Are you looking for a good, interesting free audio player?, or maybe you’re interested in checking out audio players that are built around an interesting feature or concept? Either way, you should check out some of the audio players featured below.
The list of titles featured here: GOM Audio Player, Tomahawk, Meson Player, Winyl, and Resonic. All are FREE.
To make this post short and sweet, I will list THREE (3) points of interest for each player, that can summarize why it may be interesting to you at a single glance.
1. GOM Audio Player: a nice overall player with a good set of features
- Light on resources, but feature rich
- Can be controlled remotely from your phone via an iOS/Android app
- Plays internet radio
I like this one, and feel like I can recommend it without reservations.
2. Tomahawk: a web-connected multiplatform desktop player
- Connects to other Tomahawk users, Twitter, your friends on Google Talk, Jabber.
- Connects to your favorite online music sharing sites (Ex.fm, SoundCloud, Last.FM, Jamendo, etc.) Unfortunately, for some big names it requires a paid account (Spotify, Grooveshark, and others). You can search for your favorite track or artist across all of these at once, and play online music from your desktop.
- Lets you create playstations (i.e. similar to such and such artist or band)
Overall very nice. If you like this check out previously mentioned ‘Clementine Music Player‘ which is very similar. My only criticism is that tracks from online music services frequently inexplicably will refuse to play.
3. Meson Player: a music player without an interface
- Meson Player lives in the system tray menu, and displays the names of tracks as notifications when they start playing. You can right click a folder and play it via the context menu.
- Simple and lightweight.
- It can be controlled via hotkeys – mainly on the numpad – as well as multimedia keys if your keyboard has them.
This is a multiplatform project (Windows, Mac, Linux) and overall a great concept. My only gripe with it is that I have a laptop and therefore no numpad and no multimedia keys. There is a settings.ini file template to configure the program but it does not seem to support editing hotkeys. [Thanks reader Panzer for the tip about this one].
4. Winyl: simple media library player
- Displays your entire media library in a simple view that is nonetheless very practical (and visually appealing)
- Extremely fast: can handle (and search) very large libraries easily
- Small interface nonetheless contains a ton of features, such as smart playlists, internet radio, equalizer, system tray notifications, etc.
This player is one of my favorite on this list, because I have a large music library, and because it handles music libraries in such a great yet simple way.
5. Resonic: fast audio player built around a big waveform view
- Designed around the concept of waveform visualization (there are a number of visualizations to scroll through).
- Designed to play audio files within directories.
- Designed to be extremely fast, simple, and reliable.
There are other audio players out there with a ton more bells and whistles, but this program is strangely appealing, is all I have to say about it.
Do you have any others that you want to add to the list? Share them in the comments section.
