We all love music and everyone have there own favorite genre of music. To enjoy high clarity music one needs good desktop audio players. We may have some idea about some of the popular audio players. We all having an audio player installed (good or bad?) on our computer. But this audio player is the best one available or is there any audio player having more features than the current one. Here we are arranging a huge list of audio players for you. You can choose the right one based on your requirements.
Winamp
(http://www.winamp.com/)
We started our discussion with the popular audio player-Winamp, as it needs no introduction. Winamp is an ideal choice to listen, watch and manage music, video, podcasts, and internet radio on your desktop and devices. Winamp is easily customizable, offering the widest range of extensions, skins, and services to add to your experience. You can listen to, manage and organize your media catalogs, including audio, video, streaming media, podcasts, and internet radio stations. As we discussed earlier, Winamp allows you to significantly customize your experience with over 6,000 add-ons (including skins, plug-ins, and visualizations) created by the development community. Winamp also has tools for managing your podcast subscriptions with the searchable podcast directory. You will be able to listen over 40,000 internet radio stations via integration with the SHOUTcast Radio directory.
Windows Media Player
(http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-media-player)
Second, we are considering the Windows media player as it available with the Windows operating system. Windows media player is designed by for media lovers which is available in Windows 7 and Windows 8. The Windows Media Player 12 plays more music and video than ever, including Flip Video and unprotected songs from the iTunes library. You can organize your digital media collection, sync digital media files to a portable device, shop online for digital media content, and more with the player. Listen to streaming radio stations from around the block and around the world is possible with Windows Media Guide. You can easily customize your Player with easily installed skins, visualizations, and plug-ins for a new look and extra features.
VLC Player
(http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
VLC is a popular free open source cross-platform multimedia player which plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. It can plays everything like Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices and Streams. It can easily plays most codecs with no codec packs installed like MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3, etc.. Another interesting thing is it runs on all platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix.
QuickTime
(http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/)
Quicktime is a powerful multimedia technology with a built-in media player, it lets you view Internet video, HD movie trailers, and personal media in a wide range of file formats and lets you enjoy them in remarkably high quality.
iTunes
(http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/)
With iTunes in the Cloud, the music, apps, and books you purchase automatically appear on all your devices. You can download only the stuff you want like movies and TV shows. iTunes is also your source for hundreds of thousands of free podcasts.
Realplayer
(http://www.real.com/realplayer)
Since the debut in 1995, RealPlayer has evolved into the most recognized media management software. Whether you’re looking to play videos, download videos from the web, or you want to convert the format of a video, RealPlayer is sure to meet your needs. It supports playback of major formats audio and video formats such as FLV AVI WMV WMA MP3 MP4 3GP, RM, and many more.
Foobar2000
(http://www.foobar2000.org/)
Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. It supported audio formats like MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND, etc.. You can use customizable keyboard shortcuts.
Spotify
(http://www.spotify.com/)
It’s now easier than ever to discover and share music with your friends. Thanks to Spotify and Facebook, you can see and hear what your friends are listening to – just hit play on any music post. Spotify comes in all shapes and sizes, available for your PC, Mac, home audio system and mobile phone. Millions of tracks, any time you like. Just search for it in Spotify, then play it.
MusicBee
(http://getmusicbee.com/)
If you are looking for an application geared toward managing extensive music collections, easy to use and with a comprehensive feature set, then go for MusicBee. MusicBee makes it easy to organize, find and play music files on your computer, on portable devices and on the web. You can easily add metadata to your music with a number of powerful tools.
Audacity
(https://www.audacityteam.org/)
We are ending up this discussion with Audacity. Audacity is basically an audio editor and recorder, but a great tool. It is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files. Audacity can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from other media. Easy editing with Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete. Also unlimited sequential Undo (and Redo) in the session to go back any number of steps.
MediaMonkey
(http://www.mediamonkey.com/)
Mediamonkey can play MP3s and other audio formats. It can manage 100,000+ music and video files without bogging down and can record CDs and download music, movies, and podcasts. It can automatically lookup and intuitively tag Album Art and other metadata. Pro-version of Mediamonkey offers file monitoring to automatically update the library, advanced searches and auto creation of playlists, advanced portable device synchronization with on-the-fly format.
Napster (old Rhapsody)
(https://napster.com/)
Napster Music Software and manage all your music in one place. Another music service Napster has joined with Rhapsody. Once the download of Rhapsody is over, you will be prompted through a series of installation screens. Stream music on-demand, download music for offline playback and create playlists of your favorite songs using the Napster app from play store.
Tomahawk music player
(http://www.tomahawk-player.org/)
Tomahawk is a music player that fundamentally changes the way music is consumed and shared. It decouples the name of the song from the source it was shared from – and fulfills the request using all of your available sources. This creates a universal translation layer across music repositories, streaming services and geographic territories.
Quod Libet
(http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/)
Quod Libet is a GTK+-based audio player written in Python, using the Mutagen tagging library. And it lets you do this for all the file formats it supports — Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, Musepack, and MOD.
CopyTrans Manager
(http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php)
CopyTrans Manager is the free iTunes alternative to manage iPhone, iPad, and iPod without iTunes. Drag and drop music from your PC directly to iPhone, iPod or iPad and no need for iTunes. Add music to newly created iPhone playlists and edit meta-tags like an artist, album ratings etc.
There is a lot of free and paid audio player software are available, Spiderplayer pro is one of them. You can also check QuuxPlayer or the free mufin player, which is also a good alternative when it comes to music players for PCs. Media Jukebox is also an awesome player. AIMP player is also much better than winamp. It is reliable, less resource hungry, and also very compact. Some players are discontinued like, songbird. For videos, I personally use VLC player, as it supports more formats and can play error videos or half downloaded videos. Another great player with similar advantages and even more features than VLC is KMPlayer. I suggest you check this Wikipedia article about the ‘Comparison of audio player software’, you can find many existing and outdated audio software there.
What do you think about our list of audio players? Is it a complete list? Can you suggest anything better than these?
