music

Nothing cheers someone up like good music, but when you are a music aficionado you tend to be picky about how you listen to your music. You buy yourself a good pair of headphones, continuously try to make sure the genre you are fond of is updated in your library, add a good set of speakers and so on.

It can be such a holistic process to go through all the nitty-gritties to eventually get the sound just about right. While we often splurge on buying ourselves the best of the gadgets our budget can afford, we tend to forget one of the basic and pertinent aspects of listening to good music -- the software we use to listen to the music. A good music player enhances our entire experience and is a key factor to enjoying what we love to groove with.

Here are a few music players for your desktop that heighten your listening experience and also help in curating them exactly as you would like it.

Foobar 2000

This player is for the people who believe in the minimal UI but maximum flexibility model. This is a no-nonsense music player that may appear somewhat lacking in the first approach but once you start using it, you can't help but admire the ease with which it handles your listening experience. Foobar 2000 is one of the most customizable, extensible and feature laden music player out there which lets you also avail frequency meter, spectrum meter, and album & artist view modules with its core UI. It is also adaptable to ripping from Audio CDs, and can even read ZIP and RAR archives along with the flexibility to play all the major formats like MP3, FLAC, WMA, AAC, WAV, OGG and others.

Clementine

What Clementine can do reads like a dream and the player acts like one too. It's a one-stop powerhouse to get all your music needs sorted and will never give you a reason to grumble. Along with serving as a music player that can seamlessly play all the audio formats, this music player ups the benchmark by letting you listen to internet radio from Spotify, Grooveshark, SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo, SKY.fm, Digitally Imported, JAZZRADIO.com, Soundcloud, Icecast and Subsonic servers and also Search and play songs you've uploaded to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. With this music player, wherever you are, good music follows.

AIMP

Are you one who always fiddles around with your tech to make sure that they are up to date and are always running on their optimum use? Well AIMP is a player that with continuous updates keeps on incorporating new elements for you to tinker with and give your music experience a boost. The player processes its audio in 32-bit for crystal-clear sound making sure that you are not left bereft of fulfilling experience. Along with a plethora of plug-ins to make it more feature laden it also lets you change the format of the music you are listening to. One other thing that really makes this music player tick is the fact that you can go to sleep listening to your favorite music and set the timer to switch off the computer after a certain period of time.

MediaMonkey

I admit using this software for the first time can be a little bit overwhelming, it is much like a braggart, hitting you all at once with so many features that you don't know what to do with all at once. Once you have eased in, it is a different story for you all together. It continuously keeps on scanning the library folders for any changes, and updates the media collection in a jiffy, so bye-bye to hearing a non executable notification in case you want to play something and it shows the thumbnail but the file is not there. One of the features that make MediaMonkey a god player is the fact that it can sync to a variety of iOS and Android devices seamlessly. It can also handle some video formats such as MP4 and AVI.