Still, there are plenty of high-quality alternatives for Windows that might suit you better. In fact, if you need to play music or movies, you’re spoilt for choice when picking software. The Play queue link will show you the audio and video files coming up next, while you can use the Playlists tab to create customized lists of files for playback. At least for now, the Windows 11 Media Player doesn’t incorporate any streaming services—everything you play has to be stored locally on your computer. Windows Media Player comes with Windows. VLC Media Player isn’t complicated or difficult to use though—far from it. You can simply drag files on the app to open them, and you’ll have support for building playlists, streaming media across a local network, and even loading up audio and video streams hosted on the web. Where iTunes has always excelled at is music library management. The app is perfect if you have a large digital music collection, and few other programs get close to it in terms of arranging your albums, artists and tracks out in an easy, intuitive way. VLC Media Player is free to download. Here you’ll also find support for videos, and if you want, you can buy digital content directly from Apple. You can also sign up for a $10-a-month Apple Music subscription, which will not affect your local library, since the program will seamlessly integrate the tracks on your PC with the ones in the cloud. The app will make short work of organizing the music and movies sprawled across your hard drive, and will import any missing metadata from your files (like artist names or the years songs were published) from the internet. If you want to know more about the artists you’re listening to, MediaMonkey also gives you a direct link to their Wikipedia pages. The software supports podcasts as well, and can even stream media around your home to compatible devices (like other computers) across your local Wi-Fi network. Overall, iTunes for Windows is a pretty complete package, even if it’s a little outdated compared with the Mac version. iTunes is free to download. This is all a bonus to the main functionality, which is playing your local audio and video files—and MediaMonkey does that very well indeed. As you spend more time with the software you’ll notice plenty of neat touches, including the audio equalizer and the sleep timer, which you can use to drift off to your tunes. MediaMonkey is free to download. Extra features and updates start at $25. There are several advanced features included if you dig around for them, including an audio and video effects panel that lets you adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, color, and audio frequencies. You’ll also find the option to set your own bookmarks in videos, which you might want to use for going back through your favorite content. Potplayer is free to download.
