Best Free Music Player and Organizer

Choosing the best free music player and organizer is no doubt greatly a matter of taste. But in this article I compare some of the most impressive music players that stand out of the crowd. In general they serve as excellent MP3 players and play most popular audio formats. They play your MP3, MIDI, MPEG audio, WMA, OGG, FLAC files, and many more music formats without any need to download additional components. Many of the mega all purpose media software packages out there still manage to lack key features for music lovers, prompting us to search for decent music player software.

In my search through music players, I looked at the quality of the individual music player and how much you stand to lose in user-friendliness, adaptability, feature support, and overall quality, that is, if you were changing over from Winamp Full (Bento) or Windows Media Player. Music players and organizers that equal or surpass them ought to rank high for everyday use.

I found many music players that balance play efficiency and feature support. I think the best music player and organizer ought to facilitate an appreciation for music and satisfy avid audiophiles, such as by inspiring us to rip or download music, organize our music libraries, and learn more about our favorite artists or music. Some music fans may want to use their music player for storing information and organizing extensive music libraries; others may just want to listen to music.

All of the top picks have excellent music player and organizing features, with significant advantages over bulkier programs depending on your tastes. But at the end is my current best basic/lightweight music player pick for minimalists.

Jaangle (formerly Teen Spirit) is my top pick for its combination of simplicity and ease of use for average users whilst also providing impressive features for music lovers. It downloads free information from the Internet that music fans will appreciate, including artist photos, album covers, song lyrics, music tablatures, album reviews, and artist biographies. For example, if you right-click on an artist in the library and then select "LastFM - load picture," it will download an additional free artist picture (if available) each time it is clicked, turning the relevant photo into a slide show.

By the way to set up the Jaangle interface as shown in the photo (above to the right), you must go to Options from the toolbar and deselect all of the checks under "special info" except artist picture. Otherwise, it's a very competitive music player: it minimizes to a convenient and transparent mini player, integrates support for audio/video media, and tracks user history for auto play lists. It's very competitive on performance, especially for compressed audio files (or, generally, after they were played first, but the flip side is that it's medium-high on memory use if an uncompressed file is the first song to play).

Some of its additional features include an interesting music quiz game that draws from your library. It also allows you to set minimums for item groupings, so that any item in the library with only one or two songs will not appear separately (they go under "various" instead). You can tweak crossfading with a slider bar to have smoother transitions. The new Jaangle version introduces interface improvements, such as a toolbar and the ability to quickly increase a panel to full screen. In the negative: it doesn't write some of its information to tags (lyrics and ratings will not carry over between music players), and sometimes the auto continue will repeat a couple songs when you play shorter play lists (for longer play lists it also doesn't seem random, but then again, you tend to hear songs you like more often!). It also doesn't rip music from your CDs/DVDs ("rip" means to encode music to an audio file of your choice).

Therefore, it might be helpful to download ripping freeware and other related specialized freeware in the related products and links.

For those looking for music, check out the article and comments on finding music online, the article on best free streaming media recorders, and the tutorial on finding legal (and free) torrents. Also, Free Music Zilla helps you record and download songs from members of online music-sharing communities (stick to non-copyrighted songs and license agreements, of course). These techniques could help you get a sample of your favorite albums, artists, and songs to start downloading and linking an assortment of other free related information.

AIMP 2 is an excellent second pick for me, even though I tend to use it mainly for converting music files. I recommend this music player for its high quality library and history features, which are in some ways better than its low resource competition, as well as its overall appealing design. Interestingly, it has a few independent programs/modules that are accessible from the startup folder and the interface, including a converter, tag editor, and sound recorder. These give you the ability to rip music (which I found in the converter) and tag automatically (with the CDDB feature).

Its library interface creates automatic play lists based on several categories, including star-ratings, times played, date last played, and new audio files. It allows you to play songs directly from these auto play lists. And you can even select all of the songs on the lists (or a few of them) and add them to regular play lists, effectively allowing you to save auto play lists. The main interface also docks in its library and still allows you to minimize it to a mini player.

