XMPlay is a free and lightweight media player for Windows, with support for a wealth of custom audio formats and Winamp-compatible plugins.
One of XMPlay’s best interface features is configurable global-focus shortcut keys. You can configure volume up/down, skip/rewind, and next/previous shortcuts which work while your focus is on another program, even when in Full Screen mode. I like to use it for playing and controlling podcasts while doing something else.
One thing XMPlay doesn’t seem to handle intuitively is numbered files without leading zeroes. For example, loading a set of 12 songs labelled:
song_1.mp3
song_2.mp3
song_3.mp3
…
song_10.mp3
song_11.mp3
song_12.mp3
The order will be:
song_1.mp3
song_10.mp3
song_11.mp3
song_12.mp3
song_2.mp3
song_3.mp3
And so on. But if the files are tagged appropriately, you can sort them by metadata such as track number by right-clicking on the question mark button in the playlist window.
MIDI Soundfont support
XMPlay’s native MIDI plugin can be configured with soundfonts to sound nicer than the standard Windows MIDI playback. A pretty decent soundfont (Chorium) is provided on the plugin’s download page.
Other soundfonts:
¥Weeds¥ General MIDI Soundfont by Rich Nagel. A nice alternative to Chorium.
Regression FM – Makes everything sound like a Sega Genesis game. I can’t find the author’s website anymore, but the Regression FM Youtube channel has a download link for the soundfont under the ‘About’ page.
OPL3-FM 128M by Zandro Reveille – FM synth timbres by The Fat Man, sampled from an ISA Sound Blaster 16. Can be found on the author’s website or on Github.
Vintage Dreams by Ian Wilson – Vintage synthesizer theme, can be found on this webpage.
(e 11/Nov/2016: Images, sorting by metadata)
(e 13/Nov/2016: OPL3-FM 128M)
