Via “Ice Ardor” in our live chat room:

About five years ago I made the switch from Windows Media Player to MusicMatch Jukebox Plus. I made the switch because WMP refuses to play mp3 files without slaughtering the quality, because Microsoft wants you to use their proprietary wma (DRM-able) format. WMP’s codec is pretty horrible, so the audio quality wasn’t great.

Anyways, I’ve been on MusicMatch Jukebox Plus because the software came for free with a Cassio my dad bought a decade ago. I’ve got great ripping and burning speeds with my 48x drive–some CD’s I exceed 30x ripping speed, and burning is pretty fast as well. Unfortunately, MMJB has ceased production since it was purchased by Yahoo!. It’s got a few bugs in it that make it crash about twice a month, it runs a little sluggishly sometimes, and takes forever to load. Now Yahoo! is phasing it out and introducing their new Yahoo! Music Jukebox, which in comparison doesn’t have a fourth the features that MMJB Plus had. I’ve been looking at the List of Media Players on Wikipedia, but haven’t really chosen a new media player to switch to, yet.

I don’t like the look of Winamp (and I’ve had a negative view on Winamp because it’s owned by AOL/Time Warner), but I don’t feel comfortable moving back to WMP because all of my music is in mp3 format, not wma. Furthermore, ever since Microsoft started to move its products towards Vista, the user has lost a lot of control and customizability. There’s features that I know existed in WMP10 that I can’t find in WMP11.

Is there any way that I can replace WMP’s mp3 codec? Do you have any suggestions for a media player that I should try? What media player do you use?