Everyone, and this time everyone in the world, uses the computer to listen to music using mp3 files that can be easily purchased or downloaded from the internet for free. The most used program for listening to music is certainly Windows Media Player for the mere fact that it is the only player pre-installed on the PC when you buy a new one or after installing Windows. Many use iTunes instead , for the mere fact that it is the management program of the iPod and iPhone (today it is no longer like that, see point 19) However, neither of them can be considered the best program for listening to music on the computer, so it is worth seeing which are the best programs for listening to music and managing mp3 files on the computer .
There are really many programs to listen to PC music, many alternatives to WMP and almost all video playback software also works to listen to music.
1) Foobar 2000 is certainly one of the best audio players for listening to music on Windows PCs. It supports practically all audio formats including FLAC, APE, MPC and many other rarer and less used ones. The graphic interface is very essential and not too beautiful but this allows the Foobar to be absolutely the lightest music player available . Among the versions the best is the special because in this case, the base one is perhaps too light and thin.
As far as tag management is concerned, it is equipped with an advanced editor with which to organize mp3 files and a tool for creating automatic playlists.
2) AIMP is an exceptional audio player because it takes the best features of Winamp and Foobar2000 and fonse them together in a single software.
The graphical interface is very nice and the support for Winamp plugins is complete. With AIMP you can start the reproduction of many types of audio and music files: mp3, ogg, wma, aac, wav, ape, mpc, ac3, flac and many others including .cues, single track ones and playlists like the m3u format. Among other things, it also manages to convert audio files from one format to another and create playlists.
3) MusicBee Player is a great program of which I have written a dedicated article, with a thousand functions including autoDj and integration with LastFM to listen to music online.
4) Voltra is a program for Windows Mac and Linux PCs with a very minimalist white background and black lettering, beautiful to look at and easy to use. The program is able to manage the list of songs and make searches for artists and musical genres, in addition it also supports the free listening of streaming music with a Voltra account.
5) Harmony is like a light version of iTunes, with the same interface, but without all the Apple stuff inside. Harmony also includes a series of plugins to stream music from Spotify, Deezer, Google Play Music, YouTube, Reddit and others.
6) Winamp, the most famous music player ever used, at least once by all those who have used a computer for a few years.
Winamp is beautiful, useful, full of different graphic themes to customize it, full of plugins to add, complete with many features for both audio and video, full support for high quality audio and for reading music CDs and also some possibilities to manipulate the audio by changing the quality of the mp3s. The very light Lite version allows you to play and hear music on your PC without cluttering it up.
7) Plexamp is an independent music player inspired by the old Winampo, also similar in graphics. Supports figure viewers that follow rhythm, volume leveling and gapless playback.
READ ALSO: best portable mp3 players for usb sticks such as AIMP and Foobar, to always carry the music and the program that reads and reproduces it.
9) MediaMonkey is the best audio player, in my humble opinion, that can be used on a Windows pc today. Basically there is everything and it does everything well: complete management of tags with reception of missing information from the internet, full support for output plugins to improve the sound perceived by the ear, possibility of managing IPods and mp3 players of any brand, extraction audio tracks from a CD and conversion to mp3, easy to use and very nice to see graphic interface, conversion between audio file formats.
10) iTunes becomes only music program in the latest version released in 2017, 12.7, where all management functions of iPhone and iPad and apps are removed.
11) XMPlay is an excellent program for listening to music, very similar to the old Winamp, with a compact interface that resumes the appearance of a portable stereo. XMPlay, which is one of my favorite programs, also supports extensions and skins to change the graphics.
12) Clementine is a special program mainly because it allows you to listen to streaming music via the internet, from several free sites. As a music program it is well organized, it takes a little the interface of MusicBee and MediaMonkey, it allows to organize playlists and folders.
13) Wynil is a newer program for Windows, with a dark and elegant interface, customizable in colors. It allows you to sort music on your PC by artists, albums and genres, listen to online radio, read song lyrics, get information about each song online at Last.fm and listen to tracks using the file explorer. Winyl has few options on the interface and can be minimized and hidden in the Windows taskbar, with buttons to control music playback. The program also has an equalizer and an integrated ID3 tag editor.
14) Dopamine is a Windows PC program released in 2016 that makes mp3 file management its most important feature. It's also worth a try for its playlist creation features, the ability to play MP3 and FLAC files and the equalizer
The graphical interface looks like that of an application for Windows 10, with very large writings and buttons and colors that can be customized.
15) CherryPlayer is a magnificent program for listening to music on your PC, not only the local one, but also via the internet. The program is really nice to use, full of unique functions to organize tracks, to manage files, to create playlists and to search for songs or music videos. The program integrates with Twitch, with Last.fm, with VK.com and other sites where you can discover new songs, charts and videos of the moment.
16) Jaangle (formerly Teen Spirit) is a music player whose strength is online integration (it automatically downloads and displays artist and album information from the network).
Perhaps it is also the best of these audio tag editing programs for all file formats. In a field crowded with free music players, the factor that highlights Jaangle is the way it automatically integrates the music library information by automatically downloading it from the Internet (use the Last.fm website).
Online integration concerns, for example, album covers and images representing the band or singer you are listening to. It will also be possible to download information and view artist biographies, reviews, song lyrics and so on.
Excellent also the advanced search function that allows you to search for music, as well as by title, author and category also by the words of the texts and for news and comments written on the net. Editing tags is very powerful as mentioned. You press the right mouse button to perform all the main editing operations. To search for information on the song, you can access it online using the right mouse button by connecting to sites like AllMusic, Amazon, Discogs.
Unfortunately it has no function to pass the music on an £ MP player, on an IPod and lacks support for the audio output plugins which causes a sound quality not among the best.
17) Jajuk Jukebox is described in another post, it is open source, free for Windows, Mac, Linux and absolutely among the best programs to listen to music, manage tags and albums.
18) OpenMediaPlayer is a Windows PC program, free and open source that allows you to hear music with a really good interface
OpenMediaPlayer supports many multimedia formats, including MP3, OGG, SPX, TTA, FLAC, AAC, WAV, WMA, APE and MP4, MPEG and AVI video formats. Playback controls are at the top, while song titles are at the center of the application.
In the lower area you can see the album covers, while on the left there are the buttons of the music player, the lyrics, the CD player, the radio and the video player. You can manage tags of mp3 files, create playlists, set up an equalizer. This program is among the lightest, with a low consumption of resources and CPU, also ideal for older computers.
19) Gom Audio is by the same authors as the celebrated program to watch videos, Gom Player and deserves the same acknowledgments. GOM Audio is a light program, with a compact design and some really impressive features such as streaming Internet radio, different playback speeds, plug-in support and a full equalizer.
20) JSound is a program for listening to PC music at its best, optimizing the sound through a powerful 31-band equalizer. With JSound you can improve the audio output of songs using a rich variety of filters and effects and you can also record audio from external and internal sources, convert files between different formats, listen to online radio, liven up the music using the equalization software and more.
21) Ubiquitous Player is a free media player for Windows 8 and 7 that also works as an image viewer, calculator, clipboard manager and other things. Ubiquitous Player allows you to watch videos and listen to music and audio files of mp3, bee, mp4 and many others. In addition to being a light open source program, it is also a portable type that does not require installation.
22) Stoffi Music Player is the most particular player that has been designed specifically for Windows 7 and Windows 8 (but has not received updates for a while).
23) Spotify is a similar and better mp3 player than iTunes capable of playing any song streamed via the internet.
READ ALSO: Best programs to listen to music via internet and radio on PC
