i'm not sure if it will meet your requirements but give Kodi/xbmc a try, this media player has been around for a long time
@winbond Thank-you for your suggestion! It appears to be quite the full-featured media centre. I have not tried it yet, but will do so in the near future. There may be a chance that it can play subtitles with audio. On another note, does anybody have some answers to my previous post? I'll be waiting patiently here. Thanks for the help everyone!
i think the reason you have a problem with playback is cause the ssa was not designed for audio, that's why it only works with video, for audio subtitles... aka karaoke, you should look into formats like CDG, LRC, TXT (UltraStar)
@winbond Thanks! You've added another possible path to the many possible solutions to this problem! To be honest, I haven't thought about karaoke file formats that much. The thing is, there's this excellent media player on Windows called Daum PotPlayer, which is able to play '.ass' subtitles with audio files. I simply find it difficult to believe that there isn't another media player which can do the same thing (the conversion would also be kind of a pain). However, I will definitely keep it in mind. Thanks again.