2014-10-04 06:24:37

hi,
what is the most accessible audioplayer? that is still supported and maintained

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."

2014-10-04 09:16:15

I still like Winamp, and support be buggered!

it's highly accessible (at least with supernova), including functions like the equalizer, and doesn't have all that add to media library, get online wratings mallarchy that windows media player and even worse Itunes have. I also love the chipamp plugin which lets me play lots of crazy game music formats, of which I have quite a bit.
Then again, I freely admit my attitude with audio players is much like my attitude with windows generally, if it doesn't do any good for me, what is the point of the new version other than a buggered up and complex interface?

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2014-10-05 17:15:56

VLC to the moon!
you can't beat VLC IMO.

2014-10-05 18:08:22

WinAmp just doesn't work out of the box with Jaws at all, you get a blank window. There may be scripts for all I know but I couldn't be bothered chasing them up. I just use Windows Media Player to play the files, so long as I can change volume and set repeat and shuffle I'm happy.

As for my media manager, I use a little something called Windows Explorer. Most of my stuff is fed into iTunes anyway for the benefit of my less used Mac and my iPhone, I just set the organise library option to put them in folders according to artist name and it does it all for me.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2014-10-05 20:37:07

Hi cx2, you do not need scripts for winamp. When setting up winamp select winamp classic, not another skin. Hth.

I post sounds I record to freesound. Click here to visit my freesound page
I usually post game recordings to anyaudio. Click here to visit my anyaudio page

2014-10-06 04:31:21

the best media player is one you can use with ease and almost feels like a seemless attachment to your computer experience, and that for me, without question, is foobar.  Instead of going into all of the reasons why you should get it and play around with it, I'll simply say that this is a question I don't think anyone can answer.  I'm generally willing to give any player at least one shot.  Winamp hasn't cut it for me since I discovered foobar, who's options and many other functions are available through well presented and customiseable context menus, on top of having the ability to assign shortcut keys to many of them, from creating playlists on the fly to batch converting and renaming files all in one go while listening to something else in the process, to switching between soundcards comfortably and quickly, and much more.  I'll never go back to windows media player, not because I don't want to, but because I doubt MS will ever produce something that will give me as much flexibility as foobar and keep it easy on me.  I've only vaguely heard of VLC , so I suppose I'm off to give this a try and report back to you all once I've done so, though that probably won't be for at least a week, given that I want to approach it with as much of a neutral and unbiased attitude as I can.  Since I've been swearing by foobar for the past 3 years and practically gave up winamp for it, I'll promise to let you all know if I'm sold on it, as it were.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-06 10:35:26

hi,
I tried foobar
however I couldn't figure it out.
how do you use it exactly?
there wern't any shortcuts for play/pause etc

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."

2014-10-06 12:39:52

I couldn't tell if you meant hardware or software player.

For hardware, it's Apple.

Nowadays, for software, it's iTunes, on both platforms, sharing the same library folder and handling management, ripping, playback and some buying. Say what you like about Apple, but they provided a credible alternative to Media Player that handles most common formats. This makes sense for a Mac user too, because iTunes just happens to be bundled with the OS. But before that, I *LOVED* Media Player Classic on Windows. This is a simple, no-nonsense client of DirectShow, which for all practical purposes meant that it could play anything, because codecs are available for anything, even Audible before they noticed and stop that. VLC is OK but it is gaining feature bloat, worryingly. I would use it in preference to WinAmp though, which was already too bloated for my taste unless the new owners figure something out. More important, supported formats are proprietary, whereas VLC uses VideoLAN libraries so they are much more reusable EG ffmpeg. I heard great things about Foobar, but never tried it. Perhaps I should. smile

Just myself, as usual.

2014-10-06 14:31:39

Hi, one thing I didn't like about foober was that it kept popping up a new window when I selected a new sound. I don't want that, I just want to browse my sound files uninterrupted.

I post sounds I record to freesound. Click here to visit my freesound page
I usually post game recordings to anyaudio. Click here to visit my anyaudio page

2014-10-06 14:41:23 (edited by Nocturnus 2014-10-06 14:51:39)

@enes,
When you start out with foobar, you're starting out with a player that packs a powerful punch from the get go, in spite of its appearance.  Chances are you'll land in a simplistic window the likes of which shouldn't take much getting used to, complete with a menu bar, status bar, and a couple of other things you may or may not find are of interest.  Pressing the tab key will more than likely report only two things, default tab, and playlist list or list box, depending on what screen reader you're using.  I'll get back to these later, as they are of importance.  For now, I'll draw your attention to the menu bar, which contains the functionality you are looking for.

