Windows Medial Player 9 for CD's Winamp 2.95 for everything else. Can't remember but didn't like how Winamp played CD's and then got stuck in my ways.
or
Rip the CD's into mp3's for the authentic retro experience! either of the above can do this

I downloaded a program to convert CD tracks to MP3s, and I think I have WMP. If I don't, I have the ISO of Win98SE and so can install it. I tried Googling for an alternate CD player but couldn't find a good, free, downloadable player. I want an alternate player with a customizable GUI.

Win98 shipped with a much older version. WMP9 is a newer version then what shipped with XP and does support custom skins.
Foobar 2000 was also popular 0.8.3 is the last version for Win98.
Your best bet is to search for mp3 players of the era, just about all of them supported ripping, audio cd playback, and custom skins

Thank you. I will Google Foobar now. 😀

If I recall correctly, using MCI commands to play CDs was a pretty trivial thing to do in Visual Basic, and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if it came with an example project which played some kind of media using MCI. I thought I'd mention this since I remembered that your tmpcreat project was written in Visual Basic for DOS - or at least it looked like it to me, I can't remember if you said what it was written in - and you might find it to be an interesting project. Maybe you're like me though and already have too many projects 😁

How about a CD player that displays CD-TEXT ? That would be a plus !
Who remember of a japanese freeware that could do that ?
Does foobar 0.8 do it ?

I tried some CD players, but ended using the one included in Microsoft Powertoys. It took no desktop space and worked just fine. Other players had strange interfaces, big windows or many unneeded features (if you need to access your equaliser on a daily basis, maybe your speaker are not that good).

After some time, I put a (moderately) good sound system near my desktop and never used the computer to play audio CDs.

There's a CD Player application in Windows 95 that can be borrowed.

Windows 98SE has two versions of Media Player (mplayer, mplayer32).
One is Media Player 6.x, the other is the classic one from Video for Windows (based on the original that shipped with Win 3.0 MME/Win 3.1).

Edit: PKCD is also good. It's part of the Pro AudioSpectrum 16 Windows driver package.

Source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Med … 16_software.png

There's also a DOS-based CD player that was part of the Mitsumi LU005 driver package.
PLAYCD was its name, I think. It uses coloured text-mode. Very late 80s/early 90s style.

Edit: The player can be found here:
https://ibm-pc.org/drivers/cdrom/MITSUMI/mitsumi.html