The best budget MP3 players are compact and have a long battery life. Best for Lossless Audio: Berennis Bluetooth MP3 Player at Amazon. Best known for premium iPhones and Macs, Apple isn't usually a name associated with 'budget'.
Still, a great number of music files and audio files are saved in MP3 format. MP3 is one of the most popular music file format by far. A good MP3 music player would make MP3 music enjoyment more enjoyable. Then, what is the best MP3 player? By searching online, you could get multiple best MP3 player software options, even free MP3 players. To save your time and make it more convenient, we’ve collected some of the best MP3 players for you. These 5 best MP3 players are all free MP3 music player software apps. What’s more, you could get some extended tips and solutions on how to get MP3 music for free here.
Part 1: 5 Best Free MP3 Players
Among the below 5 best free MP3 players, some of these top MP3 players are pure MP3 player software apps that allow you to play back MP3 music files, while some others are combinations of MP3 music player and MP3 music file manager. You could choose the one that meets your needs most.
No.1 Best MP3 Player – Leawo Free Blu-ray Player
Leawo Free Blu-ray Player is an all-inclusive media player combo. It acts far more than a single free Blu-ray player app, but free DVD player, free HD video player (up to 4K video supported), free ISO image file player and free audio player. As a free audio player, Leawo Free Blu-ray Player supports to play MP3 music and other audio files without any quality loss. With the support of various advanced audio decoding technologies like Dolby, DTS, AAC, TrueHD, DTS-HD, etc., Leawo Free Blu-ray Player delivers cinema-like audio experience with your home theatre system. The most exciting point is that it’s a free Blu-ray disc player, which means you could freely play any Blu-ray/DVD discs with it, regardless of disc protection and region restriction. It has both Windows and Mac versions.
No.2 Best MP3 Player – iTunes
iTunes is the best way to organize and enjoy the music, and movies you already have — and shop for the ones you want to get. You can even tune in to Beats radio, presented by Zane Lowe and a team of acclaimed DJs. Enjoy all the entertainment iTunes has to offer on your Mac and PC.
iTunes is the place to enjoy and expand your love of music. It’s where you organize and listen to the tracks you’ve collected. It’s where your Apple Music membership helps you explore artists, albums, and genres you never knew you’d love. And it’s where you can buy new songs from the 43 million tracks in the iTunes Store to build a personal music library filled with endless listening experiences. It’s all just a tap away.
No.3 Best MP3 Player – Winamp
For many of us, Winamp is the only music player worth mentioning: it’s been around since the earliest days of digital music, and while various ownership issues mean development has been halted for a while as lawyers fight each other, it remains a fantastic and very flexible music player.
In addition to supporting every audio format you can possibly imagine, Winamp supports skins to change its appearance and plugins that add new features – equalisers, audio processors, visualisations and more. As its slogan goes, 'it really whips the llama’s ass'.
No. 4 Best MP3 Player – MediaMonkey
MediaMonkey is the media manager for serious collectors. It catalogs audio and video files, whether they’re located on a hard drive or network, dividing them into different ‘collections’ (e.g. contemporary, classical music, audiobooks, home movies, tv, videos). It looks up and tags Album Art and data via Freedb and the web, includes an automatic renamer to rename and organize files, and a playlist manager to arrange your mixes. It includes a CD ripper, podcast manager, and downloader to build your library, along with a CD/DVD Burner, UPnP / DLNA server, and sync manager to share it. With built-in conversion functionality, it syncs with almost any device including Android, iPhone, iPod, and other devices, as well as a variety of televisions and DVD players (via DLNA). Its player automatically adjusts volume levels and supports a Party mode that locks the UI for use at public events. Most importantly, it supports hundreds of scripts, plug-ins and visualizations to further customize it to meet your needs. Supports MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC, MPC, WAV, CDs, M3U, PLS, AVI, MP4, WMV.
No.5 Best MP3 Player – VLC Media Player
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. Features includes simple, fast and powerful media player, plays everything: Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices and Streams, and plays most codecs with no codec packs needed: MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, and MP3.
Part 2: How to Get MP3 Music for Free
There are multiple ways in which you could get MP3 music. You could download and convert music video and save as MP3 music files, purchase MP3 music from iTunes and other music libraries, rip CD to MP3 music with CD ripping software, etc. Here I would like to introduce you the most effect solution to help you get MP3 music file for free. That’s to make use of Leawo Music Recorder.
Leawo Music Recorder is the best audio recording software ever for music lovers to record any audio and music on Windows OS. It could act as streaming audio recorder to record Mic audio and other built-in input audio stream. Meanwhile, it could also perform as a computer audio recorder to record computer audio files in local music library. What’s more, it is also an online audio recorder that could record audio of various online music sources like YouTube, AOL Music, Last.fm, etc. As professional music recording software, its built-in recording Task Scheduler allows music lovers to record music via preset starting time and duration. Based on powerful online music library, Leawo Music Recorder could automatically download and add music tags like album, album cover, artist and song name to the recordings. Not only a music recording software program, it is a music manager as well. It allows people to create, edit and delete playlists for recordings, edit recorded music file info, apply recordings to iTunes, etc.
If you want to get music into MP3 format for free, please visit How to get MP3 music with Leawo Music Recorder for detail.
Devices and Mac OS X version
VLC media player requires Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later. It runs on any 64bit Intel-based Mac. Previous devices are supported by older releases.
Note that the first generation of Intel-based Macs equipped with Core Solo or Core Duo processors is no longer supported. Please use version 2.0.10 linked below.
Web browser plugin for Mac OS X
Support for NPAPI plugins was removed from all modern web browsers, so VLC's plugin is no longer maintained. The last version is 3.0.4 and can be found here. It will not receive any further updates.
Older versions of Mac OS X and VLC media player
We provide older releases for users who wish to deploy our software on legacy releases of Mac OS X. You can find recommendations for the respective operating system version below. Note that support ended for all releases listed below and hence they won't receive any further updates.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Use VLC 2.2.8. Get it here.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Use VLC 2.0.10. Get it for PowerPC or 32bit Intel.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later is required
Use VLC 0.9.10. Get it for PowerPC or Intel.
Mac OS X 10.3 Panther
QuickTime 6.5.2 or later is requiredArcsoft showbiz for mac.
Use VLC 0.8.6i. Get it for PowerPC.
Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar
Use VLC 0.8.4a. Get it for PowerPC.
Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah and 10.1 Puma
Use VLC 0.7.0. Get it for PowerPC.