iTunes or WinAmp?

[Nekhetyo]

Hello there.

First I wanna clarify a few things:

-I own an iPhone
-My computer is a three year old laptop

So here we go:

I've been using iTunes since 2006 now. And I'm generally pleased with it. But I find it using a lot of system resources like CPU and memory. And it takes sometime to browse the iTunes store.

Now, I tested Winamp a few months ago, and It worked a lot better. Song switching was smoother and it seemed to work much easier on my computer. Now, here comes the issue:

Should I switch to winamp as my primary application for listening to music and watch video? iTunes can only play certain movie formats and does so with EXTREMLY high cpu usage(80%) Can winamp play video just as smooth as WMP or VLC? I want ONE application to watch my videos and listen to music, and not switching to VLC whenver I want to watch an mp4 video. But, since I own an iPhone, it would be troublesome to use with winamp, and keeping two music players updated whenever I want to sync my device seems to be unnecesary. I tried an addOn so I could sync it but It didn't work, plus, there's all the apps from AppStore.

But, is it worth it to keep two players updated but use only one? Or should I stick with iTunes and deal with it?

Appreciate any advice.

PS: I probably misspelt a few words. Sorry.

-Nekhet

[Keoren]

I have been using Winamp for years for music and it should work fine for watching videos too.

Mostly using MPC or VLC for videos as I like the screen otherwhat blank and hiding the rest of the Winamp interface is too much of a hassle, but never experienced the CPU usages you're describing when watching the occasional video in Winamp.

[Lusei]

Yeah, Winamp has alot of support for addons too to tweak music to get it just the way you want to aswell if your into all that.
I use it for music only as it takes next to thing of resources.

Winamp > iTunes

[Kendrel]

Personally, I use Windows Media Player these days. I used to use Winamp and I had some compatbility issues a few years back. I wound up reinstalling windows, and it resolved the issue, but it took me ages to get around to downloading the latest winamp and installing, so I just used the updated version of WMP.

I find this works just as well as Winamp ever did, and doesn't use 'that' much more in terms of resources - not when considering how much resource is actually available on a modern pc.

[baelon]

I use foobar2000. It's rough for the uninitiated to set up, but fortunately there are themes available if you look around, and installing them is easy and fast. Its footprint is very small, compared to it even winamp is bloated, and winamp isn't that bad.

Itunes on the other hand is a gigantic bloated pig of a resource hog which installs a few running processes, quicktime (which I consider malware due to the fact it always used to reset your file assoc's even if you set it not to, and probably still does), and to add insult to injury the sound quality was noticeably worse with WinXP - a problem I don't know or care if they solved with Vista / 7. There was even a foobar passthrough addon for it which required you to have foobar2000 installed and rerouted itunes output through that instead of quicktime. What a mess...

[Traezz]

I would try Songbird, it's pretty light, even while running over9000 mods.