Jump to the menu bar by tapping the alt key which will present you with six items.  From left to right, they are: file, edit, view, playback, library, and help.  Hitting enter or downarroing will allow you to enter the playback menu, which contains controls for playing a track, pausing a track, stopping a track, jumping to the previous or next track in a playlist, choosing a random track from within a playlist, and stopping playback after the current track is finished.  Within this menu of options you'll also find a submenu labeled order which allows for the sorting of tracks, IE, shuffling by playlist, album, folder, and so on, repeating the entire playlist, repeating a specific track, and randomising the entire playlist which is not the same as shuffling, but that goes beyond the scope of this post.

Obviously this is probably far from being a convenient way to use the player depending on who you ask, which is where customization comes into play.  Hitting alt f will bring up the file option in the menu bar, in which you will find options for opening files, folders, playing CDs, URLs, and others.  The choice we're looking for is preferences.  Hitting enter here will bring up a treeview in which your focus will more than likely be an OK button.  Tabbing twice will switch the focus to the actual items in the tree of preferences.  here, we want to downarrow to keyboard shortcuts.  Tabbing once will place you within a list of preassigned shortcuts you may or may not find useful.  Getting rid of those you don't is as simple as hitting the delete key when one of them is selected.  Creating a new shortcut key is as simple as tabbing to the "add new" button and pressing it.  Once pressed, any item you previously selected in the list of shortcut keys is deselected and a new item is created with no attributes asigned.  These will be filled in as you proceed to tab through the various configurable aspects of the shortcut key.  for the sake of keeping this short, I'll first walk you through creating a play/pause key, which is perhaps, the most important part of any media player and which will open up the list of possibilities for other keys you may wish to create after it.

Upon hitting the "add new" button, you will want to tab 3 times, at which point you should end up in yet another treeview and a massive one at that, which presents all of the functionality of foobar.  More than likely, everything within this tree will be open by default.  Don't let this bother you, since the tree does support first letter navigation.  the item we are looking for is labeled "playback."  Make sure this is opened and downarrow four times or until you here play or pause.  Once this is selected you can proceed to set the actual key itself by tabbing yet again and hitting the key or group of keys you wish to use for this opperation once you land within the edit field.  Tabbing yet again will present you with a checkbox that gives you the ability to globalise the key, making it available to you throughout the entirety of your system.  This can present conflicts depending on what key or keys you decide to use if those keys are already taken up by other tasks on your system, so use this checkbox wisely.  by default, it will be unchecked, which means the shortcut key will only work within the player itself.  Congratulations, you have just made your shortcut key and can now tab to the OK button to save it along with any other shortcut keys you already have, or you can tab back to the listview and see how the system has labeled your key and make any changes you desire to make by selecting it again.  The beauty of this system is that if you are creating a number of keys you know all correspond to a set of actions, IE, playback, you can create them all very quickly.  Perhaps the next shortcut key of importance that would work well for demonstrational purposes would be a stop key.  After creating the play/pause key, we need only up or downarrow to it to select it, tab over to the add new button which will deselect that item so that you don't overwrite and accidentaly change it, tab three times to the tree containing all of foobar's functionality, and here, given that the information has not changed one bit, you will conveniently land back on the play or pause option, at which point you can simply uparrow until you hear "stop," tab one more time, hit a key or group of keys, choose weather or not you wish to have that shortcut key globalised, and you've just created another shortcut key.

And now that we've sorted that out, we need to play something.  You can hit control o which will bring up a dialogue that allows you to open a file or group of files.  One of my favorite ways to work with foobar however is simply to copy and paste.  You can select a file in explorer, hit control c to copy it, then alt tab to the foobar window and paste it into the playlist list or list box with control v.  This will also work with folders.

If this all seems confusing to anyone, I would be more than happy to put up a very simple tutorial to show all of this in action along with other basic concepts that will give you much in the way of power and control over foobar and can get you started having quite a bit of fun with a very versatile player.  all I need to know is that there is interest for this and I will get to work on it immediately.  I am certain that once you see the player in action you will understand it, assuming the above information was not helpful at all.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-06 16:48:12 (edited by austingrace 2014-10-06 16:49:40)

I'm using foobar 2000 and am not lookign back. I used winamp for 10 years but got sick of it. I use a lot of DSP plugins and a lot of them would make winamp run slow or crash it. None such thing with foobar. You can throw a lot of DSP plugins  at it and it works good. Now the thing about foobar it does not have any playback shortcuts by default which was cool with me. I like making my own shortcuts. Plus I just find that foobar works way better than winamp ever did.

