If you're someone who listens to your music collection in Windows Media Player then now, thanks to Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player you can enjoy the words to your songs within the player as you listen to them. As long as you're connected to the Net the program will automatically search for the lyrics and display them in real time.

Unfortunately, probably due to my rather eclectic taste in music, the application failed to provide the words to many of my tracks. However, there is a neat facility for quickly adding lyrics to a particular song so over time more songs will have lyrics attached to them as people continue to upload them. Of course, mistakes may creep in but you can always correct these yourself.

Download Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player 0.3 in Softonic

So you want to impress your friends with your singing skill, but they only like to listen to those boring old top-40 songs; and that brand new Karaoke machine you just bought is broken. What can you do?

AnalogX Vocal Remover works on the same principles that the hardware removers do - that in most instances vocals are equally mixed in both channels, and can identified and therefore removed by simply changing the phase on one channel by 180 degrees. While this won't remove vocals in all instances, it does work in many cases, and can sometimes be used to remove bass or breakbeat sections as well, which I find to be GREAT for sampling! Depending on the effects used on the vocals, sometimes the reverb or ambience of the vocals is left.

In order to use the DirectX Vocal Remover, your application must support DirectX Audio Plugins, and must also support either realtime or non-realtime processing (such as Paris, Cakewalk, WaveLab, CoolEdit, etc). Vocal Remover requires a stereo sound streams, and supports either 16bit or 32bit data types.

Download Vocal Remover 1.03 in Softonic

Aero Fox is a theme for your Firefox browser which I am sure many of you will like. It adds a black, glossy style to your favourite browser, but apart from the main navigation bar and icons, it doesn’t change the way menus look.

This theme will probably look great with a Vista PC given the colours’ resemblance, but in computers with Windows XP installed, the blue bar at the bottom and at the top will not match at all.

What I also found strange is that when moving the cursor over an icon, instead of becoming brighter, as if you where ‘activating’ it, it becomes very dark, as if in some way you were switching it off – a counter-intuitive behaviour. Furthermore, if you have many bookmarks saved in your toolbar, you will have trouble finding the arrow which brings you to the links that don’t fit in the bar. That said, many users like it and it has become one of the most downloaded themes, so why not give it a try?

Aero Fox brings a black shiny look to your Firefox, and fits perfectly with Vista PC, but not necessarily with Windows XP’s bright blue style.

Download Aero Fox 1.0.5 in Softonic

One way of enriching your musical experience is to learn the lyrics to all those songs you know and love. Thanks to Evil Lyrics, music lovers have an easy way to do just that every time they listen to MP3’s on their PC. Evil Lyrics is a small plug-in that displays the lyrics of songs as they play as long as you’ve got an internet connection.

Once installed, Evil Lyrics starts every time you open your default media player. The window floats in a small browser style window at the side of the player but it can be minimised to the tray if you don’t want it sat there. The window also provides additional links to Google searches, Amazon album profiles, translations, offline storage and other album or song related data. The plug-in was designed originally for Winamp (which is what we tested it in) but it now works with Windows Media Player, Foobar2000 and Sonique. It’s also supposed to be compatible with Media Player XP although many users have reported problems with this particular player.

One of the best features of Evil Lyrics is that it’s very light and does the job discreetly without affecting other running applications. But most importantly, does it recall the lyrics accurately? Well, the truth is it’s not perfect but it does surprisingly well. In tests, we found that at least 80% of the time, it displayed the correct lyrics for the song in progress. The accuracy of this is very much down to you though. If the ID tags of your MP3’s are not entered accurately, then you’ll either end up with some very random results or simply nothing at all. There is a ‘Search Again’ button if this happens in which case Evil Lyrics tries to find the next closest match but we found it very rarely worked accurately. More often than not, you’ll end up with Michael Jackson rather than Jackson Browne when using this secondary option. Evil Lyrics retrieves the info from it’s ‘Ello Lyrics’ database which claims to have literally hundreds of thousands of songs.

One nice little feature is that lyrics are cached for offline playback so you can also read your favourite lyrics on the move. There’s also a karaoke mode where Evil Lyrics searches its karaoke database for lyrics but this is significantly more limited than the normal database. In classic karaoke style, the lyrics appear in huge luminous letters within the window which can be expanded to fill the screen meaning you can host your own karaoke parties.

