FXChainPlayer

A Windows desktop audio player that plays nearly every audio format, with a full VST3 effect chain built into the playback engine and a complete dual-deck DJ Mode.

Load your favorite plugins, EQs, compressors, reverbs, spatial processors, headphone correction, directly into the signal path and hear them in real time while you listen to music. Pitch records like vinyl. Mix tracks across two decks with sync, hot cues, loops and a Pioneer-DJM-style filter. No DAW required.

Why VST3 in an audio player?

More reasons than you would expect.

• Headphone surround & spatial audio. Run binauralizers like dearVR MONITOR, Waves Nx, or Dolby Atmos Production Suite to turn stereo into a full spatial soundstage on any pair of headphones. No system-wide wrapper, no virtual audio cable.
• Headphone calibration & correction. Use frequency-response plugins like Sonarworks SoundID Reference, Beyerdynamic Headphone Lab, Waves Nx Virtual Mix Room, or Morphit to flatten your specific headphone model to a neutral reference.
• Internet radio & streaming cleanup. Load a compressor, EQ, de-esser, or multiband processor on poorly-mastered streams or dynamic-range-compressed "loudness war" tracks to tame them while you listen.
• Plugin auditioning. Want to hear how that new reverb, saturator, or tape emulation sounds on real music? Drop it in. No DAW boot-up, no empty session, no audio import.
• Loudness normalization & limiting. Keep playback levels consistent across tracks from wildly different sources (old CDs vs. modern streaming).
• Room correction. Apply convolution IRs or parametric EQ profiles to compensate for your listening room and speaker setup.
• A/B plugin comparison. Quickly toggle effects in and out on familiar reference tracks to hear exactly how they color the sound.
• Accessibility. Hearing aid profiles, frequency boosting, dynamic range compression, or custom EQ curves for listeners who need tailored audio processing.
• Mix referencing. Drop your mix in, compare A/B against a reference master, hear your monitor chain on someone else's material.
• Per-channel chains for trackers, SIDs, multi-channel chiptunes. Each channel of a .mod / .xm / .it / SID / NSF file gets its OWN VST3 chain. Reverb only on channel 1, LP filter only on the bass channel, distortion only on the lead. Configure once per file (auto-loaded on track-change), bake into the export.
• Bake the effect chain into a file. Render any track or the whole playlist through the VST chain to WAV / MP3 / FLAC / OGG / AAC / AIFF / Opus / WavPack / ALAC, faster than real-time. Take your processed audio anywhere.

Up to 16 VST3 plugins in a serial chain. Drag-and-drop reorder. Per-slot bypass and dry/wet. Smooth global chain mix. Native plugin GUIs. Everything runs at 64-bit double precision end-to-end.

Plays pretty much everything

FXChainPlayer is built for music listeners who do not want format juggling. Drop a folder with mixed MP3, FLAC, high-res DSD, tracker modules, C64 SIDs, Game Boy chiptunes and console-game dumps, and it just plays. Lossless and lossy everyday formats, the tracker and demoscene catalogue, console chiptunes (SID, SPC, NSF, VGM, AY and more), a huge range of game-music containers, the modern Amiga and Atari chiptunes (real 68000 plus Paula and YM2149 emulation), Audio CD play and rip, Apple Loops, CUE sheets, and M3U or XSPF playlists. A searchable Format Library panel is built in.

DJ Mode

Press D (or click the DJ button in the status bar) to switch to a dual-deck DJ console built into the player. Drop tracks on Deck A and Deck B, mix with a real crossfader, and use everything you would expect from a DJ rig.

