Last time, I looked at a number of open source CD players for Windows.  I said that I was going to look at the following:

Here are the results:

XBMC Media Player

This program looks interesting.  It seems to be designed to run a media center PC and has an attractive interface.  Unfortunately, while it played the music on my CD, the interface kept hanging.  It’s cross-platform software, so it might work better on another OS, but it was disappointing on Windows.  Uninstalled.

Media Player Classic

It plays CDs!  The menu choices are inconsistent, however.  To play a DVD, you select File -> Open DVD.  To play a CD, however, you select File -> Open Disc -> Audio CD.  Why it’s different, I don’t know.  It does, however, work.  As advertised, it’s a stripped down interface reminiscent of the original Media Player program from Microsoft.  There is no compact mode, nor does it retrieve CD information from Gracenote.  I didn’t realize how much I liked that feature in Winamp until I found its lack in some of these other programs.

SMPlayer

I installed it easily, and the interface looks fairly nice.  It has a menu item Audio CD on the file menu, so playing CDs should be easy.  However, the item was disabled.  I checked the preferences and found a place to specify which drive was my CD drive.  I did so, but it made no difference.  I went to the forum to search for clues, but the search engine reported that the words “audio” and “CD” were too common, so it wasn’t going to search on them.  Really?  I’d like to have a conversation with the programmer who thought that was a good idea.

Eventually, I found this FAQ on Sourceforge, which answered the question.  You can’t play audio CDs on Windows yet.  Uninstalled.

SPlayer

The first thing that you’ll notice about this program is that the interface does not use standard buttons, etc.  Instead, it has a smooth, visually appealing look.  However, despite being on version 3.5, it still feels rough.  The default window size is too small to show all of the controls, so some are hidden with no indication that they are missing.  The preferences dialog has a slightly different problem: it shows all of the controls, but on panels with many of them, they overlap visibly, creating a jumble.

When playing CDs, it retrieves the CD and song title information and even the lyrics.  The synchronization of the lyrics with playback was completely off, however, rendering that feature rather silly.  Another problem with playback was that it added some songs to the playlist twice.  When I clicked on the skip button to move to the next track, the program crashed and then helpfully restarted itself.  Of course the playback was reset; I told it to play the CD again and it started over at song one.  I clicked the skip button and it crashed again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

I think that the developers of this application need to spend a little more time on the function and a little less on the form.  It may look cool, but it doesn’t work.  Uninstalled.

Status

I’ve found a few programs that do the basic job, but none that does everything I want.  I can’t really complain about that, as they’re written by volunteers; if I don’t have time to work on them myself, I shouldn’t expect anyone else to do it either.  I’ll continue to play with them and maybe settle on one that I really like.  If things go well, I might even be able to contribute to one when my schedule lightens up a bit.