Ditto for foobar, it's complete but not obnoxious and tends to focus on what's important. It's probably the one thing I miss when using my (OSX) laptop, OSX players seem to be either obnoxiously turdy (à la itunes) or exercises in minimalist style which end up inconvenient to use.
I don't know how CPU-efficient it really is though, and that seems to be Ted's main concern.
My only annoyance with it is that (AFAIK) there still isn't a 64b version of it, though that problem is so common on windows it's hardly worth mentioning.
It had a similar spirit to Winamp, so much that AOL/Nullsoft looked into acquiring them. As did Apple before iTunes existed, as documented in The True Story Of Audion:
I liked using VOX for some time because of its FLAC and BS2B support, but dropped it because of iTunes Match and Apple Music convenience. Now I see they introduced a FLAC digital locker too, but the price is steep.
> I don't know how CPU-efficient it really is though, and that seems to be Ted's main concern.
It's ancient software pretty much, written to be efficient on computers several generations back; should be fine as long as it hasn't had any major rewrites since then.
I recall using foobar2000 after becoming disgruntled with the UI bloat of Windows XP's builtin Media Player circa 2003, and it was already lean back then, so I don't have any worries that it will be fat now.
It is probably about as close to ideal as one can get on Windows. The codecs themselves are of course implementations that have been reasonably optimized and at the end of the day the audio framework in Windows is the limiting reagent for further power efficiency gains.
I don't know how CPU-efficient it really is though, and that seems to be Ted's main concern.
My only annoyance with it is that (AFAIK) there still isn't a 64b version of it, though that problem is so common on windows it's hardly worth mentioning.