2014-10-06 18:43:34

hi,
nocturnus thanks for the tutorial
another question about foobar. can you set it so it doesn't pop up another window when you click on a file
winamp does this

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."

2014-10-07 04:14:16

for those who have been asking, yes, there is a way to keep foobar from popping up whenever a new track is opened through explorer.  Simply go to preferences, downarrow to shell integration, tab until you get to a checkbox labeled "Bring to front when adding new files."  Uncheck this checkbox and you should be good to go.  From that point on you can keep foobar minimized if you so choose to and simply listen to your tracks by going through windows explorer and using any global shortcut keys you might have set up.  Never deal with the foobar window again.  I almost never do.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-07 08:25:07

VLC notes:
Installer was straightforward and easy to use and provides launch functionality before ending.

First usage: The main window is interesting; I get no information when tabbing or arroing through.  I have discovered there is a menubar though, easily accessed as is the case in many traditional windows applications by hitting alt.  Shortcut keys don't seem to be traditional; that is to say, holding down alt and pressing p does not trigger playback, and holding down alt while hitting s does not stop playback, unless I have done something wrong when installing this thing.  On the other hand, I've found that one can use the spacebar easily enough and hit s to stop playback.  IN some cases, such as increasing or decreasing volume, the shortcut keys don't work at all.  it would seem that to some degree the people who made this thing have created the very reason for this by assigning shortcut keys that are already in use and perform other events, thus the conflict.

going to preferences yielded a headache and a half, for while the ability to change shortcut keys exists, using it successfully with either NVDA or JAWS was not possible.  NVDA kept reading a ton of information that all seemed spurious or uninteresting and didn't help me figure out where I was supposed to be to achieve the very simple act of switching a key to something else.  JAWS reported much less information; when tabbing through I landed on various numbers that meant absolutely nothing to me at all.  At one point, I tabbed and got myself into a situation that made me believe that the screenreader might have crashed because there was no information being reported.  I had to alt tab away from the media player to get going again.

Simple settings like switching out your soundcard do not seem to save by default which seems strange to me, given that this is the first media player I've seen take this approach.  Files that have been previously played are saved in something called recent media which is supposed to be accessed by hitting alt r, but no doubt because of one of the key conflicts I cannot access this information by any other means than going to the menu bar and selecting it from within media.  This is, yet again, another interesting approach; hitting play when launching the player will not automatically play a file but present you with the ability to open something.  Hitting the spacebar will do absolutely nothing at all.

This is not my final play with this thing, and these are not my overall conclusions, but it's not looking good, certainly not looking better than foobar.  About the only redeeming quality I've found in this player is that by default it sounds slightly better than foobar.  Beyond that, I see no reason why it would be likable to anyone using a screenreader.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-07 21:47:03 (edited by Ian Reed 2014-10-07 21:53:39)

Hi Nocturnus.
Thanks for the very helpful notes on foobar 2000, I still need to try it someday.
I use winamp for playing music, which I'm constantly doing.
And I use VLC to open individual sound and video files so that they won't interfere with my winamp playlist.

Just a few notes that might be helpful on VLC.
Space bar plays and pauses.
Control + up or down changes the volume.
control + left or right seek back and forward by about a minute.
alt + left or right seek back and forward by about 10 or 15 seconds.
P moves to the previous sound.
N moves to the next sound.

Also when on the main screen of VLC I use NVDA object navigation and navigate down, right, down.
This gets me to the visual status bar and tells me the elapsed time.
I can move right to see a percentage slider, and right again to hear total time.
The total time can be clicked with the mouse to change it to show remaining time.

I have changed settings in the preferences before, but I won't deny it's a pain.
I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else to use VLC over some other player, just trying to help you have an easier time getting started with it.

And thanks again for the notes on foobar 2000.
It sounds extremely configurable, which is an aspect I love in software.
I've bookmarked this thread for when I get some time and motivation to try another audio player.

[Edit]
I thought I'd also mention that I like VLC's ability to play sounds at a faster speed than normal.
Quite useful when listening to a podcast or other lecture with a slow talking speaker.

~ Ian Reed
Visit BlindGamers.com to rate blind accessible games and see how others have rated them.
Try my free JGT addon, the easy way to play Japanese games in English.
Or try the free games I've created.

