I’ve made a couple posts recently about free software that I’ve found useful. One of the most used pieces of software on any of my computers (and I have too many) is a media player.
First of all, media player covers a lot of ground. I divide that into two camps: ones I use to listen to audio and ones I use to view video. Most of them try to do both and often it is this Swiss-Army-Knife approach that limits them and annoys me.
As I mentioned in one other post, my long-time favorite music player, Winamp, will play movies, but I’d only use it as a last resort. Actually, my favorite video player, one I use all the time for watching both downloaded video and DVD discs, is the lean and simple VLC player. In full-screen mode, there are no annoying player buttons that pop up if you bump the mouse, but everything you need is found in a popup right-click menu. It has screen format options that none of the fancy DVD player programs have.
But, I don’t want to rehash all those programs. Instead, I want to mention a new audio player that I just found out about. It’s called Songbird and is another project that comes out of the Mozilla program. I don’t know when it came out, but it’s now in version 1.0, which is the initial public release. Continue Reading…