foobar2000 vs Winyl

Foobar2000 has a clean, minimalistic UI, small filesize, and is light on resource usage.

Foobar200 has over a hundred components to choose from that add UI functionality, decoding support for various formats, etc.

Foobar2000 natively supports MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CD, Speex, Opus, and support for additional formats can be added with plugins.

Through the use of a plugin (of which there are three popular ones), users can get bit-exact sound output straight to their DAC or soundcard. While not something every user will use, for audiophiles this is a pretty important feature.

ReplayGain can be applied on a per album or track basis, allowing the user to set up an even volumed listening experience.

Foobar2000 provides an extensive search to look through your library. It supports special queries to only look for certain tags and other conditions and is incredibly fast in doing so even with over 20k of songs in your library.

The player has a layout-editing mode that allows for a wide variety of UI setups.

It was made in order to be as respectful to music as it can be.

Foobar works well with Windows Media Center IR remote controls with virtual mouse functions; also with wireless mini-keyboards.

It has one of the fastest monitoring abilities. Only couple of seconds passes between adding a file into monitored folder on external NAS and it appearing in the library.

Grouping files by folder structure is an important feature especially when files don't have proper tags.

Foobar 2000 has powerful theming support.

Browsing a site like DeviantArt will give you hundreds of skins (that have been made by other users) to choose from.

It has by far the best scanning of large music libraries containing couple of thousands of files.

Foobar2000 can natively play ASX/MMS/RTSP streams.

The converter component allows foobar2000 to convert from and to any file formats that the player is capable of playing back.

Includes dynamic range analysis, integrity checkers, equalizers, and visualizers, such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters, and X-Y (Shpect Lissajous) displays.

I'm old enough to have a lot of music where whole albums are worth listening to. This is also essential when the composers created music where the flow from one song to the next is part of the art of the album. E.g. on Queen's ANight_at_the_Opera_, the first song -- Death_On_Two_Legs -- is a very hard rock song with very pissed off lyrics. The next is _Lazing_On_a_Sunday_Afternoon, which is a very lighthearted amusing song. The contrast is wonderful. Also many artists have one song flow into another and breaking them up by using random on a song basis really breaks the music. Plus shuffle prevents repeats until the entire playlist is done. If you want, you can select individual songs and the are shuffled as if they are the entire album. It's harder to describe than to do:
configure play mode to shuffle albums

If you're like me -- and I know I am:
add library to list
play

But you can be more selective:
select albums (or songs if you only like a few)
do {
play_the_shuffled_list(list);
if (mood("not in for the current"))
skip();
if (mood("change_the_list))
change_the_list(&list);
} while !shuffled_off("mortal_coil");
die("happy");

Users can easily send their music files to their MP3 device through the use of the right click menu when browsing their library.

Winyl organizes your library by folder and not by ID3 tags. As such, your library stays organized (as long as your music folders are organized) even if you have incorrect or missing ID3 tags.

Winyl has a beautiful interface with thumbnails for each album (if the art is in the ID tag). If not, you can easily add cover art. It also has a great mini player and that too has cover art.

Winyl is designed to be a fast media player with low resource usage, meaning that it takes about 20 minutes to load 67 000 files. This is a pretty good time frame in comparison to some other media players' import times. So for those with a large library, this may be a good choice.

Shows albums, covers and tracks next to it, like Google Music.

This is a convenient tool for those who may have many albums that are not yet split into separate files for each song.