[X] My Assistant

do you use them or not ? if yes, what is it ?

Used MusicBee for years, never had issues with it

on PC Foobar2000 and for out and about FiiO X5 1st Gen with 2X 512GB microSD cards.

Auxio on phone, mpv on PC. Enough for my needs.

strawberry music player

On my computers: mplayer or occasionally mpv instead.
qmmp once in a great while.

Portable: Rockbox on an ipod classic

Good old trusty foobar2k. Been using substreamer on my phone since it's the only subsonic client that supports directory structure for my huge music library. Either that or the builtin webplayer from navidrome but navidrome sucks ass royally for a server that has more than a few music tracks.

I already got mpv installed for video, no reason not to use it for music as well.

Windows Media Player, the classic one. For mobile it's Phonograph.

This post has been edited by StrongARM: Feb 18 2025, 05:33

foobar2000

I use mpv. It's simple and extensible and I use it to play almost everything including manga by the way.

AIMP on Phone. On PC - foobar

foobar2000, FLAC on my PC and Opus 128 on my phone.

Spotify

Going to be blunt, not a huge fan of streaming from popular providers; i.e. Spotify, Youtube Music, Amazon Music, etc.

I'm a huge self-hosted guy, so I run the full *arr stack, and of course, indulge with Plex/Plexamp.

It supports literally everything, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, (yes even Linux), works in my car via Carplay, and I can stream it to my Airplay and Chromecast devices from any above-mentioned client.

I swear I'm not a shill, but I've been using it for 5+ years and haven't even thought once about switching to anything else.

I own all of my music in FLAC 44/16 or better format (except the 'ol faithful Monstercat rips from the "Monstercat Gold" era, I dumped their entire library on one $4.99 subscription in MP3 320kbps and cancelled lol)

Conclusion / TL;DR: I selfhost my own shit, and use Plex. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/cool2.gif)

The best players I've tried on Windows so far: Winamp, Foobar2000, and VLC

In the end, I decided to use VLC Media Player as my default player cuz, in addition to auto downloading album covers, it also has advanced media info, statistics and can play almost anything you put in, including MIDI files and chiptunes natively (.xm, .mod, .sid, .it, etc.)

For mobile and local files, Vanilla Music, a lightweight app that lets you make an instant playlist from any folder

For audio streaming, Spotify and Youtube Music

I like IINA on mac. Built on mpv and supports more formats than the regular music app, like FLAC.
it also doubles as a video player

Anyone know a super ultra light minimalist music player that would run on Android 4?

MPV (the PC version) is where I draw the line. Anything heavier will be assumed to be bloated crap with a bunch of useless features I do not need. Ever went to the terminal and typed "mpv musicFile.flac" or "mpv musicDir/" ??? If you do that, assuming the file was not created by someone stupid and has the CD cover attached, mpv will simply play the song. No visualizations. No nothing. Fucking perfect.

Why do you care about CD covers if you are playing from terminal anyway?

If you use the current best media player out there, MPV, if the audio file has attached pictures, unless you specify --no-audio-display, it will open a window and show the picture. So, not only it is a waste of disk space, but it also requires me to type more. Because of that, I always remove those stupid things from the audio files.

And that is why I care (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)