3. Foobar2000

Foobar2000 is surprisingly small, weighing in at just 1.6 MB. Naturally, at this size it offers little in the line of pretty bells and whistles. All it does is play music, but it does play music staggeringly well.

The tabbed playlists are a joy to work with for anyone who has a few regular playlists.

Foobar2000’s library support is admirable, offering the ability to comfortably read and edit ID3 tags should the necessity arise. Foobar also offers tabbed playlists: each new playlist can be created in its own tab, with favorite playlists simply left in their own tabs as long as the user wishes. These tabs are persistent, so they’ll automatically reopen with the player if you close it - it’s a convenient option that makes all saved playlists immediately accessible.

Foobar2000’s library support (I started importing dutifully at the "A"s and then got lazy..)

The extensive skin support for Foobar makes the initially minimalist player a little easier on the eyes. There are a vast number of skins available, and perhaps the best place to look if you’re interested in picking up bundles of skins, is on the Foobar page of Customize.org, here [http://customize.org/foobar].

Bonus points if you’ve got a cute background to match the cute skins.

Foobar2000 really isn’t a media player everyone can love - at its core it’s still very simple. The audio output is excellent, and there’s no loss of sound quality evident, which is quite an achievement given its size. Another big draw for resource aware users is that while playing an album, Foobar consumes around 7 MB of memory - I’ve literally seen MS Paint use multiples of this number!

Given the fact that Foobar is geared towards playing music and nothing else, it’s an ideal companion for VLC, whose lack of a library option means that it’s essentially useless as a music player.