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What are the most lightweight media players for Windows XP SP1?

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computerdude92

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My laptop with a PIII 700 and 256mb ram often skips when playing any audio files in Windows Media Player 9. I tried the original WMP 8, but it's so old that it inaccurately shows the length of the "playing progress bar" when it plays songs.

What are good alternatives that run well on XP SP1 with even a PII 400MHz using an IDE to SD card in place of the HDD? My PIII 700 laptop also uses one.

I'm going to try early 2000's VLC versions, but those in my past experience are buggy. What about Windows Media Player Classic?

Is this it? Or did Microsoft actually release a lightweight WMP version unrelated to this one?

Media Player Classic - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org


Thanks for any replies.

P.S. The reason I use XP SP1 is because it uses less resources than the later XP service packs.
 
For just playing audio files, my favorite is WinAmp. I am using version 2.7 because the newer versions were annoying... something to do with wanting too much interaction with the internet, IIRC.
 
Pretty sure I use Winamp 2.95 in my Win98SE machine, that's a PII 333Mhz with 384MB of RAM. Audacious and other programs in Linux pretty much do anything old school as far as media goes so I don't really use my old computers for that much. Though hearing it from my tiny IBM speakers is fun sometimes.
 
Thanks guys. I just tried out WinAMP 2.7 Lite and some of my .WAV songs do not play. I get the "Couldn't find destination format" error. I wonder if newer versions (from the same era) have the same issue. Can I easily roll back to an earlier version of WinAMP if needed?

We're making progress. :)

Too bad WinAMP can't play MIDI. My ideal audio playing software would play all audio file types. It's cool that WinAMP has a built-in equalizer though.
 
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I've used Media Player Classic back in the days. It can play back any format your system has an appropriate codec for. Back then, I've installed the K-Lite Codec Pack (which appears to still be developed) to get me support for all formats I needed. You might be missing some codecs for your files.

WAV is a container format. While almost all files only contain uncompressed audio (no special codec needed), there are exceptions. However, I'd bet on the file simply being damaged or renamed. Some codecs deal with corrupted files better than others.

Note that MIDI files are not considered audio files. They do not contain audio.
 
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