6 Best Music Players for Windows

Music players aren’t new or exciting. They weren’t invented alongside the iPhone, and they predate even Apple’s iPods. Even still, music players are essential to any smartphone or tablet. You need decent music players for Windows too.

Most music players for Windows have just a single job. These apps and programs let you enjoy the music that you already own. There’s no monthly fee involved. You don’t have to keep track of how many skips you’ve used in your head. There are no advertisements that suddenly take over your screen for a solid minute then grant you the right to listen to music for 30 minutes without any commercials.

Music players don’t care about whether you have access to a subscription music service or not. You don’t have to monitor how much data you consume or how many songs you’ve downloaded to listen to offline. Their single reason for being is to allow you to listen to the music that you already own. We’re talking MP3s that you’ve purchased from the Amazon Music Store or CDs that you’ve copied to your computer for car rides.

Why You Need Free Music Players

Everyone has music that they like to listen to. For years, the Apple iPod was at the center of digital music. You’d load one with your songs and buy more through a digital store like iTunes. The smartphone has replaced the iPod, which is great. Android and iOS both allow you to add music to them from wherever you purchased it. All the nuance that used to define digital music is gone. You don’t have to be wary of what types of music files you’ve purchased. All the major stores sell MP3 files.

The companies battling over which smartphone apps you use to play your music hope to extend that war to the other places that you listen from. That’s where the music players for Windows comes in. Many of today’s best apps for listening to music are offshoots of their mobile apps. Amazon Music for Windows offers the same experience that the mobile version does, albeit with an easy way to upload the songs you already own to Amazon’s servers.

You need music players for Windows because you are not always going to want to pay a subscription fee to access the services you enjoy today. If you have a large music collection of your own, music players for Windows are a better option for you than signing up for a service.

What Makes a Good Free Music Player?

The best music players all focus on your music. They don’t try to hide it behind a subscription service or add-on costs. The iTunes program that Apple makes for Windows has a store, but its primary focus is on playing back your content. It includes lots of tools for managing your library too. If you compare that to some of its contemporaries, it’s easy to see the difference. Spotify does a pretty terrible job of putting your music front-and-center, which is why it’s not among the best music players for Windows. It wants you to stream more, listen to ads and possibly subscribe for $9.99 a month.

The best music players for Windows have some tricks up their sleeves for providing a solid music listening experience. They all include information about your favorite artists. Some of them will let you know when those artists are holding a concert nearby. A few offer gapless playback and crossfading. These features allow songs to blend into one another without any awkward pauses or silence.

6 Best Free Music Players for Windows

• Plex
• Groove Music Player
• Amazon Music Player
• Windows Media Player
• iTunes
• VLC

Plex

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Available in lots of different forms, Plex Media Player is for the music and entertainment enthusiast that might want to setup a media server to stream to all their devices in the future. The base apps themselves – including the Windows apps – let you play a wide array of music files directly from your device. Read: 7 Exciting Apple TV Apps Coming at Launch If you should decide to get a more sophisticated setup in the future, there’s room for that too. Plex’s desktop app can make music, movies, photos and videos available to stream for other devices. Many store all their files on their PC, then stream them from that PC to their iPhones, iPads, Xbox Ones and Apple TVs. This allows them to have just a single place to manage their files while getting access to it wherever they are. Plex automatically pulls down information about your favorite artists. [ Download Plex for Free from the Windows Store ]

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