What software do you use on your desktop to listen to music?


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I use Groove on my desktop mostly. I have curated playlists depending on my mood. I'm a fan of Groove although the Android app is almost unusable.

 

For my library of yarr " other " yarr music albums I still use the good old WMP.

I use AIMP as well, but I don't really love it. It's got some weird issues that don't seem to be going anywhere. Like, if it's maximized, it'll hide when not focused. There's no way to stop this. "Don't maximize it" is literally the response from the developer. If you do, it enables docking mode which hides it, and it will slide down from the top of your screen if you mouse up there. It's weird behavior and it's weird that you can't disable it. Plus, while the library is cool, at times it seems counter-intuitive as well. Still, it's my player of choice right now.

 

On my portable SSD, I use AIMP Portable. It runs off a portable or cloud drive, and its database doesn't care if you change drive letters or whatever, I guess it's relative. Even though my SSD is 500GB, I only keep a small selection of my music on it, so any music library based player like AIMP or iTunes would have an advantage. (I use iTunes on my laptop because I have an iPhone and I need it somewhere. I wish there were a legit Portable iTunes I could carry on my SSD, but Apple needs its hooks in the Registry, and I won't corrupt my desktop with it.)

 

There's a new player/library on the horizon called Music Box Alpha. It's by the people behind the emulator frontend LaunchBox, and it's free to try with a 1,000 song limit, or $25 for a lifetime license (or $10 annually). These are introductory, half-price sales, with the lifetime license going up to $50 at some point. I'm sure y'all feel the same way I do about paying $50 or even $25 for a media player, though looking at it, I can see why some people might be going for it. There really isn't a good one, and these guys are saying "if you give us money, we will make a good one." And I guess some people believe in that. It's funny though, back in the day, we used to pay for all kinds of programs. Like file managers. You can still get Directory Opus, but my dad had it in the early 90s. Web browsers used to cost money, until Microsoft made Internet Explorer free and Netscape was forced to follow suit. There are still a lot of specialty programs that are free, like Photoshop and MS Office, and video editing tools, but most of us would scoff at paying for an audio player. Then again, maybe there's something to it after all. /shrug

  • 3 weeks later...
On 10/4/2017 at 9:45 AM, Jaybonaut said:

Kinda sounds like Groove is going away?

The music streaming service and store are closing by the end of this year, but you can continue to play local music and you can still manage music with the app after the closure.

 

I use iTunes for my personal music collection and Spotify for all my streaming needs.

  • 2 years later...

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