[Thor]

Hey everyone, I just had to do a reinstall of Windows on a fresh drive, and decided to ditch WMP for something else.  I really like the Kantaris MP, but it lacks library and ripping functions that WMP had.  what would you guys recommend using? 

PS: I ditched iTunes for WMP a year and a half ago...i don't have an iPod and its not something that concerns me

[Jeff Vader]

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Winamp for music and VLC for videos. Winamp has all the library and playlist functions you need, and VLC will play (almost) any format available, so there shouldn't be any need for codec battles, when trying to view videos.

Edit: Hmm. Now that you mentioned it, ripping is something that WMP can actually do right. I still use it for that purpose, if the need arises. But not for anything else.

[Thor]

sigh, i got over Winamp almost 5 years ago....right before i went to iTunes...lol

why is it so hard for a mediaplayer to have all the functionality that people actually need?

[BloodEagle]

Check out the Combined Community Codec Pack.

[Mongoose]

The KMPlayer is far superior to VLC for video in this humble user's opinion (not to mention the fact that it looks a hell of a lot shinier) and handles just about every file I've ever thrown at it without the use of external codecs (aside from some asinine subbing group that decided to do something goofy with .mkv softsubs).  I don't know if there's anything better for audio than Winamp, but I still stick with it out of force of habit, and I've never had any complaints with it.

[Flaser]

Like using an ssa subtitle that can handle a lot more than a mere .sub or .srt? That's quite sensible actually.

I recommend CCCP (Combined Comunity Pack) with Media Player Classic, or if compabilty is your topmost priority then Mplayer. The later doesn't even have a frontend, but it managed to play really mangled videos as well as ones in really obscure formats.

[Thor]

sigh, i can't find anything else with the feature set i like....back to wmp....although i'm going to keep Kantaris around

[perihelion]

I got annoyed with Winamp several years back because of their mangled support for Replay Gain (which in my opinion has done more to improve my "listening experience" than any other upgrade released in the last several years).  I gather that they cleaned up their act and support Replay Gain more evenly across multiple formats now, but I'd already gotten hooked on Foobar2000 and have no desire to switch back.

Many don't particularly care for Foobar2000's austere default setup, but it is infinitely customizable if you care enough.  I leave the thing minimized most of the time, so I don't particularly care what it looks like as long as it sounds good and I don't have to constantly adjust the volume between songs!

[Nuke]

winamp is good if you do the custom setup and uncheck anything that you don't want. i only use about a third of its features. of them are buggy or just don't work. the new skin in recent versions is just awesome, supports album art now. i always liked its visualization system, fun to program it, a couple of the presets seem to also double as simple games. then again ive been using it since the days of win95 when it was just a simple audio player.