On the downside, as mentioned earlier, it’s not 100% accurate with the lyrics. In the case of Winamp too, there doesn’t seem to be any way to minimize and restore Evil Lyrics when you minimize and restore the audio player itself. Nevertheless, it’s a fun little plug-in that’ll help you get more out of music or at the least, improve your karaoke skills.

Download EvilLyrics 0.1.9 in Softonic

Singing your favourite songs aloud, especially when nobody sees you, is one of those little pleasures in life. But you obviously need to know the lyrics to the song you're trying to follow, something you can easily find with MiniLyrics.

This plug-in includes one of the most impressive lyrics database I've ever seen in my whole life as compulsive MP3 collector. It launches simultaneously with your music player, which is probably found among the 15 players supported by MiniLyrics. Then, just click on the Play button and the program will automatically look for lyrics, based on the information provided by the file's tags.

During our tests, the program found the lyrics to every single track we played, including English, Spanish, German, Italian and even Japanese songs. Also, in the few occasions the program didn't find the proper lyrics, we were able to download and display them is less than 30 seconds.

On the downside, MiniLyrics displays a nag window every time you launch it and another registration reminder on top of each lyrics file, but that's a price I'm willing to play to be able to sing almost any of the 4,300 files in my Winamp playlist.

Download MiniLyrics 5.7.3418 in Softonic

The best way to get more out of your music is the learn the lyrics. Lyrics Plugin for Winamp helps you do this by automatically recalling the lyrics to the songs you are playing. There are a few such programs around and the usual problem is that they often don't display the right lyrics. What I like about this particular program is that it allows you to put lyrics into the database if the song you are listening to doesn't display any or show the right ones. Because this is a new program, the database is still being built so the lyrics are very hit and miss but it works pretty well.

However, in future it would be nice if they added the possibility to give suggestions when the exact title lyric isn't found in the database. I also found that when listening to streaming audio, tjhe program shows the lyrics to the right bands but the wrong songs! However, for a fledgling project, this has a lot more promise than similar ones and it's strength lies in drawing on the knowledge of it's users.

Download Lyrics Plugin for Winamp 1.0 in Softonic

Jammix Enhancer is a plug-in for Winamp which enables you to improve this player's sound quality, or at least adapt it to your likings.

The program offers more than twenty presets and also allows the user to create as many more as desired. Thus you have a wide range of possibilitires to customize Winamp's sound according to your preferences or the way you listen to music.

Some of its enhancements are automatic volume adjustment, special configuration to listen to music with earphones or dynamic bass power. Jammix Enhancer is, in fact, one of Winamp's highest rated plug-ins.

Download Jammix Enhancer 0.31 in Softonic

Ever wanted to let your friends know what song you are listening to at any one time without doing a thing? AMIP Now Playing Plugin allows you to do this with all the major players including Winamp, iTunes and OMP. AMIP stands for Advanced mIRC Integration Plug-in and it integrates seamlessly with the aforementioned players.
Present AMIP features:

You can use it to share song details across IRC clients: mIRC, jIRCii, Bersirc; IM clients: Miranda, Trillian, MSN Messenger; E-mail clients: The Bat!, Outlook, Thunderbird; Web browsers, blogging tools, windows clipboard amongst just a few. You can quickly switch to the song you like via the Search/Jump dialog with regular expression support

This is a great way to get even closer to your friends online.

Download AMIP Now Playing Plugin 2.62 in Softonic

The WhiteCap visualizer is a highly configurable add on for your media player with a wide range of impressive effects.

WhiteCap works with most media players out there, including the more popular iTunes, Windows Media Player or Winamp. The free version has a few limitations but you can still choose from a number of wave shapes and backgrounds. You'll only have one color scheme to work with though. From the settings menu you can adjust frame rate width and height and sound response scale.

If you pay for the Gold or Platinum versions of the program, you'll be able to save up to five presets.

Apart from the setup menu, which is really easy to use, I was well impressed by the effects themselves. The morphing wire frame effects really flow and manage to capture the essence and rhythm of different tracks really well.

Although the free version has its limitations, WhiteCap is an impressive visualizer for iTunes. Kick back and enjoy!

