Windows 11's New Media Player Brings Big Improvements to Audio and Video (2024)

Windows 11's new Media Player plays both video and audio, and it replaces Groove entirely for the latter. If you're running Windows 11 and haven't seen the new Media Player app yet, hang tight. It's coming in an update. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to offer the Movies & TV app, which also plays video and services the movie and TV show content available in the Microsoft Store. These two apps aren't your only options for media players in Windows, and quite frankly, knowing which one you need can be confusing. Don't worry! We'll tell you here which apps you need for different purposes and then offer a deep look at the new Media Player app.

The new Media Player app arrived between the big annual Windows “feature updates”—those with names like 22H2. It’s a continuation of Microsoft’s one-time claim that Windows has become a service rather than a set version of software. I’m all for that. It also means that some users receive the update before others, so if you’re still seeing Groove, give it some time.

You won’t find Microsoft’s new Media Player listed among the apps in the Microsoft Store—it currently still appears as Groove there. Some sites have reported that you can get the new app by updating that store entry, but it appeared in my system as part of a standard Windows update.

Introducing Windows' Three (or Four) Media Players

Media players included in Windows have taken many forms over the years. The basic Windows Media Player has been around in one form or another since 1991. The Movies & TV app, also available in Windows 11, lets you watch videos stored locally or online as well as shows you can buy or rent in the Microsoft Store. Groove—which is being replaced—plays music stored locally or in the cloud. The tired-looking Windows Media Player that came with Windows 7 has been hanging around in Windows for more than a decade... and it's available in Windows 11, too.

In the new scheme of things, if you type “Groove” into the Windows search box, the new Media Player pops up, and if you type “Windows Media Player,” the ancient one presents itself. That’s right, Windows 11 includes three apps (four if you count Groove before it gets replaced) that play video files and two that play audio. The apps differ in how you’d use them, however.

The following table should help you sort out the several different overlapping media players in Windows.

I’d warn against ever using the old Windows Media Player in most cases. The interface has always been nonstandard and awkward. Note that none of these players can play standard DVDs or Blu-rays. For information on how to play those, read How to Play DVDs in Windows. But there’s a reason for Microsoft continuing to include the old player: It’s the only included app that can rip and burn CDs for those who still have a collection they want to digitize.

Let's take a deeper dive now into the new Media Player.

As mentioned, the new Media Player app is not in the Microsoft Store. The only way to get it is by updating Windows. Once it appears, Groove will be gone, and any playlists you had in that app will now show up in Media Player.

Welcome to the New Interface

The new Media Player app sports five mode buttons below a search box: Home, Music, Video, Play Queue, and Playlists. The Home page shows any recently played media. The buttons’ functions are fairly obvious, but you can expand them into menu options with the three-line hamburger menu at the top—if you widen the app’s window, these menus expand, too.

In the Home view, you can open specific media files as well as urls for streaming media. This works for both video streams (here’s an example) and audio streams. It’s not, however, for streaming YouTube or Vimeo videos (you can do that in CyberLink’s PowerDVD). See the Streaming Music and Radio section below for more on streaming audio in Media Player.

What Formats Does the New Media Player Support?

The new player supports all standard audio file formats—including lossless FLAC and open-source formats like Ogg Vorbis. I was also able to play both 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound samples.

How to Add Music to the Media Player

You don’t open sound files in the Music section, though you can in the Home section. Instead, here you tell the app which folders to watch (the Music folder makes the most sense) and any audio files in those folders appear in the Media Player interface. If you just want to play a specific music file that's not in a watched folder, you can find the music file using File Explorer and open it with Media Player.

Take Control of Your Music

As with any good music player, the new Windows Media Player gives you choices for how to music from your catalog and playlists, including shuffle, straight play through, and repeat.

A Speed controller lets you change the playback speed. An equalizer is for adjusting audio levels at different frequency ranges for both audio and video playbacks. I love that the equalizer can move neighboring sliders automatically to avoid sudden drop-offs. Even more useful are the equalizer’s presets, which optimize the sound for playback on laptop, headphones, car speakers, portable speakers, and to boost the bass. The laptop setting actually improved the sound for me. Note that the music stops momentarily when you adjust and close the equalizer.

You can skip back 10 seconds or forward 30 seconds using the on-screen buttons or Ctrl-left arrow and Ctrl-right arrow. I was surprised that the big Play button didn’t respond to tapping on my touch screen, however.

Right-clicking on a track in the playlist opens some options, such as setting the track to play next, adding it to your queue or a playlist (I'll explain how they're different in a moment), showing its properties or artist, and opening its metadata to edit it.

How Create Play Queues and Playlists

The Play queue is simply the list of tunes or videos lined up for playing next, you can add to this queue by right-clicking on any media entry, choosing Add to > Play queue.

Playlists are groups of tracks that you save and can play at any time. You create one simply by tapping the New Playlist button in the Playlist view that shows when you choose the bottom icon on the left. Add songs to playlist the same way you add them to your queue. You can select multiple songs to add in the Music library view, and you can add whole albums and artist sets from there, too.

What About the Album Art?

When you’re playing a song, tapping its album cover in the lower left changes the app display to a full image view with a picture supplied in the album. The program can retrieve album and artist images from online sources, just as most other music players do.

Get Minimal With Miniplayer Mode

Miniplayer mode tucks the app into a small box in the corner of your screen. You can resize this to a very small square showing nothing more than the artist image with pause, play, and skip buttons on hover. If you enlarge the Mini-player somewhat, you also see the square album cover art on the left. The small player is always on top of other windows, for always-available access to those controls.

Metadata, Exposed

The Properties view shows you all the metadata—title, album, year, track, length, artists, genre, as well as the the file format and bit rate. Note the example below is a lossless FLAC file, which sounds fantastic. Also note that the file lives in OneDrive, so you could access it from any internet-connected device.

Streaming Music and Radio in the New Windows

Not only can you create your own playlists in the app, but you can open online streaming playlists—which includes many internet radio streams. I tried it with SomaFM, which publishes .pls and .m3u file download links for its streams. It would be nifty if Microsoft included an internet radio-finding feature in the app, but I happened upon an excellent tool for finding such streams: The Radio Stream URL search engine.

Playing Video in Windows 11's New Media Player

As with audio, Media Player supports all major (and a bunch of minor) video formats and codecs (55 at present), including open source ones like MKV and OGV. The same note about adding folders rather than opening files holds true for video, though your video folders are separate from your audio folders.

I was able to play even an 8K video file shot on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra in the new app, while the old Windows Media Player said that it encountered an error when trying to play it. One limitation I ran into, however, was that the new Media Player was unable to render a 360-degree clip, which the Movies & TV app could do.

All the same controls mentioned above for audio also work for video: changing the speed, skipping ahead and back, the equalizer, viewing file properties, and making playlists and a play queue. The video player adds a couple of video-only features, however, including Zoom to Fill for removing letterboxing and closed caption support for videos that contain that data.

Like Movies & TV, Media Player lets you cast your playing media to a compatible device, and it works for both audio and video together. I tested it by sending music playing on my Surface Laptop 3 to a Roku Express media streamer. The app uses Windows 11’s built-in casting capabilities, so when you enable casting, anything on your PC screen appears on the screen you’re casting to. A separate bar appears at the top of the PC screen indicating that I was streaming to the Roku and offering to stop.

For more coverage of Microsoft’s latest and greatest desktop operating system, visit our Windows 11 series page, and be sure to check out our ever-growing list of the Top Windows 11 Tips.