The powerful, lightweight, and customizable MusicBee wins our choice for the best music player on Windows. The other great player, Winamp, has recently shut down.

MusicBee

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Download Page

Features –

• Manages all your media and supports a number of formats including MP3, AAC, M4A, MPC, OGG, FLAC, APE, Opus, TAK, WV, WMA and WAV.
• Create and manage playlists, and “smart” playlists that update based on custom filters
• Enqueue songs into a “Now Playing” pane for on-the-go playlist creation.
• Watch folders on your hard drive for changes and automatically adjust your library accordingly
• Import libraries from iTunes and Windows Media Player
• Sync Android phones, USB drives, some iPods, and many other portable music devices with your library
• Convert files on-the-fly as you sync to your devices
• Auto-tag your music using the music databases of your choice
• Keep your files automatically organized in folder based on tags
• Customize a number of different keyboard shortcuts
• Subscribe, download, and listen to podcasts, either by searching MusicBee’s podcast directory or by adding feeds yourself
• Use advanced audio features like a 10-band equalizer, crossfade, WASAPI and ASIO playback, and more
• Customize your player with skins, different layouts and views, and three different players including a mini player and compact player
• A plugin architecture that lets you add lots of functionality to the player, like extra supported formats, skins, library organization tools, and other features (Winamp plugins supported)
• An integrated browser that allows you to browse for just about anything in-player (useful for browsing plug-ins, skins, and so on)

The Alternatives

MediaMonkey: We debated between MediaMonkey and MusicBee for a long time before settling on MusicBee. MediaMonkey does have a few other features—like iOS syncing and DLNA sharing—but it isn’t quite as good-looking or as lightweight as MusicBee. Most importantly, however, is that some of MediaMonkey’s features—including smart playlists, on-the-fly conversions, advanced searching, automatic library organization, and others—require a $25 version license or $50 lifetime license to access. Considering that these features are all available for free with MusicBee, it was hard to recommend the more limited MediaMonkey as the best player. Still, depending on your needs, it may be ideal for you.

Winamp: Winamp may be dead, but it’s still a pretty solid player. It doesn’t do much that MusicBee and MediaMonkey don’t (Shoutcast support being one exception), but if you long for the llama-whipping days of the 90s or like its expansive list of skins, it could be worth a try.

Foobar2000: Foobar2000 is extremely lightweight and insanely customizable. It won’t do much but play and tag music out of the box, but it also has a lot of plugins that let you customize its features to a ridiculous level. It’s a bit more difficult to use than Winamp or MediaMonkey, though, especially when you first start customizing—so it’s really a better player for advanced users that want to tweak every dark corner of the player.

iTunes: If you’re an iPhone user, it’s certainly the easiest way to sync your music, apps, playlists, and other info to your phone (since it was made for it). That’s pretty much the only reason to use it in our opinion, though, and even then, MediaMonkey can still sync to iDevices quite nicely, so we’d try that first.

These are some of the biggest ones, but there are still a ton of others, like Windows Media Player, the Zune Player, AIMP3, Clementine, and even VLC (though we’d be hard pressed to call that a full-featured music library program). The best thing you can do when looking for a music player on Windows is try a few out. If you don’t feel like sifting through a ton of players, though, I’ll eat my hat if you can’t make MusicBee work the way you want it to.

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There are a lot of great music players for Windows, and it's next to impossible to make a broad "best" statement that applies to everyone. But that doesn't mean we can't pick one. See our selection.

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