Music software that can play multiple local music files simultaneously, and can be controlled with hot keys

Question

I am looking for software that can play locally stored music files (e.g. ogg, wav, mp3 etc). I am searching for something that is able to play two or more files at the same time, e.g. a file of background ambience and a file with a song, over one another, with volume controls for each track.

The software also must be able to loop a track.

I would also love to be able to start and stop music files with hotkeys - e.g. pressing [a] makes foo.mp3 start to play, pressing [b] plays bar.wav, etc. This is not absolute crucial, but it would be really, really nice to have.

Those features are the main part. What comes next is basically an addition:

Furthermore, I would be interested in any kind of option that allows me to stream the music to a few friends. I am having a hard time coming up with results for this functionality, because everybody on the internet wants to have their streaming service (Spotify and similar) to their devices, however, I am looking for an option to set up my own stream of locally hosted music that can be received by somebody else over the internet. I am totally willing to jump through a few hoops, install or compile a self-hosted server of some kind, I just haven't found a solution for this yet.

For background: I intend to use this for audio layers for a pen&paper roleplaying campaign. I don't plan to do any podcasting or music streaming to a public audience, it is just a group of 4 friends.

Thank you, everyone!

Answer 1

Most media players can run multiple instances with independent controls. For VLC, for example, just remove the checkmark from Allow only one instance.

That said, you might need to "raise" the correct instance (bring focus to that instance) for keyboard shortcuts to take effect. Use AltTab to select an instance, then apply the keyboard shortcut.

VLC also has a streaming feature, enabling you to send to other network locations.