Bread Player is a buttery-smooth Windows 10 music player

By Richard Devine
published

This amazing Music player is ready for the future of Windows 10.

There are many music players for Windows, particularly PC, but there are none quite like Bread Player. Not just because of its bakery theme, either. This is free, incredibly designed, free, and packed with features. It's also on phones, too, which is awesome.

Did I also mention it's free?

From the developer:

Play songs, organize music, make playlists, tinker under-the-hood, style the UI or maybe just let the song play on loop! Enjoy your music the way you like without any distractions or ads because Bread Player is yours freely and personally.Free and open-source, Bread Player offers a better look and a better playback engine than Groove Music Player. Coming now with a 10-band Equalizer + PreAMP and Last.fm Scrobbling, Bread Player is ready to become your default player.Bread Player offers many options to customize the way you experience your music from 'Theming' to 'album art color adaptation' to adding 'favorites' and displaying your playback history.

We'll start with how it looks. Bread Player is designed with the next major update of Windows 10 and its accompanying Fluent Design Language in mind. Not only is this unlike any other music app right now with how it looks, it's easily the best looking of them all.

And that includes Groove Music.

Bread Player

That's the real kicker here. If you're not a Groove subscriber and you want something equally good looking yet simple to use, Bread Player is probably it. On a basic level, it's very similar to Groove in the way it organizes your music.You can break it all down by recently played, albums, songs, or artists, except at first use it'll take you a short time to figure out which bread-related menu is which!

Bread Player packs a breadbox full o' features

The features which stand it most apart though are the engine underneath and the included 10-band EQ and pre-amp. A software pre-amp isn't something particularly common, certainly not in Windows 10 music apps. It allows you to give up to 12db of amplification to your music right within the app.

One of the app's most powerful features, however, is its extensive list of keyboard shortcuts. There are 17 in total, allowing you to control essentially every aspect of music playback without touching your mouse.

Bread Player

Bread Player also supports lyrics for your songs within a full-screen playback mode that also offers up artist information. It's nice that you can open a music file directly from within Bread Player without needing to import an entire folder. It just opens up a File Explorer window, allowing you to pick the correct file.

There are so many good features it's hard to talk about them all without just going off on massive tangents. But if you like to change your lock screen with your now-playing tunes, have support for all the major file formats, and have Last.fm scrobbling, you're covered.

Bread Player is open-source, with a Github page listed right in the app description. The developers aren't kidding when they say it's free and personally yours. If you want to tinker around with it under the hood, that's fine. Go nuts. Or just listen to your favorite music in one of the best music players you'll find on any platform.

Download Bread Player on the Windows Store (opens in new tab)

Richard Devine
Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine

23 Comments
  • Crashes every time I run it with my pretty big collection
  • When EQ is off but you change it it still works and when you turn it on it doubles.
    Developer should fix all this errors before publishing into store
  • Everytime I try it, the amount of padding makes me uninstall it instantly.
  • Yeah, that's a pity but it looks like if they'll remove the titlebar soon and integrate the buttons in the app.
  • You're right. They made a lot of unused space. But uninstalling it doesn't help. Give your feedback.
  • Streaming my collection from OneDrive is the main reason I will keep using Groove. It's just so convenient. If this can read music through OneDrive's music folder, I'd be very willing to try it out.
  • Yep
  • Crashes every time it tries to load my library. Gets to around 1,200 songs, then the "Song(s) Loaded" banner starts to flicker and jump. Crashes shortly after that, every time. If it didn't crash, best guess is that it would take a couple of hours to load my collection (30k songs). Does it do that with each launch, or is this a one-time hit? Also, I don't get the whole "bread" thing. "Toast Collection", is that artists? albums? songs? Maybe spend more time making it solid and less time renaming terms the music industry has been standardized on for a while now.
  • Naming: I find the naming amusing. It is something one can get used to... it is fun, nothing that hurts. FLickering: Yes, if it is loading songs, it flickers on each song... but then it works. Also, after changing the themes, it hangs. I had to reset it from my setting. But in all, it passes. It's still an infant. Let's all give our feedback and things will improve. This is the first app I use apart from groove. Not as functional as groove, but that's organizational owned. 
  • I tested it first with just a few songs on Mobile and it was good but still played audio out the speaker even with headphones in. Looking at the Github they seemed to have fixed it. However trying to load my full collection (about 10,000 songs) it didn't load them. No indication it was working on it and my phone actually seemed to freeze up. So I haven't tried playing any songs yet with the update. I find it frustrating as well with the goofy names for things. I know I would have to get used to it, but it is just too far to the side of silly to use the odd naming convention. They seem to be working on it constantly so here's hoping the mobile version works correctly soon. Otherwise staying on Groove. I have not tried the desktop app as I don't play music as often there.
  • The whole "bread" thing is gimmicky. I'll stick with AIMP.
  • Tried it out. Apart from the issues previously mentioned, the songs it managed to load were doubled, with one playing and the other crashing the app. Would've loved the last.fm integration, but the bugs make this app unusable on my Lumia 950. Sticking with Groove.
  • Already installed it, facing all the mentioned issues. Totally not my kind of bread... (u_u). Uninstalled.
  • Well, I say kudos to them. The issues reported in other comments here show that it’s not that easy to get UWP apps to work flawlessly across devices, especially apps like media players that are somewhat hardware dependent.
    I happen to be the developer of another media player, which I haven’t published for mobile so far because of these challenges.
  • Reading all these comments with everybody having issues it seems developing UWP is very very difficult. Even MS their stock apps took 3 years to have enough features and don't crash on a regular basis. That is the problem with UWP apps, they appear in the store when they are still half baked (see what I did there lol)
  • It's not that difficult, but it's not as easy as some articles on UWP here portray. Coding for different form factors and - for some types of apps, like media players and video games - for different architectures require significant investment.
  • May be good UI but crshes on PC & restarted my mobile.
  • Nothing wrong with Groove, I'll stick to that.
  • I with the OP on this one. This app is brilliant.  Granted I've only used it a day but it has not crashed once. I like much of the development especially the EQ although we the presets could use some tweeking but overall, not a show stopper  The Pre-amp was a nice touch.  I can't wait to see where this goes from here. Its off to a really nice start. Good job devs and thanks OP for this post. Really nice find.
  • Edit: Bread crashed when I clicked to get to get the image to show up. Repeatable.  Clicked My Breads on the left shoulder. I had one track there.  Then I double clicked the icon and it gave the title and track list.  Then clicked the refresh button on top. CRASH! So I can't do that for now and hope the devs are working on updates. Not giving up on this one just yet.
  • Still a long way to go. Does not work with bluetooth headphones, at least in mobile devices.
    I liked it's potential but is not usefull for me as I need something that works with bluetooth headphones and with a good equalizer with bass boost.
  • I've tried it only for the last.fm integration (hope Groove will add it someday, then I'll be definitely sold!). I must say it's not working very well, crashes and gives a feel of clunkiness, but the worst is I somehow noticed that the rendering of the music is not very good. I can hear artifacts which I don't hear with Groove, even with the EQ off. It's like the mp3s were played at a lower quality. I also find the choice to use all those "bakery" terms quite nonsense and annoying... It's promising, bust still falling short of expectations.
  • Naming: I find the naming amusing. It is something one can get used to... it is fun, nothing that hurts. FLickering: Yes, if it is loading songs, it flickers on each song... but then it works. Also, after changing the themes, it hangs. I had to reset it from my setting. But in all, it passes. It's still an infant. Let's all give our feedback and things will improve. This is the first app I use apart from groove. Not as functional as groove, but that's organizational owned.