I found the mini player quite impressive. When you hover over the mini player, an optional second panel appears with rolling information and several options. At first, I was not a fan of the Quick File Info box that pops up when you click on the scrolling information or hover over the tray icon. But then I found that it just disappears a few seconds after you move your mouse away (I kept wanting to close it myself). In the negative: I never really did get comfortable with the main interface and it seems generally cluttered to me. It is obviously visually stunning, but I wish I could find what I wanted more quickly.

Foobar2000 is another excellent choice and it is a strong favorite of many users. It has much to admire for its excellent nuts and bolts capabilities in ripping, tagging, or converting audio files. Most other music players are not nearly as successful at packing so many features all in one place while also remaining simple, adaptable, and light on resources. Be sure to check its excellent website for many additional components to expand its functionality.

Foobar2000 is not the most visually attractive music player, but it succeeds with an intuitive and easy to use interface (without any loss of functionality). Its interface is also highly adjustable to suit the desires of the user; in fact, it is more adjustable and customizable than most other music players. Also, it has a transparency option for the whole player, it adjusts the location of toolbar features to fit the size of the interface, and it has visualizations that either fit in the toolbar or open in a separate window.

In addition, Foobar2000 has a decent library for organizing music. The newest version now supports artist images. It substitutes auto play lists by allowing for filter expressions, but the filter and search features do not seem very user-friendly. But you could use the playback statistics plugin to improve this feature. If your sound card supports the ASIO plugin to improve sound quality, you can download it for use with Foobar or XMPlay below.

There are also excellent basic and further stripped down music players that aim at playing music and not so much at organizing it. XMPlay is an impressive option for its lightweight interface mixed with high quality capabilities. Surprisingly, it provides for a wide range of features and additional plugins. It only comes with one skin, but others are online for download. I like the way its side windows retract and the way it minimizes to the tray with a right click to the minimize button.

Some of its features take experimentation and discovery. It allows you to drag and drop individual files as well as massive folders into a queue and library. Another way is to select specific files by holding the Ctrl key or the Shift key and clicking on the files you want (alternatively, hold and drag your mouse over the files you want). The library window also sorts by various categories and can monitor selected folders to update them automatically. Since it loads multiple play list formats, XMPlay is a good possibility for a second music player. It could also be used as a primary music player for those who just want to listen to music.

Most of the top picks share common features, so here is a sample of them (in no particular order, and non comprehensive):

• Keyboard shortcut support (hotkeys);
• Minimize to tray capability, if you click all the appropriate options;
• Mini player (all but Foobar2000);
• Visualizations and multiple skins;
• Play many audio formats;
• Tagging support (all but XMPlay -- requires plugins);
• Ripping/Converting (Foobar2000, AIMP 2);
• Play streaming radio (all but Jaangle);
• Drag and drop files from explorer;
• Play list support: save play lists in compatible formats to allow users to load them in other players;
• Song search/advanced search;
• Equalizer and spectrum display;
• Crossfade;
• Tweak sound quality -- use output adjustments (up to 24 bits or 32 bits) to fit your sound card specifications;
• ReplayGain/Normalize -- help prevent major shifts in song volume (all but Jaangle, though some sound devices have this capability too);
• ASIO output plugin support (Foobar2000 and XMPlay);
• BASS player engine (Jaangle and AIMP 2 -- just for reference).

Please help us by rating this review.

Several other free music players were brought up in comments here or noted from other sources. As they are not rated in this review, I am listing some of them here with brief descriptions and links to their sites for ease of reference.

Many of the music and media players I looked at were problematic for their general complexity or inefficiency in playing and organizing music, such as Media Monkey, Winamp Full, Songbird, and, of course, Windows Media Player. For those who want to save on system resources, these may not be the top choices for playing music and multitasking for long periods of time.

In alphabetical order:

• 1by1 is an interesting and popular option, referred to as the "Directory Player." It allows you to select and play music from an explorer-like interface, but most music players have some degree of a folder structure display. Its memory use is a little higher than XMPlay (for small MP3 songs) and it requires additional plugins for almost all audio formats besides MP3. I found its minimalist directory layout easier to use than XMPlay's separate library/queue setup.
   
