Listening to your favorite music shouldn’t be a resource draining activity. For instance I listen to the music while I do Java development with a virtual machine running Eclipse. I just can’t waste memory nor cpu.

iTunes got bigger and bigger. Loading times and performances are not among his best features so I searched the web for a so called iTunes alternative.

The best one I’ve found so far is called foobar2000. It’s a media player with simple UI and low memory usage. It also offers plugin support for new features.

While iTunes uses 54Mb of RAM, foobar2000 uses only 15Mb. This is also true if you minimize the two softwares to the system tray. 14Mb for iTunes, 3Mb for its alternative.

With the iPod Manager plugin foo_dop you can easily load your entire music collection from the device and listen to your favorite tracks.

These are the plugins I’m using right now:

• iPod manager (foo_dop)
• Audioscrobbler (foo_audioscrobbler)
• Columns UI (foo_ui_columns)
• Quick Search Toolbar (foo_uie_quicksearch)

Check it out. Have fun.