... is a piece of shit. It crashed my entire Windows and prevented me from rebooting. I had to do a hard shut down. It even crashed other unrelated programs... I thought at first it was better than shitty WMP 11 that comes with Vista... hell no. I really suggest you use iTunes or Winamp for your music, all you new Windows 7 users.
Does it have a pretty good music library setup? That's the main reason I've stuck with Winamp for Windows and iTunes for Mac OS X over the years. I like how VLC can play virtually any type of file - oh, and it's on both Windows and Mac.
I think VLC only does playlists. I'm a fan of Banshee. It can actually connect to third-party DAAP shares, which iTunes 8 magically lost the ability to do. And it runs on Linux and (albeit beta-quality) Macintosh, and really, who needs anything else ?
Ah, by Novell, I see... Hmm... I don't know if iTunes 9's Home Sharing has replaced the DAAP sharing you're referring to, but perhaps?
It's sort-of similar. It looks like you have to go through the iTunes store to do all the authorizations to get iTunes to do it, grumble grumble Apple walled-garden crap grumble grumble. What I was specifically referring to is the ability to use a third-party DAAP server to stream music to iTunes. Up until iTunes 8 the protocol had been reverse-engineered and was effectively open and people had written third-party DAAP servers so they could serve music from platforms not supported by iTunes. I personally use Firefly Media Server to stream my voluminous music collection from my Linux server to my Macbook. Then in iTunes 8 they changed the protocol, added some secret handshake sauce that only Apple knew how to do, and basically screwed-over anyone who had the audacity to not do everything Apple's way. Then in iTunes 9 they renamed it to Home Shares and acted like it was something new and interesting. I know not to expect better of Apple but man, I loved iTunes 7 the best. They should have stopped fucking with it then. I'm thinking I might have to go reinstall 7 now somehow because 9 is pissing me off too much. No third-party DAAP, pointless UI embellishments, switching to a goddamn Miller Column interface... Anyways, what's interesting about Banshee being by Novell?
Not much... I guess I just didn't realize they had made so many programs... Well, man, I see what you're saying about Apple but of course if you don't like Apple's way of doing things there is always pure Linux. The choice to get the best of both worlds is always going to be imperfect. I myself like many options and enjoy having the best of multiple worlds - at the same time I accept that Apple and Microsoft are for-profit and so have their own interests at heart. But they make stuff that works pretty well for the most part, so I use it. I definitely believe that open source is the future in the same way a free economy is the future. Until then I'll try my hand at every option that intrigues me.
I use iTunes and VLC for audio and video respectively. Songbird is pretty good too but missing a couple features that I like from iTunes like copying songs to your music folder when you add them to your library.
Oh yeah, Novell does lots of interesting stuff. IIRC they were the guys who first developed all the Compiz/wobbly windows stuff. Most of the interesting stuff in the Linux world is being done by a corporation. It's a myth that open-source is mostly volunteers. Haha, I just like to complain. In some ways I like Apple, in a lot of ways I don't like them. I can still access my DAAP share from a downgraded iTunes, which is all i really care about.
Yeah, dude, iTunes 7 is pretty good still. 6+ are all pretty good. For me, it doesn't make a difference since I don't use DAAP really. That's something for life on campus.
I agree that Media Player 12 is a piece of shit. It hasn't crashed my entire system but it constantly crashes and I'm forced to end the process in the task manager. I'd say I have only about an 80% success rate when attempting to watch a video. I also hate 12 because they got rid of the toolbar that sits in your taskbar and allows you to control the music and see what song comes on. At some point I'll look into uninstalling 12 and installing 11.
Like others have mentioned, try songbird. It is really cool feature wise and has a built in browser based off of firefox. plus it has built in last.fm support and lots of other cool features.