J. van Baardwijk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] asked:
>
> First, I need software to load music from an audio CD,
> convert it to MP3 and save it to disk.
>
> Next, I need a good player. This program must be able to:
> - play just one selected song
> - play all songs in a subdirectory, in random order (shuffle play)
> - play only the songs I select, in random order
> - play only the songs I select, in the order I want to hear them.
If you're on Windows, Microsoft's Windows Media Player 7 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/) actually handles all of that pretty well (to play all the songs in a subdirectory or select you need to make a playlist, but that's easy and typical). I switched from WinAmp since it can rip; you can also save files in WMA which most MP3 players (software and hardware) handle nowadays and are about half the size. For my purposes - sucking in 50+ CDs of music - the media manager is pretty darned good, automatically presenting views by artist, by CD, etc. The playlist editor is weak - reordering is limited to "move up"/"move down", and it is deathly slow when you have a few hundred songs on one - but it works.
The interface is a little finicky relative to more solid Windows apps; personally, I'd prefer boring and perfectly normal UI (as per the Windows User Interface Guidelines) to what they've come up with, but IMHO it's better than WinAmp. A couple of nice skins exist.
Joshua
