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Playing FLAC files on PC’s

In the past, the PC’s in my home all used Windows Media Player (WMP) to play the MP3 files available via Samba shares exported from the server. WMP doesn’t support FLAC natively. There are codecs that can be installed that solve that particular issue when I tried that in the past WMP became flaky. I have tried Winamp in the past but never really warmed to it, primarily because the media library wasn’t that good. The WMP media library allows me to rate tunes and it makes automatic playlists based on what I listen to the most.

Well, things have changed. I tried Winamp v5.33 and I now prefer its media library to the one in WMP. It does most of the things the media library in WMP does. It is very easy to find the tune I’m looking for by entering an artist, tune name, group name or whatever in the search field. Winamp whittles the possible entries down as I enter my search term character by character. In WMP I enter a search term, press the search button and I hope for the best.

Included with the player is MusicMagic from MusicIP (called Predixis in Winamp). It is supposed to be able to analyse your music, when you then highlight a particular tune it can suggest other tunes for a playlist. Unfortunately MusicMagic as bundled with Winamp doesn’t support FLAC files, which is a bit odd as the stand-alone program they have does. The idea is interesting so I would like to see how well it performs.

Summary: Winamp is now the media player of choice on the PC’s in my home.

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