Happened to me as well, freezing up the whole system, especially with many/large files. None of the suggestions I found online actually worked. Happened on USB drives as well.
Then my whole HD gave up completely. Replaced it and all problems are gone. USB drives as well: turns out Linux at least tries to read it so you can attempt to save some data, while Windows just says it’s unreadable.
I’ll just mention QMMP which is basically a Winamp clone. Works great and I’ve used it for many years now.