Here’s a really simple to use audio player that’s kinda similar to Winamp in appearance. It’s based on Coolplayer, a well known freeware player thats been around quite a while. This is basically a portable version.

It has very good audio quality and includes the kind of features you require from a music playing program, like play-lists, skin support, randomizer and so forth. You just drag your audio files onto the play-list area and it instantly begins playing.

It supports streaming audio, ideal for listening to your favorite internet radio stations. It has an equaliser and support for winamp plug ins.

An easy program, not burdened down with superfluous features, yet adequate for most people requiring a nice audio player. Just copy it to your memory stick and you’re free to enjoy music from any computer you find yourself at, all without having to mess with other peoples programs or settings. Just don’t forget your earphones!

Check out the homepage here for this free download.

Recently I’ve made a pleasant discovery: The KMPlayer. It’s not just another media player,but,in my opinion,very possibly the ONLY media player you will ever need.

How can I make such a bold claim?

The playback abilities are very impressive; It plays just about every video and audio format you’re likely to ever use (with its own internal codecs as standard, so no downloading messy codec packs!) and it’s very customizable. It can be skinned and a whole lot more (I tend to like the default skin anyway) with all key and mouse actions fully customizable.

It also has very good subtitle support, and a neat option to have the subtitles only show on the black bars, underneath your movie instead of over it. As far as audio goes, it has some features which are very directly infuenced by winamp such as the same kind of winamp options,playlist support and it’s even compatible with some winamp plug-ins! Audio streaming is supported too so you can listen to your favorite radio stations online.

It has a very extensive list of options which can be customized to your liking with just a little experimentation. I liked it so much, I uninstalled winamp and my dvd/media player. Maybe you will too? Let me know!

Check out the official forum where you can read more info and download the latest version.

Are you a music addict? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had instant access to listen to your own music collection, as small or big as it may be, from any internet connected computer?

The Anywhere.FM player is a Flash program that works in your browser. You’re able to upload and hear your own music, and it lets you listen to others peoples shared music too.

Thinking about the legality of all this? This is fully authorized by the respective performance rights authorities to stream this music, so you don’t have to be worried about attracting any bad karma from questionable legalites. And whenever you discover something you like, they’re linked into Amazon, so you’ll be able to purchase the song or album for yourself if you should decide on it.

Anywhere.FM is a free to use web service and at least at the time of writing, there’s no limitation on how much music you can upload to the service. www.anywhere.fm

Screamer Radio is a Windows application that allows you listen to online radio stations right from your desktop. You’ll be able to listen to stations ranging from talk and comedy to various music genres. Its got has more than 4000 radio stations included in its radio directory so you’re sure to find something you like.

A cool feature is that it doesn’t just let you listen to radio, as additionally, it gives you the option of recording what you’re listening to.

Screamer Radio has support for the following radio streams:

• Shoutcast and Icecast MP3 Streaming
• Icecast OGG Vorbis Streaming
• WMA Streaming
• AAC Streaming

The Recording features are:

• Recording buffer: For example: begin recording in the middle of a song and you can still save the whole song!
• Direct MP3 Audio stream saving, without loss of quality!
• Direct OGG Vorbis stream saving, without loss of quality!
• Or encode OGG Vorbis as MP3 using Lame
• Encode WMA or AAC to MP3 using Lame

When you record a stream using Screamer Radio it’s able to name the files after the song that’s played, however this does require the radio station to transmit this sort of information.

There’s also a portable version available

Full details and download from the homepage.

If you regularly listen to music on your computer, check out this neat little player. AIMP is an audio player, similar to other players such as Winamp, etc. It packs a lot of power though for a relatively small program, while still being low in its resource usage, always a good thing.

It provides support for a large amount of sound formats, including MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WAV, WMA, and CDA, and a whole bunch of lesser known formats such as MP1, MP2, MPC, MP+, AC3, APE, WavPack, Speex, S3M, XM, MOD, IT, MO3, MTM, UMX and can also use M3U, PLC and PLS playlists. It also works with internet radio (it has bookmarking) and it has a Mass Tag Editor, Audio Grabber, Audio Converter and external plugin support as well.

If you like a bit of eye candy, you can customize it with skins and icon packs too. All in all, this player is worth checking out if you’re looking for a fully functional audio player with a small footprint, so it wont slow up your computer.

For more details on features and to try it out for yourself, visit the homepage here. Oh, and its freeware!

Sooner or later a time comes when most of us need to convert a file between formats for one reason or another, usually because your particular program doesn’t support a particular format. Rather than hunting around for a file conversion program, there now exists quite a few sites for online file conversion and Youconvertit is certainly one of the better ones.

