The best media player for large collections?

I guess you could say I have quite a large music collection. I have been collecting CDs since I was old enough to buy them for myself, I inherited a huge amount in the past, and my collection is bolstered by the many freebies from the huge range of unsigned bands I enjoy listening to. Up until recently I have been using a Windows Explorer session to find the mp3 I want to listen to, and then dragging it into a media player. Realising that there must be an easier way, I wanted to find out which, if any, of the modern media players could handle a large collection and which one is the best.

The music library is a 220GB store of around 40,000 files attached across a wireless "G" network (at "Excellent" signal strength), on a USB 2.0 external drive in an IcyBox enclosure. All of my systems run Windows XP.

In Brief
Winamp is clearly the best choice, as the smallest download, the easiest installation (beware of installing additional extras by not unticking boxes) and the least memory- and resource-intensive. If you want brainless autonomy, the better option would be Windows Media Player, although avoid iTunes at all costs, unless you're the 'pretty' type, or you have shares in Apple.

iTunes
Apple's media player is the obvious choice for many people because it's so closely associated with the overpriced and limited (but 'pretty') portable media player from the same company. The download is over 30MB, and despite my crippled (see the blogs about Virgin Media for more) broadband, it still downloaded at an unreasonably slow speed. Installation was fine though.

On loading the software, it looks pretty. All Apple things look pretty. Apple is the stereotypical blonde of the computing world. You'd never see an iPod outside the house with no make-up. Annoyingly, iTunes hungrily starts scouring your drives without even asking permission. I do some audio and video editing so I have things like partial clips and stock effects littering certain folders, which I certainly don't want importing into my media library. It's this kind of dumbing down of software that annoys the more experienced user. Finding the configuration for the media library locations was simple though, and I pointed it to the right place.

Several hours later I was still waiting for it to import. There is no indication of time elapsed or remaining, and no option to import in the background so that you can begin using the newly imported files. It really was laughably slow, and on a number of occasions I was considering clicking the cancel button and totally ditching the software. This is why you don't run the 400 metres in make-up and high heels. You look pretty, but you don't go fast.

Having perservered through what seemed like an eternity of importing files, I thought the ordeal was over. Alas, not so. The blasted software insisted on doing all kinds of crazy things to my files, such as downloading album art and even converting them! Apparently I didn't get a choice in the matter, as Apple's (pretty) monstrosity happily began devouring my collection. Fidelity is important to me. I consider myself an audiophile, and I use Exact Audio Copy and LAME mp3 encoder to get the maximum quality, regardless of speed. Just about everyone else I know would just press the 'rip' button and live with all the audio artifacts (pops and clicks from small CD scratches). They would probably also happily accept iTunes tearing through their music collection doing its own thing. Again this is dumbing down, and again I found myself infuriated. My mouse moved a little closer to the "uninstall" button.

Next there's the search. I couldn't even type letters into the search box, because after each letter, the program froze for a few seconds. The search did find what I was looking for, eventually, but not without leaving me feeling as though I had climbed a mountain. Oh, and it's using 120MB of RAM at the moment, shortly after loading it. It isn't playing any songs or sorting through any media. It's just idling.

All in all, iTunes is probably a superb piece of software if you want to do what all the other millions of emo MCR-obsessed sheep do, and transfer your post-grunge non-specific mediocre trash to your iPod. To me, it is a clunky, slow, unwieldy piece of software better suited to those with deep pockets, thanks to the prevalence of the links to the iTunes store. It's a resource hog, and it's frustrating to use. Did I mention it doesn't play WMA files? Come on, what kind of program won't play WMA files? On the plus side, it's pretty.

Windows Media Player 11
You can probably tell from the previous section that iTunes left me more than a little annoyed. It's one thing for a media player to get bloated, use all your RAM, slow down, and waste your disks by building an unnecessarily large music database on its own terms, but I am very careful with my files. Even if Jesus knocked on the door, accompanied by Elvis and Bill Gates, and asked if he could rearrange my H: drive, the answer would be a resounding "no."

Until recent times, Windows Media Player (WMP) was a rather ugly thing that imposed upon you and made a fuss about almost anything you tried to do, like a mother-in-law. Nowadays, it's a bit more sexy. In some ways it feels as though Microsoft have tried to copycat Apple's success with the iPod. After all, they released their own media player in the shape of the Zune (the what?) and the look of WMP has come a long, long way.

Download and installation is quick and simple thanks to it being part of the Windows Update process, although it does leave you feeling a little like you can't escape the update even if you had wanted to. Pointing it to the main music store, it began the slow and laborious task of scanning the entire 220GB collection. Although this wasn't a fast process, it had two crucial advantages over iTunes: firstly, there's feedback on how the operation is progressing, so you are kept in the know, and secondly, there's the all important 'run in background' button, so you can at least get on with listening to some music while the rest is being imported.

