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.

'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!

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.

This might be a bit off-topic here, but I value your opinions, so here goes...

I'm looking for recommendations for Windows music player programs that 1) can play a variety of formats (mostly FLAC), 2) displays cover art, and 3) is simple to use for a standard folder structure of Artist/Album/Songs.

Thanks!

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!

I primarily use VLC for video, but I want something that nicely organizes my library into albums and such for music. I WAS using grove music till they killed it, and I just switched over to the new windows media player app when I realized it removed all my .wav music and so my mass effect 3 album wasn't on my playlist. At that point, I gave up.

Does anyone have a favorite music player?

Edit: Wow, thanks everybody for the suggestions!! Too many posts to individually respond, kinda tempted to go through and tally the recs for each player though.

FREE - I don't care what kind of flak I get I HATE VLC and a ton of other media players. The experience is too challenging for what I want. It looks terrible and it's annoying. I want something that has a simplified and pretty UI, but can play media of all types. MKV 4K, remux 10bit files, etc.

Is this out there?

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.

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

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:)

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 was listening to music and now as usual, I was using the default Windows 11 player, (which I remember was called Groove Music on W10 from what I remember) forgetting about the existence of the good ol' Windows Media Player "Legacy".

Which one do you prefer, and why?

Do you use non-native Windows program for offline music?