MusicBee

I've tried multiple music players and this one is my favourite. I adore the interface as well as the last.fm integration. Not having to download the actual last.fm program is a huge plus.

The auto-dj function has to be my favourite though. It's very accurate and allows me to listen to music that I don't have in my library. Great way to find new artists.

It's full of features and a definite recommendation.

I am an audio podcast fan and tested Mediamonkey and Helium as free versions to see how they manage podcasts.

Helium has a very simple if not rachitic podcast functionality. Mediamonkey is very good but i sincerely hate Delphi coded apps and their clunky GUIs.

The biggest problem was : i'm french and these apps have problems with accented characters (replaced by symbols).

I tried MusicBee thanks to the enthusiastic comments here and wow, not only MusicBee is able to deal with these accented characters but the podcast functionality is also very complete. The program is able to retrieve episodes with their entire tags. It is the only one which detected the "genre" of my podcasts (news, social and so on).

MusicBee can also detect episodes you already have on your hard drive and put them in a tree called "unknown subscription". You can move them to one of your feeds by a simple "right click -> move podcast to". It is very convenient if you have archived episodes of a same feed which were downloaded by another app like iTunes or whatever.

Concerning the whole program iself, i don't think you can find a better option in the freeware league it even surpasses paid apps in certain aspects.

The tagging capabilities are legion, it is skinnable, it supports radio stations and podcasts. I recommend it.

It is what Songbird should have been in a sense.

PS : the user Pr1me said earlier that he didn't like the logo and the splash screen. Splash screen can be disabled in the options and the logo icon can be changed.

I was sold with this media player thanks to the built in Last.FM integration that helps me finally break free of the dependance on stand-alone players for music stats such as play count, favorites, etc. This means that I can, at any time, start from scratch with my media player or library location (due to pc re-build, or a catastrophic recovery etc.) and continue where I left off with all my play counts.

Unfortunately for me, its taken me over 9 years to find a product like this. Media monkey came close but was never reliable. I highly commend the authors of this program for building a light, effecient, yet feature loaded program. In that time, I have lost thousands of play counts and other stats... this is what I've been waiting for.

Pros: Syncs with Last.FM, built in automatic lyrics search, auto playlist generator.

I used it for some time, but now i found out how much you can do with the interface, really great program!

Add me as another MusicBee enthusiast. Lots of feature, good usability, A+.

All this alternatives listed here are not alternatives to MusicBee.
MusicBee doesn't have alternatives.

This is an incredible music player. It is much better than iTunes and keeps getting better every month with more functionality.

By now, it is very polished and bug-free and really worth exploring.