Top 7 Free Music Player Apps for PC in 2022

Previously, I have shared a few methods to download music for free. Now, it’s time to pick a music player to enjoy music. In this post, I will share with you the 7 best free music players for PC. Most of them are open source. 

Not only can these players play your music collection, but they also offer advanced management, customization, syncing, and cloud playback features. All tested working for Windows 10 and the latest Windows 11.

1. Foobar2000

As a professional music player, Foobar2000 has been on the market as early as the early 1990s. You may not like its original interface, but it is one of the most customizable and extensible music players on the market.

You can customize the foobar2000 user interface as you want, such as integrating components such as Playlist View, Equalizer, Lyrics, Spectrum Meter, Album, and Artist View into the core UI. 

It also supports almost all music formats including OGG, ALAC, AIFF, MP3, etc. It can even read ZIP files and RAR archives directly and can rip audio CDs. Oftentimes, I use it to convert FLAC to ALAC. 

2. Dopamine

Dopamine is a simple but elegant music player designed for Windows 10/11. It takes advantage of Windows features such as notifications, tray controls, and UI derived from Microsoft’s design philosophy.

When you launch it for the first time, it will scan your music library folder and load all your music quickly. It supports popular formats such as MP3, OGG, FLAC, APE, OPUS, M4A, etc. 

In the main interface, you can see album art, track listing, and playback controls. If you don’t like the window size, you can select cover player, micro player, or nano player, which is the smallest. You can easily rate tracks with starts through the taskbar controls.

3. AIMP

Inspired by the old Winamp, AIMP is an incredibly simple music player. Within AIMP, you can add folders on your PC to load music. Besides local music, AIMP allows you to stream music from cloud drives including Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive, custom WebDAV, etc. You can also install plugins to play music on YouTube, SoundCloud,  MixCloud, etc.

In the main interface, you can easily search for music through the search bar. Many features such as scheduler, equalizer, radio capture, and many more are just a click away. 

What’s more, AIMP has the most dynamic designer community for a music player, with hundreds of beautiful skins available for download that can completely change the look of the program.

4. Audacious

Audacious is an open-source lightweight audio player that provides everything from adding and managing music libraries to advanced playback support. It displays playback controls at the top and a horizontal playback status bar at the bottom showing what’s playing, album screen, and music spectrum. Its powerful search function allows you to find the track you need instantly.

Audacious supports music files such as FLAC, WMA, MP3, and WAV. additionally, it also allows adding various plug-ins to extend its features. Such as advanced playlists support, removing duplicate tracks, shuffle, cross-fade, and tag editor.

5. MusicBee

MusicBee offers rich features in managing music and customizability while remaining lightweight. It offers advanced tagging, media management, and syncing options, and updates smart playlists based on custom filters.

Its advanced options allow you to adjust the audio with a 10-band equalizer. You can customize the player with different skins. While syncing music to another device, it can even convert audio formats if the target device does not support certain formats.

Once you have specified folders, MusicBee monitors changes to disk files and automatically adjusts your music library. It also provides the ability to import libraries from iTunes and Windows Media Player. The only downside is that the MP3 and AAC encoders need to be installed separately due to licensing issues.

6. iTunes

Even if you don’t use any Apple product, iTunes is still a good music player for Windows. iTunes automatically manages and organizes your music library, filters your digital music collection based on metadata such as album titles and genres.

It can help you find all duplicate tracks, but you need to manually remove duplicates from iTunes. iTunes can play a variety of audio formats, including AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, and WAV. However, iTunes does not support FLAC. 

7. MediaMonkey

I save my favorite to the last. MediaMonkey offers a lot of impressive features. With it, you can manage unlimited music, podcasts, audiobooks, or music videos whether they are on a hard drive, a network, or a cloud drive.  

Besides local playback, MediaMonkey enables you to cast music on your TV, stereo over UPnP/DLNA, or Bluetooth devices. It also allows you to tag convert audio format for better compatibility and sync your music library with iPhone or Android devices.

Other features like auto-tag, duplicate removal, report generation, and CD recorder are all included. Additionally, you can also customize MediaMonkey with addons or skins.

However, MediaMonkey is not completely free. Some of the features are limited. Moreover, some features are only available in the paid version such as advanced search, automatic media library organization, instant conversion, and smart playlists.

Conclusion

Surely, I haven’t covered all good music players for PC in this post, such as VLC, Winamp. Recently, I have discovered a new open-source music player called Harmonid that looks promising, but some key features are to be added. 

All these listed are based on my preference. Hopefully, you can find one that fits your needs here. If you know a better one, be sure to share it in the comments. If you have questions regarding these music players, feel free to ask. I am quite active in the comments.