Let’s call the second group ‘audiophiles’ – those who love to listen. If you’re one of them you will turn your machine into an audio library containing not only the music itself but also information about the artists, the music, displaying song texts and art covers, allowing you to sort by albums, genre, artist, and year.

You will want to generate playlists for different moods, download music, and synchronize your external MP3-deviceses according to those lists, burn CDs or DVDs. Of course you also want to play a great variety of music formats like MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, APE and the like without too much fiddling with the download of additional codecs.

What you need is a Juke Box. A program well balanced in functionality and usability, ready to use out of the box. Here are the best desktop media players we found. All of them are licensed as Open Source, which we find highly recommendable when dealing with music.

All come with a range of preconfigured net radios – an extra less valuable as we could not find a streaming option.