are there any ? 99% of the stuff i see doesnt have the features im lf or barely even works.

just something as replacement for youtube, considering how broken and useless yt became.

I have never seen such conflicting studies. Some say Groove is better cuz its newer, less bugs, and will be updated more frequently. Others say VLC is still king as it can run more format and even some corrupted formats to some degree. Some sources says there is no difference and other say we have to look at the codex or something.

Should there be a more concert answer to this, we are dealing with 1s and 0s after all how can their be so many conflicting opinions on quality. I mainly want to focus on audio quality so if someone can help me navigate this mess that would be great.

I tried Winamp, Foobar2000, VLC. For some god forsaken reason, they are unable to do the following: When I click "next", have it play the next song file in the folder.

I don't want to have to create a playlist or to update it every time. I thought every program would have this very simple feature....any programs that can actually do this?

edit: Reworded for clarity.

'm looking for a basic music player for PC- something with a good queue system like Musicolet and easy playlist management. Right now, I use Foobar, but maybe due to my customizations, I can't properly set up queues, and most resources I've found about it are over 10 years old.

I don't want to use Plex since I'm not interested in paying for a license. I did try Jellyfin, but also want to have an offline copy of my library on my phone. Unfortunately, the player I used with Jellyfin behaved strangely-it felt like it was made primarily for streaming, and downloading was more of an afterthought.

Right now, I've just set up an FTP server on my phone, copy files from my PC, and use Musicolet which works for now because my collection is pretty small (30 GB MP3s 320/kb). Maybe there's a better way to use Jellyfin for offline playback, or perhaps I should just use two different players on my devices. I do like Musicolet, but I haven't found a good player for PC yet

Do music player programs (Foobar, Winamp, Dopamine, etc.) affect the quality of digital music file playback? Or do they just spit out digital information to the DAC? Or sound quality changes due to prebuilt internal EQ from the player (software)? I am wondering if some programs fail to send complete digital information of a FLAC file to the DAC? Maybe it's placebo thing; Potplayer (I use it to watch video files) makes the music much noisier than VLC to my ears.

If no difference, are there some better programs (for Windows) to playback digital music files (ie FLAC)? No commercial, no privacy theft, etc.

Thanks!

As stated in title. Looking for what you guys consider your go to music player when using the pc for testing hires files?

After Microsoft changed "Groove Music" into "Media Player", it turned into a sluggish laggy app that has no features. So, I am looking for a better music player that has great equalizer, good integration with Windows 11 and has all that for free. I used to run "AIMP" back in the day but is there anything else that I should consider?

For a very long time the experience of listening to music on my pc truly sucked, I never quite found a player that doesn't feel like a relic from the 2000s (like the wmp) or has a frustrating lack of features (Grove-Music). With the VLC or Foobar I missed a good looking way to search through my library and Spotify sometimes is just overwhelming with it's limitless choices and with all of those I still needed Mp3tag to reliably tag my files.

But now I think I've finally found one that does it all, looks gorgeous, is a truly powerful media player that can pretty much handle every format and even streams and podcasts and to go for the trifecta it even is a powerful tool to manage your library and tags. MusicBee truly is great and I finally enjoy choosing music to listen to at my PC and don't always want to stand up and look at my physical collection to pick something.

So yeah I just wanted to share that in the hope to help out someone who has the same odd problem I had.

As the title says, is there a recommended music player for my audio files (loseless FLAC) that actually would make a difference in sound quality compared to the player installed by default? I have a Focal Radiance headphones, and I played one song in Youtube and one in the default player and to be honest, sound was way better in Youtube. I have seen Music bee or others recommended, but I am not sure how would it improve. Thanks.

Hi, I have over 150GB of music on my PC and am looking for something different that WMP. The UI is white and I have a folder with random songs without being classified or in folders (I have many others by albums and artists) and it takes close to 2 minutes to load them all.

Thanks!