WMP picked up on my album art, which I had carefully collected using a freeware album art tool, and stored as JPG files in the album folders. iTunes, on the other hand, preferred to check the Internet for every single piece of album art and painstakingly download it, ignoring what I already had. But iTunes is pretty.

It's easy to build a playlist containing individual songs, albums, or everything from a single artist in WMP, but the default action seems to be to play, rather than to add to the end of the playlist, so you do need to train yourself to use the right menu combinations or drag things to the right area to add things at the end of your list. The rating stars next to each track are a nice feature, but I'm not sure whether they link to anywhere like a central database, and this is more of a gimmick than a solid enhancement.

WMP comes with a visualization function that will display pleasing colours and animations in sequence with the music you're listening to. While it's fun at first, it's a bit wishy-washy and doesn't leave a lasting impression. Not to mention that it will slow down the computer a lot unless a powerful graphics card is installed.

I found that WMP kept scanning my networked music collection for changes without asking me, which created a lot of traffic on my network and a lot of unnecessary hard disk activity. There didn't seem to be an end to this, so I'm not sure whether it scans permanently, or whether the collection was just so large that it never reached the end during a normal listening session. In any case, this is unsuitable for large networked collections, and probably not good for my drives, either.

After loading it up and performing one search for music, WMP was using a respectable 46MB of RAM.

By far the most annoying aspect of the WMP experience was the large delay on loading the software. Sometimes when I get in, I want to be able to click a button and embrace a cacophony of sound. I don't want to click a button, wait two or three minutes, and then begin my embrace. It's a bit like the other person pausing during sex to answer the phone. It ruins the mood.

All in all, WMP is a solid experience with a few rough edges that need smoothing before it can properly handle a large collection of music. It's not a bad piece of software. It's just not overwhelming in any way, although it does look rather nice and you do get the benefits of an aesthetically pleasing media library (better-looking than iTunes in my own opinion) to plough through.

Winamp
Winamp has been around for a long time. It stakes its claim to being the first consumer mp3 player available. The latest version, 5.35, has come a long way since the early days. For a start, it is a tiny download, at just over 6MB. Installation is quick and easy, although there are a few boxes to untick to avoid unwanted extras. Winamp added my music to the media library faster than both of the other players. I have no idea why.

Playing back the music is really easy thanks to the way the playlist works, allowing music to be added easily from the media library. The media library's 'now playing' feature is useful; it will look up the current song and artist and display information on them. Unfortunately the information comes from AOL Music and this isn't the best or most complete source. Having said that, it's still a welcome addition, and there are even plugins that will grab the current song's lyrics from the Internet for you.

Let's face it: the default Winamp skin is ugly. Thankfully, there is a huge database of skins available at the Winamp site, allowing the look and feel of the player to be changed to any one of thousands of different choices. The player also has the option to bring up a random skin each time the song changes, although so far I haven't found a way of binding a specific skin to a song or album. Visually Winamp offers the most flexibility, allowing individual elements to be sized, coloured and arranged as desired, and even allowing different levels of transparency on different elements.

Winamp had almost no trouble with the large music collection, allowing quick searches (a couple of seconds) to yield results ordered by artist and by album. There is even the powerful 'filters' option where music can be displayed according to certain criteria. Assuming your music library is tagged properly, you can quickly see your whole collection in a new light. I chose to filter by year, showing me only tracks from 1994, for an extremely retro experience, but more complex filters are possible too. Bearing in mind that any of this music can be accessed at the touch of a button and a two or three second delay, this is extremely suitable for a large collection.

The visualization options in Winamp are a Maglite to WMP's candle. The Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS) has thousands of presets available to download, and runs in a separate window so it can be customised to run in as much or as little detail as your computer can handle, or even in fullscreen mode. You are given the option of choosing how long each individual visualization lasts, which transitions are used between visualizations, and even how long the transitions last. There is also the opportunity to download one of a number of alternate visualization studios, each with their own plethora of presets.

After loading it up, performing a search and adding some tracks to the playlist ready for another intense listening session, I found that Winamp was using less than 9MB of RAM. Less than nine megabytes! I was surprised but extremely pleased by this, and my memory is screaming back at me from inside the computer, "Please don't make us load iTunes again! Please sir!"

For the purposes of my experiment, I just can't fault Winamp. Yes, it's not the most straightforward player to use, its critics would say. Yes, there are no shiny bars and there aren't many rounded corners in the default rendition. No, it won't reorganise your entire collection and convert it all automatically to its own ridiculous format. No, I don't care about that at all really. I think I'll be sticking with Winamp for now.

Conclusion
I admit that I was not rating the media players on the entire range of features. iTunes is the obvious choice if you have an iPod. It's really simple. (Did I mention it's pretty?) Windows Media Player is just 'there' and easy to use, with an edge of cool about it. I could have talked about how well USB devices synced up to the players. I could have talked about how they handled downloads of podcasts, or how many people are using each one. There is a lot of difference between all the various media players out there, including the ones I didn't touch upon, but there is no question that Winamp outshines the rest when it comes to keeping a large music collection organised.