Re: best audio player?
On Mac, I stick to VLC, mostly because it can play other formats apart from MP3 and AAC, but also because every single file you open in iTunes immediately gets dumped into your library. And because I play a lot of things like podcasts, audio dramas and other voice posts people post to places like twitter I really don't want them to be added to my library, treated as music, and then synced with my iPod (yes, I know there's manual sync, but I generally do want my whole library syncghronized). One thing to note about VLC is that the Mac version uses a native Coco omterface which means that it's very accessible, while the Windows version has an interface written in QT which can be a bit problematic.
For music, and everything else audio really on Windows I swear by Foobar just like a lot of other people here. Everything in this program is a native control, which is very useful for me because it really doesn't matter what screen reader you use, it just w orks (I have used it quite successfully even with Narrator, and because the time ellapsed and remaining just comes up on a normal windows status bar I could even read that. Now try doing that with Winamp). It also has a lot of plugins to make it play many formats, things like video game music or a stupidly complex Midi plugin that lets you play .mid files through either a soundfont, a vst, or by emulating a sound blaster FM chip or a Roland MT32. It also has a component which lets you use winamp DSP's, so if there's a particular sound enhancement plugin you're used to, you can still use it.
For those of you who use winamp, if you ask me it's a lost cause. I'll just restate what I said in an audioboo that I posted when Winamp was due to shut down, the only reason people still use it is because they have a comertial screen reader which scripted the shit out of it. However, these scripts rely on the classic skin to be used and, in most cases, video interc ept, and because things like the playlist view in winamp are custom controls they could break very easily, the equalizer would become completely unusable (Foobar just has normal sliders) and obtaining any kind of information about the track you're playing can't be done without scripts, which, to make things even worse, use completely different hotkeys depending on what screen reader you have. It's also very unlikely you're going to see updates for it and don't get me started on ow bloated it is.
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