Does anybody know of any good music clients on windows that look like Apple Music. Don’t need to have streaming options just a place to store and sort music like iTunes but perhaps with a dark mode? Any help is appreciated!

i've tried several music players for playing local music files on my pc , mainly foobar2000 and musicbee , but foobar2000 has a very outdated and basic UI while musicbee's UI is kinda messy and the lyrics implementation is bad . even spotify's local files function doesn't read .lrc files for lyrics

I'm looking for a music player with a modern beautiful UI and good lyrics implementation , i'd really appreciate suggestions

Greetings! I always used to use foobar2000 as my main music player, but since now I’m away from my PC, I needed a player that can sync with my iPhone so I can just access my library from anywhere.

Do you have any suggestions? Thanks!

Switched from Windows Media Player for windows 11 to apple music a while back due to countless bugs and lag, recently got into the habit of listening to high quality audio (.FLAC format) but apple music doesnt let me add them to my library, looking for a music player that is capable of playing FLAC files whilst having a decent UI. Thank You in advance:)

Am using JRivers but it's not accessing folders within folders within folders.

|----Folder1

  |     |----Folder1.1

  |     |     |----Folder1.1.1

  |     |     |     |----Folder1.1.1.1 (not showing up on "Audio>Files>Play Shuffled")

  |     |     |     |----Folder1.1.1.2 (not showing up on "Audio>Files>Play Shuffled")

  |     |     |----Folder1.1.2

  |     |     |----Folder1.1.3

  |     |----Folder1.2

  |----Folder2

I've brought this up, for years, on their Interact forum but they seem more interested in trying to capture the "I can play music from my TV!!" market and expect me to have a CS degree or something anyways I'm ready to try something else. Such a shame that 10 years into this...there's *still* such a lack of adequate software!

=====Ｔ𝐡𝓐ｎк 𝔂𝐨𝐔! =====

Looking for a basic lightweight music player for Windows without all the visualizations and other extra features, just a barebones music player that I can navigate through folders and play...

So far I tried Dopamine which has the best looking UI on Windows so far, but it's sluggish and takes ages finding music files when navigating through folders.

MPV since I use it as media player, but it's not an ideal music player and sometimes having audio issues.

VLC is not lightweight and neither Clementine or Strawberry.

Edit: found Winyl Player, ~5 MB, has portable version, it even has a few skins and a dark skin which is a big plus for me, so far it's smooth and snappy, leaving this here for those who are looking for similar audio player.

Edit 2: the popup from changing audio is causing fullscreen application & games to minimizes to desktop, I couldn't find an option to disable it from advanced settings, however, if you right-click on the popup itself there should be an option to disable it there. Don't know how to bring it back other than replacing with a fresh copy.

Edit: 3: Billy is another lightweight player.

Billy can play WAV, MP3, OGG, and FLAC files. It can usually load entire directories of MP3 files 2 to 8 times faster than winamp or media player. Billy plays music albums without any gaps between tracks, so an overlapping applause or beat will continue. The player is 100% controllable by keyboard and its easy finder and special rename functions help you to find and organize your files quickly.

Hey everyone,
So I’ve been trying to find a good audio player that fits how I like to listen to music, but it’s proving trickier than I expected.

What I’m looking for is something minimal, clean, and ideally customizable/stylable — like, I want it to look nice on my desktop without being flashy or bloated. I prefer that compact, focused vibe where I can just drag in an MP3 and enjoy it without a full-blown media center UI staring back at me.

I really like the simplicity of mpv and terminal-based players, but I’m on Windows and a lot of those cool Linux-native options just aren’t available here. MPV’s “black box” approach works, but I wish there was a way to have a little more personality or UI polish while keeping the same kind of minimalist spirit.

It doesn’t have to be open source, but that’d definitely be a bonus.
Peace and love! ✌️

Hey there! What are some of the top music players? Been sick of itunes for years. Also needs to be able to sync with an android and carry over playlists. thanks!