please recommend a good media player

[ultimate.goon]

hi all. i got my surface3 LTE yesterday. i have transferd my mp3 collection. but WMP is horrible as a player for a tablet/touchscreen. I even went back to my roots and installed winamp but its too small.
Has any one found a player with large buttons? Or is there a way to enlarge WMP?

 

[leeshor]

Welcome to the forum

Have you tried VLC?

 

[ultimate.goon]

Doesn't multitask .. music stops when you slick out of it

 

[GreyFox7]

AFAIK, You'll need to get a Store App vs a desktop app to achieve your desired results.

 

[hughlle]

Do you need music to be playable even when the device is not powered on? In which case your only option is something like the xbox music app (is it called groove now?) or an alternative app from the windows store.

If you are happy to use a traditional player (you mentioned winamp so I assume you are) then you might want to try musicbee. I really like it, it has more features than I know what to do with (tabbed music browsing rocks) and has untold mountains of settings including the ability to change the sizes of all components such as text and buttons etc. It's my go to on my surfaces having had similar issues with buttons that are large enough for fluent touch use.

 

[CrippsCorner]

Have you upgraded to Windows 10? Groove would be the obvious choice...

 

[hughlle]

Have you upgraded to Windows 10? Groove would be the obvious choice...

It is also absolutely and completely lacking in features. Like most Microsoft MUI apps it seems :/ Definitely a viable option though if it's just as a casual player, and not your primary player (just like onenote ).

 

[ultimate.goon]

thanks for the help...It would be nice to have my audio playing in the background. it would also be SUPER nice to put the display off and still have music playing just like android tablets do!!!
I am going to try music bee. if any one knows about a winamp skin for 1080p screens please let me know..

-Goon

 

[hughlle]

thanks for the help...It would be nice to have my audio playing in the background. it would also be SUPER nice to put the display off and still have music playing just like android tablets do!!!
I am going to try music bee. if any one knows about a winamp skin for 1080p screens please let me know..

-Goon

It's a great app, but it does take some tweaking in options to get it to where you want it (for example you cannot use Enter to select a song by default, you have to change it in the hotkeys, for which there are a billion (just make sure not to tick universal/global tick box else even if you are typing a document and hit enter it will start the song over )

Musicbee will not run in the background like on an android device however. For that you have to have an app from the app store (or just use Groove for those occasions). Hopefully this will change before too long though, as in win 10 there is now a separate option for when to put the device to sleep, but also when to simply turn the screen off; however this doesn't work at present and turning the screen off is effectively sleep and all music will stop playing.

 

[ultimate.goon]

the only option i could find for the power button is sleep and shutdown...
I thought the screensaver had a setting for turning the monitor off but i didnt find it.
I saw some work arounds when i googled it but i dont want to side load a bunch of random software..

-goon

 

[hughlle]

the only option i could find for the power button is sleep and shutdown...
I thought the screensaver had a setting for turning the monitor off but i didnt find it.
I saw some work arounds when i googled it but i dont want to side load a bunch of random software..

-goon

I am not the man to ask, but I know there is a user around here who knows how to get screen saver for this device. It was somewhere within a thread on just this kind of topic, not being able to just turn the screen off. Maybe make a thread asking. The solution didn't require any downloaded stuff, you just created a simple .bat file and stuck it on your desktop.

 

[ultimate.goon]

So i tried musicbee and it was just too much to handle..
then i installed XBMC and it is the best one by far. it even has a tablet mode the "appearance" settings ...you can also swipe out of it and will still play your mp3s in the background...i just hope its stable. the library could use more refinement...