Download WhiteCap 5.1.2 in Softonic

TV and FM radio channels are saved a s small files which can be enqueued in a playlist, added to the music library or just played one by one. To change a channel, you only have to change the track in Winamp: so you can arrange the channels any way you like, you can have Winamp or a general purpose plugin randomize them for you, or make different playlists with e.g. preferred selections of channels for the morning or evening. Every channel has its own settings for the video adjustments, the TV system used, stereo/SAP audio and volume.

The plugin lets you run the sound of the TV or radio stations through Winamp's equalizer, DSP and output plugin. You can use this to get better sound, or to correct problems with a channel (using the automatic equalizer settings). The video can be output in a separate window with captioned or thin frame, or just attached to Winamp's video window. The plugin can also use the Video Mixing Renderers which avoids the problems associated with overlays (i.e. problems in multi-monitor setups and multiple applications trying to display video), and lets you select different de-interlace options, or use the comprehensive on-screen menus.

Download Winamp TV 1.9 Beta 13 in Softonic

Audioscrobbler is a utility that creates your profile in terms of what music you like. You need to register as an Audioscrobbler user, which will then allow you to access a web page where all your statistics will be stored. You can add as much personal details as you want, participate in forums, or exchange messages with other users.

Download Audioscrobbler for Winamp 1.18 in Softonic

Streamripper is now part of the FreeBSD standard distribution, mentioned in the Linux MP3 HOWTO, known to compile on many platforms such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2. With the emergence of file sharing protocols such as Napster, Gnutella, and now Mojonation and Freenet, the average Internet user can download nearly any mp3 he wants in a matter of no time, but many times people don't know what they want. Streamripper allows you to download an entire station of music. Many of these mp3 radio stations only play certain genres, so you can now download an entire collection of goa/trance music, an entire collection of jazz, punk rock, whatever you want.

Download Streamripper for Winamp 1.62 Beta 7 in Softonic

The term ‘widget’ has traditionally been used to describe some kind of contraption or piece of technology that improves the overall functionality of a particular product. Mac OSX and Microsoft Vista users will be all too aware of how software widgets can bring more power to your desktop, as they now come as standard on these operating systems. For the benefit of the uninitiated, a widget is basically a small application that provides you with easy access to a particular function. These applications are docked on a ‘dashboard’, and you can add as many widgets as you like, giving you instant access to anything from a simple clock to a weather forecasting tool.

Yahoo! was one of the early pioneers of widgets, and this application is likely to intrigue anyone who hasn’t come across the technology before. The package sits on your desktop and allows you to download and install widgets from the Yahoo! site. There’s a healthy range of widgets available here (almost 4,000), each of which are installed automatically as soon as they’re downloaded. Although this helps to keep things simple, it’s frustrating that you cannot change the destination folderwhich folder the widgets are stored in here.

While it all runs from the same package, each widget is actually its own application. In previous releases of the Widget Engine, this had a tendency to tie up your system rescoursces when using multiple widgets. However, tThis issue has been better addressed in this version, and it seems much less memory-intensive than before. Having said this, it’s not a good idea to keep more than about 10 running at once, as you do start to notice it then.

In terms of the widgets themselves, it would obviously be impractical (and quite frankly, boring) for us to review all 4,000 here, but needless to say there are some very useful ones, along with some downright pointless ones. For instance, we can’t really see the benefit of having a dancing skeleton on your desktop , yet there are tools for checking stock quotes, accessing iTunes, organizing your Flickr images, checking your WiFi signal and getting the latest travel news, all directly from your desktop. Graphically, the widgets are very impressive and each of them floats over the screen without the constraints of traditional window borders, ensuring they don’t intrude on your other activities.

We like the fact that you don’t need to register a Yahoo! account in order to use widgets but Yahoo! still doesn’t allow Desktop Widgets to be included on My Yahoo! pages, overlooking something both Microsoft and Google already allow. Although the program doesn’t really add anything you won’t find in Vista’s built-in widgets system, it’s perfect for XP users who want a taste of what they can expect when they get around to upgrading to the new version of Windows.

