Nemp Music Player for Windows

Nemp is an open source music player for Microsoft Windows PCs with a rich feature set that runs on very old versions of Windows as well as all supported versions of the operating system.

Nemp, which stands for Noch Ein MP3 Player (Yet Another MP3 Player), is offered as a portable program. You can run the music player without installation, for instance on a USB Drive that stores your music collection.

The player runs a wizard on first start that you may use to define important settings that include configuration of automatic updates, whether the player is allowed to modify the metadata of audio files, download cover art from Last.fm, or if it may adjust the rating and play counter of music files automatically.

You can skip the wizard and load it with a click on Settings > Wizard.

Nemp

Nemp's interface is dark but you can switch to a light theme with a click on Settings > Skins > Windows default, or by downloading available skins to integrate them.

The player uses different panes to display information. There is a pane for the album browser, playback controls, playlists, and the selected library folder.

There is a lot going on even with a blank media library and playlist. First thing you may want to do is add music to the media library. You can drag & drop audio files or folders to the media library pane to have them scanned and added, or use the Media Library menu to initiate a scan.

Nemp may monitor folders that you add for new music to add new files to the library automatically; handy.

The music player supports audio files with the following extension: mp3, ogg, wav, wma, ogg, flac, ape, aac, m4a, mp4, mp2, mp1, aiff, mo3, it, xm, s3m, mtm, mod, umx, fla, oga, midi, mid, rmi, kar, mac, wv, mpc, mp+, mpp, ofr, ofs, tta, and cda (CD-Audio), and the playlist formats m3u, m3u8, pls, asx, wax and cue.

Cover art is downloaded from Last.fm if you have selected that option and if no cover art is available. The player supports all popular audio formats and ID3v1, ID3v2, Ogg Vorbis comments, Flac metablocks and Apev2 tags that it displays and that you may edit.

The default media library view displays covers but you can switch to a list view or tag cloud view instead.

List view divides the music into artists and albums; it is the best view mode if you want an overview of the entire library.

A click on an album populates the song list automatically. It lists artist names, album and song titles, play duration, genre and other information.

Individual songs, albums and tags can be added to playlists. This works like in other players but you may find some of the provided options useful. You can play individual songs that are not on the playlist without changing the playlist, use headphone mode to play a song on a secondary audio card to preview it, and use various playing and enqueuing options.

The position of the playback controls may require some getting used to if you keep the default interface. You find the controls in the middle of the interface. Nemp displays the cover art by default but you may switch to lyrics, the equalizer, effects or headphone view mode instead.

Other features of interest

Nemp supports lots of features, some big some small.

1. You can run a web server to control Nemp using any device with a web browser, e.g. your smartphone.
2. Birthday Mode to play a song at a specific time.
3. Play jingles at the same time as the main song.
4. Webradio support is built-in and you may record mp3 web radio.
5. Last.fm users may use scrobbling.
6. View detailed information (tags and other), and edit some.
7. Nemp supports unicode.
8. Configure Sleep Mode to change the power state of the PC after a selected time.

Closing Words

Nemp is a powerful music player that comes with all the bells and whistles that you'd expect and some that may come as a surprise.

The player used less than 30 Megabytes of memory and barely any CPU while it was used to playback local audio files and web radio streams.

All in all a well designed player that is updated regularly.

Now You: Which music player do you use?