remote streaming through your browser and game consoles, and an auto-tagging feature that automatically updates your music’s metadata. This newer version 5.54 has also added video support for managing your ever-growing video library.
Download [ Winamp ]
MediaMonkey
With MediaMonkey you can manage small to very large collections of audio files and playlists (50,000+), whether on a hard drive, network, or CDs. You can also lookup missing information and album art online, tag almost any audio format, and automatically rename/re-organize tracks on your hard drive. Here are some of the main features at a glance:
- Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface.
- Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata.
- Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down.
- Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.
Download [ MediaMonkey ]
iTunes 8
Apple’s highly polished iTunes software is a firm favorite with iPod users, but is also useful if you want a media player that can organize your music library. As well as purchasing music from the iTunes Store, you can rip your own CDs, burn custom audio CDs, listen to Internet radio, download free podcasts, and more. The only downside to iTunes is its portable media device support; apart from the iPod and iPhone, there are very view supported devices. That said, iTunes still offers enough features to make it your default player and media manager.
Download [ iTunes 8 ]
JRiver Media JukeBox
Media Jukebox software is a complete solution for digital music management and playback. It plays all major music formats. Use it for full-speed ripping, burning, and encoding your music collection with automatic CD, Album art and Track look-up. It is device friendly and syncs to your iPod, PlaysForSure device, and many smart phones. It has the best file organization of any digital jukebox, and lets you easily create custom Playlists and Smartlists, and tag your files with the powerful tagging studio. Personalize your listening experience and get the best sound performance with EQ, DSP and audio effects – audiophiles will not be disappointed by the top-notch sound output.
Download [ Media JukeBox ]
Start Organizing Your Media Now !
A true media player does not just play music files.
j.river complete media the best of player
I certainly hope this list is in ascending order because when I saw that Songbird was developed by the crew that totally dismantled all things great about MusicMatch, well underwhelming. All things Apple are rejected by me. I have a lifetime upgrade to MediaMonkey and am still searching for better. WinAmp has steadily improved but first impressions of their invasiveness and catering to AOL mentality taints any respectability they might actually deserve. That leaves JRiver as the only possible satisfactory media organizer listed worth my checking out.
I can attest that MediaMonkey with a 100K song library has extensive lag issues–2 minutes is quite common. I defrag often and maintain library database often to make it usable at all. My requirement for 96k mp3pro encoding is denied. Winamp plugins are required for mp3pro playback.
I may actually find better suggestions from commenters than from this article.
I’m using jetAudio for a long time and have no negative point about it.
I always like winamp media player to listen and watch the videos
Jet Audio is certainly one of the best for encoding purposes, but here in this post we were preferring those media players that lets you organize your digital content.
Jet Audio is the best that I have found though my preference does lie with the encoding options FLAC and OGG to name the two favourites.
@rob
Thanks for pointing out the typo. It’s fixed now. 🙂
@Geoserv
Thanks for Stumbling, I appreciate your support.
STUMBLED!
Aside from the small typo noted above, good list.
It’s “Songbird” not “SongBird” — please update your post!
Rob