You have the option to choose between a very large variety of file formats. These include audio, document, image, video and archive file types. What’s cool about this particular service apart from the large range of file formats supported, is that you can add up to five files at a time for conversion. You can even add a url that links to a file online which you’d like to convert. It also provides an option for sending files to a recipients email address (again, up to five at a time).

As a slightly unrelated bonus but in keeping with the theme of conversion, they also offer unit conversion (distance,weight, etc)

It’s a site worth bookmarking, whether you find yourself needing to convert between file types regularly or just once in a while!

Check it out here.

Do you wish to have all the music and the videos that you ever wanted in your hard disk downloaded from different Internet radio stations? With the Audials One Music & Videos 2 software you can do just that by finding your favorite music and video by specifying the artists, albums, etc. The program just requires you to make some selections for searching for the music and videos of your choice. It also supports you with the search engine features that help you to search and get the required Mp3 file downloaded. You can also have the formats of the files converted to the one compatible to your mobile phone, MP4 player, etc.

Audials One Music & Videos 2 launches with a screen that is pleasing on the eye and contains the features placed well on the screen. It provides you with the radio tracker from where you can record the music of your choice. With the videoraptor you can search for the music, download Mp3 and video clips, and even you can record the web videos. The “Tunebite” feature with the program is for the conversion of the files, removing the DRM protection and capture streams. You can search the music by entering the required text for carrying out the search. You would be shown on the search result on the main screen in the form of the list and even have the selected converted to the selected format. Search for the Web Videos easily and download them to your PC for enjoying anytime. You would see the files on downloading on the right side of the screen. You can open the folder and get them played for having check for the correct files.

Audials One Music & Videos 2 also helps you to Burn CD, Create Ringtones and Organize the MP3 files.

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It’s all too common these days for good software to become “bloatware” after a few versions. What was once a good program can easily become bloated with countless features that you can barely understand, let alone ever have a use for.

So it’s refreshing to find this little program that does one useful thing and does it simply and good. It’s called Soprano and it plays audio files (mp3, ogg, wma, wav) it also supports streaming. It requires no installation, so is therefore portable naturally. It has its own compact playlist in a resizable window and supports dragging and dropping of songs or folders. It can be hotkey driven by editing the included hotkeys.txt file to your own liking.

In short, it plays music files and is easy to use, uses minimal resources and it’s free. A great music player for those who like to keep things simple yet functional! All weighing in at only 340kb as of this writing! So good things DO come in small packages.

You’ll find more details and can download it at the homepage here.

Streaming Audio Studio: All-In-One Sound Recorder, Editor and Converter has tools to analyze, record, edit, and convert audio file, produce music loops, digitize and clean-up old recordings.

Pros: Streaming Audio Studio application is a all-in-one sound recorder, editor and converter. You can use to analyze, record, edit, and convert audio file, produce music loops, digitize and clean-up old recordings. You could record and play sounds, import and export audio files, drag-and-drop, trim, copy, paste, split and merge to aid in its functions. A set of real time effects also can be added to the recordings. Waveform and spectral view of the sound recordings and audio effects filters along with an unlimited undo/redo helps in the edit process. Most popular formats such as mp3, wma, wav, vqf and ogg are supported.

Streaming recording helps recording of cassettes, vinyl records or live performances directly to hard disk in mp3 or any other format you prefer. Level meters indicate volume levels so that adjustments could be made for optimal recording.

Cut, copy, paste and delete set of operations on the audio waveform/spectrum diagrams make editing really simple. Unlimited undo steps help in going back indefinitely to undo mistakes and go back to a known reference point. One could modify the envelope directly if that is useful. Drag and drop paradigm helps make the editing even easier. (more…)

If you want Microsoft’s answer to the iTunes platform, then you only have to look as far as the Microsoft Zune platform. This absolutely blows iTunes out of the water when you consider the organization features that it has as well as a number of the different abilities it has to allow you to store and transfer files. You can label files, create playlists and do a number of different things with Microsoft Zune 2.1 that you can not do with iTunes or alternatively that would take you a lot longer to do with iTunes. MS Zune is also freeware and therefore quite easy to download and set up.

2.1 is the latest version of MS Zune and it was released on November 19th. It is a piece of software that has been growing its fan base through each successive version being released and this version promises more of the same that fans have come to expect from the teams constantly working to correct any bugs and errors that might crop up in Microsoft Zune 2.1. This version primarily addresses issues of ergonomics and appearance and does a lot to streamline the code involved in the software and in doing so make the software run a lot faster. This will be welcome news to fans of Microsoft Zune 2.1 as any faster speed is usually good news!

For more information about Microsoft Zune 2.1, you can visit its website directly at http://www.zune.net/en-us/products/zunesoftware.