• JetAudio is surprisingly lightweight and efficient for such a feature rich and capable music/media player. It has many features to help build and manage your media library. Rip, Convert, Record, Burn, play Internet radio all in one program. Use countless auto play lists (the most I've seen, but some are based on tags you must create) in its library. Though, I found its separate media center/main window setup confusing (the media center does not reduce to a mini player). It also has a large download size, several nags to uncheck on install, and I experienced some program crashes while updating tag information.
   
• LiberKey Picks: Includes iPod Managers to help you sync music to iPods and help replace iTunes. There are three in the Full LiberKey Download List, but you can also click on them individually and download them from their homepages at the LiberKey site. SharePod is the only one listed in its regular download packs. Other excellent audio related freeware are also listed in LiberKey, such as AIMP 2, TagScanner, CDex, Audacity, and ImgBurn.
   
• I find Media Monkey excellent and convenient for the initial basic tasks of ripping, converting, and tagging. It has an excellent, user-friendly interface for music fans, and it has a colossal library organizer; though, it's a bit heavier on system resources than Winamp Full. And it is interesting that the download sizes of EAC (ripper) + TagScanner (tagger) + AIMP 2 or CDex (as converters) + Jaangle (player/organizer) would only outweigh Media Monkey by less than 3 MB (feel free to adjust this pretend Rizar-pack to your tastes and redo the math), so don't worry about having several specialized programs to do these basic tasks (over something like Media Monkey) unless they all still lack something you need.
   
• Media Player Classic (MPC) would be a good second player since it could easily load play lists (ASX, PLS, or M3U formats) from another music organizer, but XMPlay is slightly lighter on memory resources and it is more devoted to audio features.
   
• Quintessential Media Player (qmp) surprised me with its thorough MusicID updater feature. It automatically downloads information about your music, so you don't have to search so much on your own. For example, it created a list of composers (song writers) based on MusicID information that I usually have to track down myself (though it does have a long list of leftover songs to which it couldn't find information). It can massively edit tags, rename files, and write its auto MusicID info to tags (or update its library info from tags). It automatically retrieves SHOUTcast and Icecast radio station lists. The library interface is intuitive and easy to play songs quickly. On system resources and efficiency it's between JetAudio and Winamp Full (after playing for awhile it was more similar to Winamp Full's resource use).
   
• Songbird -- An open source, refreshingly simple interface that highly integrates to Internet resources like a browser. It's still the most bulky and inefficient of all tested music players (around 60 MB on memory use). But I keep going back to it, so maybe they have something for the future there. It's in constant development, with nightly Beta versions for testing.
   
• Winamp Full is very professional, customizable, has excellent support for many music file formats, and has good integration with Internet resources. The library and music organizing features are top-notch; and it's even incorporated in other well known media players (such as in The KMPlayer). The downside is that it has several nags on install and tries to send off your usage stats, and it is bloated with features making it heavy on system resources.
   
• Winamp also packages a lite version of its player with the full version's installation and as a separate download, which is not so atypical for music players except that Winamp lite plays much more efficiently than the full version. It plays an impressive number of audio formats for such a lightweight and CPU efficient player. It also mimics the professional feel, wide array of options, and feature richness of its full version, but it has the similar installation disadvantages as the full version and no library for organizing music.

 
Mentioned Above for Finding Music:

• Finding Music Search Engines
• Best Free Streaming Media Recorder
• Finding Legal (and Free) Torrents
• Free Music Zilla (external site)

Additional Articles of Interest:

• Best Free Media Player
• Best Free CD Ripper
• Best Free MP3 Tag Editor
• Best Free Audio / Video Format Conversion Program
• Best Free CD / DVD Burning Software
• Best Free CD / DVD Emulation Software
• Best Free Audio Editing Software
• Don't know the name of the song? Just hum a few bars into this search engine.
• Free Utility Manages and Converts Digital Music
• What is Bittorrent? / Best Free BitTorrent... / Optimizing Vuze... / Optimizing µTorrent...

Guides:

• How to Work With Audio CD .CDA Files
• Understanding Codecs
• How to Remove DRM from WMV WMA legally