What is a simple folder music player for Windows?

Question

I am looking for a free and simple music player for windows that has the following features:

• It is either GUI or command line interface
• I can select a folder with music files that the player is playing
• It should play the files in order or randomly
• I do not care about Album or Artist information at all.

There is "Windows Media Player" but this app has many features I am not interested in (Burn, Sync, Playlists, too much confusion on the GUI, there is no "Open" menu, i.e. there is no menu at all)...

I already tried:

• Windows Media Player
• Folder Player: UI seems to be broken, no shuffle
• mplayer: unable to install

On my other computer (Mac) I always used mplayer which worked perfectly.

Answer 1

You can try Quod Libet. You can play folders or even set up playlists.

It is open source, and runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS. I have used it on Windows for a few years now.

It is typically updated say once a year or more, but development is ongoing via github.

Answer 2

Winamp is a Windows application aimed at playing music and other audio files. The program's powerful media library allows you to navigate through large databases at lightning speed, create playlists and, of course, listen to music. Winamp is developed exclusively for Microsoft Windows and is officially compatible with Windows 8 and Windows 10, but older versions of Windows can still run the current Winamp version.

Answer 3

There are many simple players, but AIMP would be my recommendation. You can use "classic" interface to have a very simple UI, then you can just click "+" to add a folder or drag & drop into it. It also has lot of options and extensibility (plugins, themes) to suit it for your needs.