I used winamp for years, and recently switched to foobar2000 which I am pretty happy with.
I also use VLC for playing individual files without messing up my foobar playlist.
Try control + up or down arrow to adjust volume in VLC.
I've never had foobar ask me to convert a file and have been using it for about a year, so I'm not sure what is different about our setups.

Heh, Like afrim, I used media player classic too. this thing supports many formats. but the issue with jaws that I have is, this thing always reports the status of videos/MP3s while you're playing. when I used this software, I always switch to NVDA for quite sometimes.

wow, I didn't know this tricks! thanks mate!

Well I've still not found anything to beat Winamp for just pure playback and customization, not to mention support for all sorts of fun game music formats (I know foobar does this but hay).

I love the fact winamp doesn't have all the library best rated recommended crap of windows media player much less the horrors of Itunes.

I have however recently started using Vlc player specifically for watching dvds, sinse my computer got blanked and I didn't have another power dvd license, (plus when I tried the latest version of power dvd the interface was totally inaccessible).

Vlc I like as a dvd player, especially the options to play bits like titles and chapters of a disk, but there are some things from power dvd I miss.

For example, I miss the auto resume that kept your place even when the computer was shut down.
It also seems vlc doesn't have many shortcut keys. There's an option in the preferences for keys, but the only thing there is mousewheel, it doesn't actually list any functions, so if someone could let me know about some keystrokes that'd help a lot.

I've found space as general pause button, p for play, s for stop and f for fulscreen, but others I have no idea about. In particular I'd really like to know the keys for wind back and forward, sinse right now it seems if I miss a line or whatever and want to whiz back I can't at all, and the menus don't help with that one.

knowing the shortcuts for next and previous chapter would be nice as well.

If you guys are using the latest version of Winamp, that could explain all the problems with crashing and so on. I noticed that problem myself when I first installed it. I just rolled back to the previous version, 5.65, I believe, and it works great. I've used it both on Windows 7 and 10 with no issues. You can try googling for that version, or maybe see if oldversion.com has it.

Thanks for the tips. I hadn't heard of this media player classic thing. Control up and down doesn't seem to change the volume for me in vlc, I don't know why. when i change the volume from the menus, that works, and the rest of the keystrokes work too.

o, why am I not surprised at it being a screen reader issue. Good thing i have nvda as a backup.

Hi there mate,
Media player classic, when installing it, comes with some codecs. As I have written above, if you are using jaws, it will announce the status of the file currently being played. So, if you are using jaws, go to the view tab and disable/untick the status. Then go to options menu, and select playback tab. There is a combo box menu there which says, "After playback", select play the next file in the folder and click OK. This media player is not the best one for playing all files in the folder, but you have the opportunity to play a track in the folder and then press page up or down to go to the previous or the next file. This, by the way, is the only media player so far that does this. So, if you press applications button over a folder, you won't find an option which says, "Play files/folder using media player classic."
In my opinion, the best media players for playing folders or selected files are winamp, VLC and windows media player.
As regarding your point of comparing VLC and MPC, I think they are almost equal. Each one has its advantages and drawbacks. Both open the files quickly, both do not crash, both are accessible. (remember, VLC shortcut to increase or decrease the volume "ctrl+up or down arrow" does not work with jaws).

Cheers.