Navidrome is written in Go and released under GPL v3. It opens a Subsonic interface so a hundred and two existing clients connect, adds transcoding, several libraries and plug-ins, and the current release is 0.64.2.

A self-hosted open media server that files films, series and music into a library for playback on many devices, supports server-side transcoding and plugins, and can give each person in the household their own account; the current release is 12.2.

An open media centre for the living room that scans local films and music into one library with artwork and descriptions, designed for a remote control on the sofa, and extended through community add-ons; the current stable release is 21.3 Omega.

mpv is a free open source cross-platform media player built around the command line, with a deliberately minimal interface and video output covering colour management, interpolation and HDR. Version 0.41.0 makes gpu-next the default.

Winamp turned a folder of MP3 files into a show: skins, visualisations and a playlist you could drag anywhere. The brand is back, the desktop player still gets updates, and it is still remarkably light.

Anyone still collecting local music in the streaming era cares about two things, sound quality and order. Strawberry plays lossless files without complaint and organises a library by album, artist, genre and year, however many thousands of records it holds.

A local collection usually ends as a folder with a thousand songs and tags in ruins. MusicBee fixes that first and plays second: automatic tag and cover matching, duplicate detection, then a library sorted by album, genre and decade, with smart playlists that keep themselves current.

KMPlayer keeps every decoder inside the box: rare formats open without extra packs, subtitles are matched automatically, network streams and mounted drives work as a library, and the same habits carry across desktop and phone.

IINA wraps the mpv engine in a native macOS interface, so awkward containers and high bitrate 4K files open without codec packs while dark mode, picture in picture and trackpad gestures still work as expected.

Subtitle Edit is a free, open-source subtitle editor that has been maintained since 2001, now cross-platform, with Whisper transcription and OCR for burned-in text.

AIMP reaches its twentieth year in 2026. A small team, a plain interface and a deep audio engine: equaliser presets that follow each output device, ReplayGain, BPM detection, cue sheets, bulk tag editing and a built-in converter. The stable 5.40 build still runs on Windows, and the next major version arrives with native Linux and ARM support.

XMedia Recode converts between containers and codecs, ships presets for phones and players, and can hand encoding to the graphics card when one is available.

An open-source utility that detects speech in a video audio track and shifts a mismatched subtitle file back into place, correcting frame rate drift as well, usable from the command line or in a browser page.

A free video player for Android from a team known for a video editing tool: the usual container formats open without conversion, high resolutions decode smoothly, subtitles are fetched and styled, private clips sit behind a password, and playback continues in a floating window or in the background.

A media player developed for more than twenty years by a Korean portable audio company, offering an effects chain that originated in recording studios, support for nearly every audio format, and built-in disc burning, recording, tag editing and format conversion, now free of charge.