Windows Media Player (WMP) 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.
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.
Nero Multimedia Suite is a software suite for Microsoft Windows that is developed and marketed by Nero AG. Version 2017 of this product was released in October 2016.
MusicMatch Jukebox was an audio player made by San Diego-based MusicMatch, Inc. It contained features commonly found in jukebox software such as the ability to manage digital audio files and playlists, audio file conversion, an online music store, Internet radio, music CD playback and ripping software and managing media on portable media players.
MusicMatch Jukebox was bundled with the Apple iPod as its music manager until the introduction of iTunes for Windows in 2003. In September 2004, Yahoo! announced the acquisition of MusicMatch Inc. for a reported price of $160 million. Following the acquisition, the application was rebranded Y! Music Musicmatch Jukebox. On August 31, 2007, Yahoo! discontinued MusicMatch services in an effort to move users to its own music services.
RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3, MP4, QuickTime File Format, Windows Media format, and the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems; Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian versions have been released.
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.
Kodi is a free and open-source media player software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It allows users to play and view most streaming media, such as videos, music, podcasts, and videos from the Internet, as well as all common digital media files from local and network storage media.
Amarok is a free and open-source music player, available for Unix-like, Windows, and macOS systems. Although Amarok is part of the KDE project, 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.
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.
Front Row is a discontinued media center software application for Apple's Macintosh computers and Apple TV for navigating and viewing video, photos, podcasts and music from a computer, optical disc or the Internet through a 10-foot user interface. The software relies on iTunes and iPhoto and is controlled by an Apple Remote or the keyboard function keys. The first version was released in October 2005, with two major revisions since. Front Row was removed and discontinued in Mac OS X 10.7.
Banshee is 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.
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.
iTunes Remote is a software application developed by Apple Inc. for iOS devices that allows for remote control of Apple TV or iTunes library in an area with Wi-Fi connectivity using the proprietary Digital Audio Control Protocol (DACP). It is currently available as a free download from the App Store for iOS devices such as iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Apple Watch.
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 1998, that offers playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats.
Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library. Ex Falso is the stand-alone tag-editing app based on the same code and libraries.
DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Linux, Android and other Unix-like operating systems. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android.
