AOL Media Player is a free piece of audio and video playback software. With it, you can play back MP3 files, music CDs, and DVD video. You can also burn music and other files to blank CD-Rs or CD-RWs.

Feature Rich Yet Feature Light

For software of its vintage, AOL Media Player handles burning tasks with speed, and plays back audio and video with aplomb. It is well-calibrated to work with older machines, and you'll find that it plays files of any reasonable size on them without hiccups or bugs. It doesn't support some more modern audio formats well: in our testing, it struggled to play back OGG files. This is compounded by the fact that there aren't many settings to tweak or things to see 'under the hood': this is a simple media player, and it does simple things well.

How Does It Stack Up? It Doesn't

Despite the pessimism of this headline, it's simply an acknowledgement of one fact: AOL Media Player cannot be compared to modern media players. It is much more compatible with older systems than they are, and runs better than the most modern software on computers from the early 2000s. For modern computers, there's tons of equivalent apps, many of them built right into the latest operating systems. For anyone looking to enjoy audio or video on an older computer, AOL Media Player is a fantastic choice.