With Last.fm, music fans have found a place to congregate and share musical tastes. The Last.fm player places the “social music revolution” onto your desktop, giving you access to thousands of tracks from all musical genres.

The beauty of the application is that it encourages you to find similar artists to the ones you’re accustomed to and also pushes you to interact with users who share the same tastes. Search results appear as a tag cloud, with the biggest elements being the most popular. With thousands of songs available on Last.fm, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll listen to the same thing twice. The player is streaming and you’ll have to be connected to the internet and have a Last.fm account for it to work.

Although slightly bulky, the Last.fm player interface is sleek and accessible. We like the shiny control icons and the “now playing” window. This is where you’ll find all artist information like album cover, a small description of the artist, related tags and artists and top listeners. The menu bar on the left includes your recently played tracks, recently loved and recently banned, although to listen to these you’ll need to upgrade your Last.fm account (€2.50/month). The last 10 stations you’ve listened to are automatically saved in your history file.

The social experience is central to Last.fm and becomes pretty addictive. By listening to tracks you create a profile of yourself, the music you listen to and the artists you like. Last.fm then connects you to other users that have similar tastes, whom it calls neighbours. In the Last.fm player, you can connect to neighbours' stations and listen to their tunes. The lists of the friends you made on Last.fm will also appear in your player. If you have the Audioscrobbler plug-in installed, Last.fm can also track all the songs you play in your favourite desktop music app (like iTunes) and connect you with even more neighbours.

Most of us here at Softonic have Last.fm connected all day, simply because it doesn’t require you to have your own music library, it’s free and provides an endless flow of new tunes. In line with modern evolutions in online music, this web music application mixes streaming and social tools to give you an exciting music player. No music fan with access to Internet should be caught dead without it.

Download Last.fm Player 1.5.2.38918 in Softonic

If you're tired of always listening to the same songs in your music library, what about some live online radio stations for a change?

With Phonostar you can now tune in to more than 7,000 radio stations that stream their contents on the Internet for free. What's more, you can also use it to subscribe to your favorite podcasts. The program features a nice-easy-to-use interface, similar to any other music player, from which you can listen to your favorite online radio stations. The interface also displays an extra window where you can search for any radio station according to different parameters (language, genre, quality, etc.) though its reduced size makes search a bit uncomfortable.

But that's not all. Phonostar still keeps an ace up its sleeve with its built-in recording tool, which enables you to record your favorite songs right to your hard drive – in WAV or MP3 - with just a single mouse click.

Phonostar is a great online radio player and recorder. A bit of improvement in the way it displays search results and it'll be nearly perfect!

Download phonostar-Player 2.0.1.2 in Softonic

If you're a big fan of Last.fm-style, then you might like Finetune Desktop because it works in a similar way in helping you discover the kind of music you might like.

However, this is a far more sophisticated affair because it's based on Adobe Air. There's very little to it except to select those artists that you're interested in and Finetune Desktop will guide you to the nearest equivalents or those with similar styles. In addition, you can filter music according to style and genre. The advantage of using AIR is that adobe have moved their product away from the restrictions of Internet Explorer which it was formerly locked to. By using AIR, Adobe have also made this a truly cross platform application. Using AIR also has other advantages - AIR can capture music preferences stored on your desktop such as those of your iTunes library and then feed it into Finetune’s recommendation engine. You are then offered well-matched songs based on artists, genre, and playlists that you already listen to. In addition to helping you find artists that you might like, Finetune Desktop can also stream Mp3's directly from the net.

This is an interesting innovation from Adobe that could prove a worthy competitor to Last.fm if it gathers a bigger following.

Download Finetune Desktop 1.0.7 in Softonic

After listening to music for ten hours a day, you end up knowing your whole MP3 collection by heart, no matter how many of them you've got. So maybe it would be a good idea if you listened to the radio instead, and one good application to start with is Nexus Radio.

This tool grants you access to literally hundreds of online radio stations from all over the world. They're organized by categories, according to the music's style. Simply click on any of them and the program will list all the available radio stations.

Besides listening to music, Nexus Radio also allows you to record the streaming music right to your PC in MP3 format, either manually or via scheduled recordings. Click on the appropriate button and the program will start recording immediately. Nexus includes some basic sound effects, a 10-band equalizer and even an ID3 tag editor. On the downside, we didn't like being redirected to the browser to obtain more information about the station or perform a search.

Download Nexus Radio 2.2.4 in Softonic

Simplify Media is an attractive and incredibly fast way of sharing your media - whether it be on iTunes or Winamp - with other users.

The program automatically detects your music collection and whether you use Winamp or iTunes as your habitual player. Afterwards, you can send invitations via Simplify Media to share your music collection with other iTunes and Winamp users. It's a wonderful concept in that you can access all those cool friends that your friend without doing anything that may be considered illegal such as via a P2P network. The downside obviously is that unless your friend is online at the same time as you, you can't view or share their collection. You can only invite up to 30 friends also which is a bit of a drawback and if you've purchased music on iTunes, you can't share that either - only music that you've ripped yourself. Note that also you can only share two songs at one time but since you can only physically only listen to one track at a time anyway, this is not a major issue. However, for music buddies that love to share their music with each other but live miles apart, this is a truly brilliant program that nicely avoids illegal P2P downloading issue while giving you many of the benefits. Let's just hope that the powers that be don't get their hands on it.

A superb application that makes music sharing a pleasure and runs no risk of blocking your bandwidth or engaging you in illegal downloading.

