Coolplayer & Foobar (Alternates to Winamp): Luddite/Old Skool WAV-CDDA Players

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catachresis

1
I get a hankering for CDDA/WAV-player applets that have supposed-audiophile capacities. In the past, I've been a fan of the strong features provided by Winamp 2.71/2.81(?). Recently, I felt like I wanted an alternative.

I've been pleased with the clarity and minimalism of Coolplayer (advocated by some folks in these forums) which delivers audio in 'blazing-fast C'. It has plugins for Ogg and some nice skins, but does not seem to have a good applet for CDDA (so you can't just shoot yur cd into the tray and play on Coolplayer).
Freeware: http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/

Still more recently, spurred by the vehement denunciations of Coolplayer fans in their support forums, I've tried-out and liked Foobar 2000 -- another ostensible audiophile player that does play cds from the tray, supports a variety of compression codecs, including flac, and is similarly free.
http://foobar2000.hydrogenaudio.org/

While I'm blissfully free of any of the technical knowledge that gives opinions on audio quality legitimate authority, I'll say I like the two new players and would enjoy what other folks have to contribute on the subject. A dog-fight over which is better might be entertaining too (but people here at cdrbase are too good-natured for that kind of carry-on ;)
 
S

scarecrow

1
Foobar is great, although it looks more like Notepad and less like a multimedia app. I don't like Coolplayer, just too limited for my taste.
Still I prefer Winamp 2.81, where I can add/remove whatever I please.
 
Wedge

Wedge

1
Ok cat, now you got me fired up.....

....j/k

I still use winamp :rolleyes: but I might give foobar a go. Thanks for the hot tip.
 
disthegame

disthegame

1
coolplayer is limited but will get better in a few months. foobar2000 is horrible to me. Lots of people claims it sounds better than most media player but i disagree. I play a lossless wma 9 file in foobar2000, coolplayer and windows media player 9. coolplayer sounded better than foobar2000 and coolplayer and windows media player sounded the same. This was tested in windows xp professional edition.
 
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scarecrow

1
Plus that Foobar does NOT have embedded support for WMA at all, not for any other copyrighted audio format- actually it will never have, the program philosophy is totally different.
What it should playback is the output of the Microsoft DirectShow filters- so it should not sound better or worse than WMP.
 
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