Kerkia

Background

A music player obviously plays music on your computer, something you can do with the basic functionalities the Windows Media Player already provides. That being said, music players can be a lot more than just players and they typically are also organizers, provide sync feature (think iPod), provides lyrics support, play radio, play from various web services, import/export files, manage playlists, record and convert, etc.

Recommendation

Our top recommendation is the late comer SongBird. We love the user interface and customizability, and appreciate its browser support and ability to leverage extensions, like other products from Mozilla. The tool is very complete and the roadmap quite appealing with CD ripping and video support coming soon. Like other Mozilla products, it is also very easy to maintain up-to-date.

There are many nice alternatives such as Jaangle, Foobar2000, Winamp, Quintessential Media Player, etc. And although those are all good and we prefer SongBird, we’d like to recommend MediaMonkey as well. We like the richness of its feature set, its strong support for syncing music with various devices including iPhone and iPod, its ability to convert formats and burn to discs, as well as its skin, look, and feature customizability. Its GUI can seem overwhelming however.

Web links

Songbird

Web site: http://getsongbird.com/

Download: http://getsongbird.com/

MediaMonkey

Web site: http://www.mediamonkey.com/

Download: http://www.mediamonkey.com/download/