2014-10-07 22:37:15

I've tried Foobar and I'm sold. After a little fiddling to set up some shortcuts and setting up the convert stereo to four channel option I'm extremely impressed. I have been using a SB recon 3D card with 5.1 Roccat Cave headphones but was only using Windows Media Player, having the four channel DSP makes a big difference and I seem to have increased quality of playback in general on top of that.

Two Steps from Hell sound amazing now. Well more amazing than usual, every note and drum beat is incredibly distinct.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2014-10-08 03:45:38

Usually all I need is a sound interface for any sort of increase in audio quality, but it's nice to know that someone else did it for free.  goes to show that there's more to foobar than meets the eye... Or the ear... Or something.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-08 16:58:10

if you are on the mac, vlc or iTunes would be your best options. If you are on windows, winamp would be your best option. Or you could go with footer 2000.

2014-10-09 13:58:39

Winamp, Winamp all the way! Highly accessible with jaws, and offers a high-quality experience. even though they may not produce anymore new versions, but I am not going to change it.  Never!

2014-10-09 15:14:22

Hopefully I don't come across as a twit when saying this, but I've never understood this logic; saying that something is better than everything else in a particular department because it's accessible with one's screen reader is a lot like saying that oil is the best thing to drink because you can stick it in your mouth and swallow it.  That last part may be true, but that alone has never made any oil that I know of the best in the west or anywhere else, as it were.  What is the best thing to drink?  Some say coke; others say juice.  Still others say beer, but the fact of the matter is that it all depends on how you look at best, because if you ask me, I'd tell you it was plain and simple; if you want the best, drink water!

This is precisely why I posted above that I don't believe anyone can answer the question of what the best audio player is, but if you look at the first post, the question is actually clear and concise.  The most accessible player on windows at least that is still being maintained is the one I refered to above and shall continue to refer to so long as apple keeps its tab interface way of doing things.  Foobar has a simplistic window you never need to touch, never need to use a JAWS cursor or NVDA navigation on should you not care to, provides a ton of functionality out of the box to both play your audio and customize your player as you see fit.  As if it couldn't get any more convenient, you can take this configuration anywhere you go and never lose it.  I've been using the same configuration for three years on more than six computers and I never have to feel clumsy because someone else might have another set up of some sort or an media player I don't care for.  There are quite a few plugins ranging from trivial to flat out just don't want to live without that perform any number of actions, from enhancing your listening audio experience, to playing files from within archives instead of having to extract them first.  It is still being maintained; winamp is not, which eliminates it from the question entirely.  :d
so there!  Hahaha!

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-09 15:53:17

Here's an interesting thing in my case

I've used winamp for 5 years or more. Last year i gave foobar2000 a try, but I was  very lazy to check the shortcut settings, and since there were no hotkeys  predefined in it, i just removed it off my computer.

Last month i Installed foobar2000 to play .opus files. I figured the hotkeys out, and now i'm sticking with it, and maybe i'm going to  totally drop winamp in the future.
Foobar2000 is 100% accessible, and you can access all the features with standard nav keys.
Also you can easily convert, and rip audio as well.

twitter: @hadirezae3
discord: Hadi

2014-10-11 00:37:25

Hi.

Hmmm, Foobar sounds really cool. I'll have to check it out. Is it available for Mac OS X?
I don't use Winblows as my primary operating system anymore so would prefer it on OS X. However, if it's only for Winblows, I still wouldn't mind installing it on my XP virtual machine.
As for the Mac, I highly recommend VLC. I cannot stand craptunes, and yes, I will call it craptunes from now on. It has a klunky user interface and doesn't support a whole lot of media formats, not even OGG. As for Apple's iPods and iOS devices as music players, I will say no to that as well. I don't understand why Apple forces you to use craptunes just to copy music and other audio onto the device. I am not a fan of proprietary garbage like that. I may consider using my iPhone for music or buying an iPod if Apple finally gets over their superiority and uses Mini/micro USB like oh, I don't know, 99 percent of the world? BUt my rants against Apple and their questionable practices are for another topic.

Grab my Adventure at C: stages Right here.

2014-10-11 10:36:08

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 works (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 intercept, 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.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2014-10-11 11:53:50

@pitermach, a well written post covering various  points of importance.  You get a thumbs up from me and a thank you to go along with it.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2014-10-11 14:32:16

Good morning, I personally use a small player "Vu player" because I do not enjoy having both just to play the most popular formats and is accessible with any screen reader ... And to play any media file think I'll stick with Media Player Clasic ...