If you want to listen to your music files on your computer or mobile phone, then you can use a number of audio player applications such as 1by1 which I personally use on Windows 11. But if you want to record and convert audio files in addition playing them, then you need something like fmedia.
fmedia is a very fast and lightweight music player. It also comes with features to convert the audio file formats and to record audio from microphone or stereo-mix streams. It is an asynchronous media player which makes it much more efficient when handling large number of music files. It ensures smooth playback and recording even when your devices are running very slowly. It is highly customizable and can be easily extended with additional plugins.
It comes with both a CLI version and the GUI version of the fmedia application. It is much easier to use the GUI version of fmedia. You have to begin by adding your files to the list and then clicking on the play button. The user interface is very minimal and has the volume control only in addition to the play/pause player bar.
We can open remote media streams in fmedia too using their URLs. It also supports opening of the playlists in the M3U and M3U8 formats. In fact we can open several playlists in different tabs and switch between them quickly.
When recording using fmedia, it uses the FLAC audio file format which records the audio in very high quality. However, we can change the settings easily and choose a different audio file format for the output.
It supports opening of the usual audio file tyes such as MP3, OGG Vorbis, MP4, WAV, APE etc. It can also convert the audio files into several formats including MP3, OGG Vorbis, M4A, FLAC, WAV and OPUS.
You can download fmedia from https://stsaz.github.io/fmedia/.