• Two decks side by side, each with: per-deck waveform (overview + 10-second close-up), title / artist / BPM / Key / Camelot, 8 hot cues, Loop In/Out + Reloop, auto-loop chips (1/8 to 8 beats), beat-jump, 3-band EQ (LO / MID / HI, ±12 dB), gain, Play / Cue / Sync, SLIP / QUANT / BRAKE, and a Pioneer-DJM-style filter knob (LP on the left half, HP on the right, magnetic dead-zone at the centre).
• Crossfader with four industry-standard curves (Linear / Smooth / Sharp / Hamster), per-sample smoothing (no zipper noise), right-click snaps to centre.
• Sync engine, Mixxx-style phase-lock. Single-click SYNC matches BPM and beat phase to master; right-click makes THIS deck master. Octave-fold keeps a 175 BPM follower against an 87 BPM leader at perceived-equal speed.
• Vinyl scratch on the waveform. Click and drag the close-up or overview waveform like a Pioneer-CDJ jog wheel, with a Newtonian-physics platter integrator (viscous + Coulomb friction), forward and reverse, even while paused. Works in single-track mode and DJ mode with the same physics.
• Per-deck Pitch / Stretch toggle. Disc icon = Pitch (vinyl, pitch and tempo move together). Gauge icon = Stretch (phase-vocoder, pitch stays constant while tempo varies).
• Per-deck Echo + Gater FX, tempo-locked to the deck BPM, plus your own VST3 effects on the decks, the same per-channel chains as the main player.
• A real headphone cue. Three output modes: single device, dual WASAPI device (Main on the speakers, Cue on a second endpoint such as a USB headphone DAC), or ASIO channel-pair (Main on 1+2, Cue on 3+4 of one multi-out interface), with a pre-listen cue-mix balance.
• Saved Loops + Smart Cueing, a Camelot wheel + harmonic-mix hint (experimental, trust your ears), and MIDI controller support with hardware-detected mappings (Pioneer DDJ-FLX, KORG nanoKONTROL2, Akai LPD8, Behringer X-Touch Mini, Mackie-Control, General MIDI) plus an Ableton-style Learn Mode for any other controller.
• Tracker DJing, unique to FXChainPlayer. Drop a .mod onto Deck A, an MP3 onto Deck B, hit SYNC, and the tracker-tempo engine plus offline beat-detector consensus matches demoscene tracks against modern dance productions on the same crossfader. No other DJ tool can do this.

(DJ Mode is feature-complete and stable for production use, with a "beta" marker in the header while a few rough edges are polished.)

A serious audio engine

WASAPI (Shared and Exclusive) and ASIO 2.3 output. A 64-bit double-precision signal path. Per-channel VST chains for trackers, SIDs and multi-channel chiptunes. A real-time spectrum analyzer with several modes plus a Live Shader visualizer, GPU-accelerated loudness-coloured waveforms, a built-in 3-band EQ with live FFT, gapless playback, A/B Studio Compare, Bauer-style headphone crossfeed, BPM consensus and Camelot key detection, MIDI controller support, per-track tag editing, synced lyrics, and a fast SmartScan library. Cast to Chromecast, DLNA and AirPlay (Apple TV, HomePod and Mac).

Export through your VST3 chain

Route any file or the whole playlist through your VST3 effect chain and render the result to disk, faster-than-real-time, offline, sample-accurate. Right-click a track and choose Export to format... for a single file, or Ctrl+E for the full batch dialog. Output formats: WAV (16/24-bit, 32-bit float), MP3 (128/192/320 kbps), FLAC (16/24-bit lossless), OGG Vorbis, AAC (.m4a), AIFF, WavPack, Opus, and Apple Lossless (ALAC). Multi-tune containers can expand into one file per subsong, and a per-voice stem export renders one WAV per voice. Export is included in every build, no separate "Pro" tier.

Windows 10/11, 64-bit. Free, with a signed installer. The app updates itself from the official GitHub release channel, no matter where you downloaded it.

FXChainPlayer bundles excellent open-source libraries (FFmpeg, Qt, TagLib, libgme and more). Full third-party credits and the corresponding source offer ship inside the download (the "Licenses" folder). Source mirror: https://github.com/akustikrausch/FXChainPlayer-Releases/releases/tag/lgpl-sources