It can also plug into more social tools like Jabber and Hatchet, plus music charts like Billboard, iTunes, Metacritic, and more. It supports streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, Rhapsody, Tidal, Amazon Music, Google Play Music, OwnCloud, Subsonic, Jamendo, and Bandcamp. If you can’t decide between your local music library and streaming services, Tomahawk does a decent job of combining them all. Tomahawk: Combine Streaming and Social Into One Program If you’re really, really serious about your music, foobar2000 is an open sandbox for you to play in. You just need to be willing to put in the work.Īpart from that, foobar2000 is also popular with audiophiles for its plethora of advanced playback options and plugins. That’s how much customization foobar2000 offers. You’ll see countless screenshots that don’t even look like the same player. Basically, you’re building your own custom player from (almost) nothing.ĭon’t believe me? Look around the internet for threads of people showing off their foobar2000 setup. You can include features like auto-tagging or CD ripping as “optional features” during the installation, and foobar2000 has plugins for just about anything you could imagine.
And maybe that’s exactly what you want-but foobar2000 really excels when you start to customize it. You have full freedom to craft the look of the player just how you want with skins, different panel organization, and so on. When you first start it up, you’re given an extremely basic, lightweight interface (like the one shown above). foobar2000: Customize Your Music Player from the Ground UpĪre you a customization nut? Are MusicBee and MediaMonkey just not configurable enough for you? If you really want to tweak every single pixel of your music player’s interface, welcome to your new heaven: foobar2000.įoobar2000 is not for the faint of heart. But if you need iOS syncing, there’s no getting around it: MediaMonkey is your iTunes replacement. Some people may not need these features, but if you do, it can be annoying to pay for them-especially since MusicBee offers many of them for free. MediaMonkey Gold is $25 for the current version or $50 for a lifetime version. MediaMonkey has one main downside: some of its more advanced features (like smart playlists, automatic organization, or on-the-fly conversion while syncing) require a paid license. It even supports add-ons for extra functionality. It lets you move around interface elements to customize it just the way you want, and even has a few different skins (though the skinning community isn’t as active as it once was). Its tagging features are second to none, letting you auto-tag your music or meticulously fill out the metadata with its robust tag editor. It may be a little slower than MusicBee for normal-sized libraries, due to the style of database it uses, but if your library is enormous, it will excel when other players fail.
(You still need iTunes installed, but you never have to open it-MediaMonkey just needs the drivers that come with it.)Īpart from syncing, MediaMonkey excels at organizing the heck out of large, unweildy libraries. Why? Because MediaMonkey is one of the only music players that can sync your music to iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads. I use our second favorite pick, MediaMonkey, which is arguably more of a true iTunes replacement. MediaMonkey: Perfect for iOS Users and Super Large Librariesĭespite the glowing review above, I don’t actually use MusicBee myself. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with all the options on Windows, it’s hard to go wrong with MusicBee. Its forums and wiki are also great resources, and the developer is pretty active in helping people with problems. On top of all of that, it’s pretty fast, at least for small and medium sized libraries, and updated pretty frequently despite being a one-man operation.
It has native support for Groove Music and last.fm, can auto-tag your library, rip CDs, and will even appease audiophiles who require WASAPI support.
It can sync music to Android phones and other non-iOS devices, and convert tracks on-the-fly if they aren’t compatible with your player. It even supports some Winamp plugins, so you don’t have to give up those super-custom features you’ve come to rely on. It also has a very active skinning community, which means you can get it looking pretty snazzy without a lot of work. It has a familiar interface for iTunes converts, but you can move things around and customize the window to your liking, adding extra panes for lyrics, now playing, artist bios, and more. Think of MusicBee like a modern, lighter version of Winamp, without a lot of the cruft.