Download Yahoo! Widgets 4.5 in Softonic

PaceMaker is a plug-in module for WinAmp player that controls how the music sound as it's playing. It can:

• Speed up or slow down the music tempo without affecting the music key (pitch)
• Change the music key (pitch) without affecting the tempo
• Change the music "speed" (playback rate)

Download PaceMaker plug-in 2.1 in Softonic

Although MP3s offer fantastic audio quality, it is actually possible to enhance them other than by increasing the bitrate they are recorded at. DFX Audio Enhancer gives your digital music files more vibrancy and enhances your music listening experience by improving the sound quality of MP3, Windows Media, Internet radio and other music files.

The developers claims that with DFX, you can transform the sound of your PC into that of an expensive stereo system 'placed in a perfectly designed listening environment'. In reality however, the application seems to add nothing more than a bit more body to your music although it does allow you to control stereo depth renew stereo depth, boost your audio levels and produce a deep, rich bass sound.

DFX supports Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, J. River Media Center, Musicmatch Jukebox, Winamp and Yahoo! Music Jukebox. However, the fact that it does not support iTunes is a glaring omission but will hopefully be resolved in future releases.

Download DFX Audio Enhancer 8.35 in Softonic

One way of enriching your musical experience is to learn the lyrics to all those songs you know and love. Thanks to Autolyrics Winamp, music lovers have an easy way to do just that every time they listen to MP3's on their PC. Autolyrics Winamp is a small plug-in that displays the lyrics of songs as they play as long as you've got an internet connection.

Once installed, the plugin opens every time you start Winamp. The lyrics window opens in a window behind the player but it can be minimised to the tray. The perennial problem with these types of programs is that they often don't recall the right lyrics. We found that in around 70% of cases, Autolyrics Winamp does but much depends on whether your Mp3 tags are labelled correctly. The program can also cache lyrics so that you don't always have to be online which is a useful feature. However, when you are online, it displays Adsense ads down the sidebar which is a bit annoying. On the plus side, it does offer links to further album and artist info although many of these are sponsored. You'll definitely find your music experience seriously enriched by learning all those lyrics you never knew.

Download Autolyrics Winamp Plug-in 0.99 in Softonic

Toaster is designed especially for the visual pleasure of Winamp users, displaying a highly customizable notification on the desktop every time a new song starts in the audio player. It's not just a decorative message: in fact, you can choose exactly which data should be displayed among a wide range of options such as artist name, track title, length and, of course, the album cover if available.

These are not the only customization options included in Toaster. You can choose between several configuration presets, although not all of them are as visually pleasant as the original one and sometimes they don't load correctly. Anyway, you can also customize it manually by choosing fonts, colors, skins, animation effects and many more details.

Download Toaster for Winamp 0.7.8 in Softonic

CD Art Display (formerly Winamp CD Case) is a free desktop program that shows the current song cover in a skinnable display. This is a very simple but useful program to view the cover of the album that is playing on your Winamp. It has the following key features:

• Compatible with foobar2000
• Read cover from song's folder, a folder cache or ID3v2 tag
• Skinnable (full png support)
• Download cover from Amazon
• Invisible buttons to play, pause, next and previous
• Drag support for image and mp3 file
• Customize song notifier, case size and more
• Pin to desktop
• System tray

Download CD Art Display RC5 Build 1 in Softonic

Chronotron is an improved version of the popular DSP plug-in that allows you to manipulate tempo and pitch separately when playing audio and video files, in other words, it allows you to change the tempo of the music without affecting pitch (audio/video time stretching) and/or change pitch without affecting tempo (key change).

Download Chronotron 3.5 in Softonic

LyricsSeeker is a very small plugin for your favorite music players that retrieves lyrics to song currently playing. You can install plugin for WinAmp, Windows Media Player or both. LyricsSeeker will notify you if it found words to song in our extensive database featuring over 275,000 lyrics and 15,000 artists. Best Winamp Lyrics Plugin

If lyrics are found, a notification balloon will show for 10 seconds as presented in figure below. After ten seconds, balloon will disappear leaving colored icon reminding you that lyrics were found. You can either click balloon or double click notification icon to retrieve lyrics. Lyrics will be shown in your Internet browser (you have to be connected to the Internet in order to get lyrics).

If lyrics were not found, balloon will not show up and the LyricsSeeker icon will remain gray suggesting that lyrics were not found.

Download LyricsSeeker 2.1 in Softonic