Music ♪

Music can easily lighten your mood, soothe your mind and promote imagination. But it has been discovered that music can do more than just lift your spirits.
Fresh research from Austria has found that listening to music can help patients with chronic back pain. And a recent survey by Mind - the mental health charity - found that after counselling, patients found group therapy such as art and music therapy, the most useful.

Its proven, music is necessary for a better life,  lets find out what plays music best


Windows Media Player

Although a product of many reinventions, windows media player or WMP lacks some necessary features but still is the most used media player on windows platform. It lacks music organisation, start getting slow when music collection is a bit large and has no understanding of what music user likes to play. 

iTunes

The best if you are using apple products. It can sync you media on apple devices, suggest you new songs. You can buy tracks/albums from apple store directly by using iTunes. It has a music 'genius' feature hat suggests you tracks based on currently playing track. And the latest version is also very light on resources.

Winamp

Winamp is a classic media player developing since 1997 and capable of playing a wide range of media formats. It can search your pc for media files in no time or import your iTunes library. It has got great developer support and lots of plug-ins that can transform the player in any way the user wants. It has got support from gracenote for identifying and tagging songs.

Zune

Zune was a brand of digital media products and services developed by Microsoft. Zune included a line of portable media players, digital media player software for Windows PCs, a music subscription service known as a 'Zune Music Pass', music and video streaming services for the Xbox 360 game console via the Zune Software, music, TV and movie sales, and desktop sync software for Windows Phone.
Zune has got great UI but limited features.

Music players for android

Poweramp

Poweramp is so far my favorite on android platform. It features a 10 band optimized graphical equalizer, crossfading, gapless, replay gain, scrobbling to last.fm, lyrics support and lots more. Plus it is capable of playing most common music and even video (only audio) formats. UI is awesome with theme support and a good-looking widget pack.







N7 player

N7 player has a unique UI that resembles the tile view of windows 8. Music browsing is indeed very fast and  Supported audio formats: mp3, mp4, m4a, ogg, wav, 3gp, mid, xmf, ogg, mkv(4.0+), flac (3.1+), aac (3.1+) 5 band graphic equalizer with presets – requires Android 2.3+ Environmental effects, bass boost and sound virtualization technology (SRS/Dolby Surround) (2.3+) Automatic and manual album art and artist image downloader Tags editor for all supported audio formats File browser (SD card) with filters.


TTPOD

Interesting feature of this app is the support for time-stamped lyrics, floating lyrics and instant search and download of music files (might be illegal though). High quality decoding with mp3,mp4/m4a,wma,flac and ape; Built in graphic and customize EQ; High accurate lyrics and album acts downloads; Plenty of skins to chose from.




Develop your own music player

If nothing suits your style, then don't be shy to create your own music player. If you wish to just add a few features to your favorite music player, then plug-ins might be a better option.
Different music player software come with different plugin libraries. To create a plugin, the first step is to visit the website of targetted music player software and study its documentation for extending the functionality.

Here's a video tutorial on creating a very basic lyrics plugin for WMP, winamp and iTunes.

If you desire to create a music player instead or know how its done, then you need to chose a playback library. Well, if you thought of creating your own playback engine then this post is useless for you. Creating a playback engine is an entire different thing. It was a bunch of features or a whole new interface that may have provoked you to create a new music player.
You need to select the playback engine carefully that suits all your needs, that may even arise in future. You shouldn't be creating half your music player using one music library and then at some point dropping the idea of continuing with it and chose another. That will affect whole of your development.
Here are a few playback libraries -

DirectShow

DirectShow, codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It uses codecs present on user's computer to render audio and video.
Media player classic is based on DS. Directshow SDK is available in unmanaged c++. For managed platform Directshow.NET is available.
    Video tutorial

Media Foundation

Media Foundation (MF) is a COM-based multimedia framework pipeline and infrastructure platform for digital media in Windows Vista, Windows 7 & Windows 8. It is the intended replacement for Microsoft DirectShow, Windows Media SDK, DirectX Media Objects (DMOs) and all other so-called "legacy" multimedia APIs such as Audio Compression Manager (ACM) and Video for Windows (VfW). The existing DirectShow technology is intended to be replaced by Media Foundation step-by-step, starting with a few features. For some time there will be a co-existence of Media Foundation and DirectShow. Media Foundation will not be available for previous Windows versions, including Windows XP.
See: Managed MF.NET

SharpMod

A Soundtracker Module music player in C# (100% Managed, without interops), At the beginning, a simple port in C# of the famous Mikmod Library. Today, it have some improvements. Three versions are avaible : NAudio Output, Silverlight and XNA (Windows Phone 7, Windows and Xbox360).The code is shared by links between projects from a trunk "Core" Project. Audio renderers are saved in each project files (Windows, Silverlight and XNA)
Project page : Codeplex

Comments

  1. Thanks for mentioning playback engines.
    That helped!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whats better directshow or mf

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Media foundation is considered to be replacement of directshow in vista and newer version of windows.
      But if you also want to target windows XP, you should consider using directshow.

      Delete

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