Someone had commented on a previous post about a media player for Windows called Foobar2000. Having just been swept off my feet by Billy, I decided to give it a try. I chose the “Special” download option and was very impressed with the extensive options for music file formats available. There’s also a good amount of modules or plugins that can be downloaded from the web site. The interface is very simple and minimalistic, focusing almost that entirely on the task at hand: just playing your music files. I threw some .ogg and .mp3 files at it and wasn’t disappointed. I then tried one of my .acc audible books but alas, the stupid encryption/protection got in the way. Satisfied with my experiment, I decided to perform yet another “benchmark” to see which media player I have used the most resources. Disclaimer: I’m not by a long shot an expert in benchmarking noir have I specialized tools to perform such a task. I simply relied on the information displayed by Microsoft’s Task Manager window. The following are my findings for the applications listed below (running both .mp3 and .ogg files at work, except for Winamp which doesn’t support .ogg playback AFAIK):
Application
Memory Used
12,188 K
~2,500 K
~10,500 K
21,948 K
~15,412 K
I must confess I was amazed at the performance comparison between Microsoft MP and Winamp! I must admit I was expecting that WMP would be the big bloat in the group… Too bad I don’t have Real Player installed at work (come to think of it, I don’t have it installed at home either!!!) so I could add to the experiment. For those of you who are running a slow system or optimizing greedy users as I am, the top 2 applications listed here have my full endorsement (and before anyone ask, I do not work or get paid by either one of them… :) ).