Windows Media Player is the first media player and media library application that Microsoft developed to play audio and video on personal computers. It has been a component of the Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows 9x, Windows NT, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile. Microsoft also released editions of Windows Media Player for classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Solaris, but has since discontinued them.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2, it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.
Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems.
Amarok is a free and open-source music player for Linux, macOS, Windows, and other Unix-like operating systems. Amarok is part of the KDE project, but it is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle. Amarok is released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.
M3U is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. One common use of the M3U file format is creating a single-entry playlist file pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and is often used in downloads from a website, for emailing, and for listening to Internet radio.
JRiver Media Center is a multimedia application that allows the user to play and organize various types of media on a computer running Windows, macOS, or Linux operating systems. Developed by JRiver, Inc., it is offered as shareware.
Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a free and open source music player server. It plays audio files, organizes playlists and maintains a music database. In order to interact with it, a client program is needed. The MPD distribution includes mpc, a simple command line client.
Banshee was a cross-platform open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it used the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players, including Apple's iPod, Android devices and Creative's ZEN players. Other features include Last.fm integration, album artwork fetching, smart playlists and podcast support. Banshee is released under the terms of the MIT License. Stable versions are available for many Linux distributions, as well as a beta preview for OS X and an alpha preview for Windows.
Audacious is a free and open-source audio player software with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible Unix-like operating systems, with limited support for Microsoft Windows. Audacious was the default audio player in Ubuntu Studio in 2011–12, and was the default music player in Lubuntu until October 2018, when it was replaced with VLC.
Cog is an open source audio player for macOS. The basic layout is a single-paned playlist interface with two retractable drawers, one for navigating the user's music folders and another for viewing audio file properties, like bitrate. Along with supporting most audio formats compatible with macOS's Core Audio API, Cog supports a wide array of other audio formats, along with their metadata, which are otherwise unsupported on macOS.
JUCE is an open-source cross-platform C++ application framework, used for the development of desktop and mobile applications. JUCE is used in particular for its GUI and plug-ins libraries. It is dual licensed under the GPLv3 and a commercial license.
Moodbar is a computer visualization used for navigating within a piece of music or any other recording on a digital audio track. This is done with a commonly horizontal bar that is divided into vertical stripes. Each stripe has a colour combination showing the "mood" within a short part of the audio track. The colour can depend on spectrum and/or rhythmic features of the part of the track. If the audio is a song then various parts of it as well as changes are differently coloured on the bar. If the audio is a speech or an interview then the moodbar displays different speaking segments in unique colour combinations.
Exaile is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. It was originally conceived to be similar in style and functions to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is written in Python and utilizes the GStreamer media framework.
The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.
JetAudio is a shareware media player application for Microsoft Windows and Android released in 1997 which offers playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats.
mpv is free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several operating systems, including Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows, along with having an Android port called mpv-android. It is cross-platform, running on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390x, x86/IA-32, x86-64, and some other by 3rd party.
The KDE Gear is a set of applications and supporting libraries that are developed by the KDE community, primarily used on Linux-based operating systems but mostly multiplatform, and released on a common release schedule.