Download Simplify Media 946 in Softonic

Find, download, burn MP3 music from 77 genres & thousands of artists. Listen to music on your PC, mobile player or as ring tone on your mobile phone.

Imagine: Christmas & your birthday, together on the same day. With Radiotracker, you get the gift of unlimited music everyday, free & legal. Radiotracker provides you with free MP3 music downloads.

Radiotracker supplies you with free music from the Internet. Just click and go! Radiotracker's comprehensive music database lets you choose from almost 100,000 artists and their music titles. Simply add your favorite artists to the MusicFinder's wish list. Radiotracker delivers the selected MP3 music as soon as it plays on one of over 15,000 Internet radio stations. To speed things up, Radiotracker finds out which stations play your favorite artists most frequently.

Applauded year after year by the international trade press for its ease of use, Radiotracker has established itself with in-the-know music lovers around the world as the king of free music solutions. No subscriptions! No tricks! You only pay once for Radiotracker. A DSL flat rate connection is all you need. There are no other charges or hidden costs.

Download RadioTracker 4.1.36.0 in Softonic

Icy Radio is a player that specializes in radio and TV over the Internet, allows you to search hundreds of channels and save them.

You can save up to 100 favourite channels of any style of music and in addition, you can record Icy Radio broadcasts in Mp3 format. Of course, some stations you will not receive very well and others you will and much depends on your bandwidth, especially with the TV player. The TV support is a relatively new thing and you can't help thinking that they would have been better to stick to radio. The channels on offer are pretty poor quality to say the least. However, they have added a few cooler skins and if you're willing to scroll through the channels on offer, you can check the channel lists at www.beelinetv.com and www.wwitv.com. Once you've found a channel that you want, in your check the "Video Stream" box and add it to the "Add/Edit" window. The radio station operates in a similar manner except you only have to select a directory in which to record channels and click record.

An excellent radio resource but rather less than impressive for TV channels.

Download Icy Radio 0.5 in Softonic

SlimServer is a powerful and free open source software. It can power any MP3 player on your network and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Solaris.

This robust software includes contributions from a worldwide community of developers who are driven by the desire to work on exciting projects. It features a Web Interface - you can control the player and manage playlists from a web browser plus it features MP3 & WMA Internet radio.

It automatically imports iTunes library and playlists and also metadata tags. You can search search by title, artist, album or genre. Best of all, you can listen from any computer using an MP3 software player such Winamp or iTunes.

Download SlimServer 6.5.4 in Softonic

Originally MyTunes was developed to work with iTunes version 4.1 to 4.7, but no further releases were put out to match the seemingly never ending iTunes revisions. Thankfully, despite its lack of updates, this unique tool is still kicking strong with the latest version of iTunes. Softonic has dug up some interesting information that illustrates just how fragile and unforgiving the software development process can sometimes be.

Quite some time back, MyTunes suffered one of those cruel twists of fate that rear their head from time to time, effectively bringing development on this popular utility to an abrupt halt, CNET News.com reports"the popular software has all but vanished from the Net, and its programmer's sites have gone dark. But this time, it's not the doing of an angry record industry or a conflict-averse Apple. Trinity College sophomore Bill Zeller, who wrote the program in less than two weeks of off-time coding last year, says he simply lost the source code in a catastrophic computer crash." Zeller said: "I was about to release the second version, when I lost everything. I may put it back online, but there won't be any updates. I don't want to rewrite it."

Download MyTunes Redux 1.0 in Softonic

If you want to add some originality to your website, this is certainly a good option: an embedded Flash player that allows users to choose a song and play it while they're visiting your webpage.

Flash Music Studio provides you with all the tools you need to create this player. You don't need any programming or Flash skills, as the program's interface guides you through the whole process in a step-by-step procedure. This makes it very easy for beginners, but more advances users may miss some more customizing options.

The program includes a wide variety of ready-to-use skins for your player and supports the most popular audio formats. Once you've finished the players, it automatically generates all the necessary files to upload to your web server.

Download Flash Music Studio 1.0 in Softonic

Sick of radio station Java pop-ups that slow your machine down?

Radio Stream Player allows you to stream online radio stations without having to run a bloated player, or even having an internet browser window open.

The program can stream online radio stations from the internet (that use MMS streams) plus it has a small and easy to use Graphical User Iinterface. It can discreetly hide in your system tray
and you can add your own stations.

The program also keeps itself fully automatically updated for both the program and radio station list.

Download Radio Stream Player 1.4.0.5 Beta in Softonic

Orb gives you secure access to the digital media on your home PC through a simple web interface. Orb streams your content safely to virtually any internet-connected device. Just install the Orb software on your PC, then access your media anywhere. It gives you mobile access to music, photos, live TV, videos and more.

Download Orb 2.00.0919 in Softonic

Sockso is a free, open-source, personal music server for everyone! It's designed to be as simple as possible so that anyone with a mouse and some mp3's can get their friends listening to their music across the internet in seconds!

Sockso currently features a simple setup procedure (no install! just double click and go!), it supports MP3, OGG Vorbis, and WMA and has an easy web-interface for your friends, and a GUI for you.

It also features statistics like most played, recently popular, etc plus a drag and drop playlist creation option.

Download Sockso 0.3 in Softonic

Octoshape is a peer to peer streaming media server and client which uses peer to peer grid technology to minimize the bandwidth for any broadcaster to stream any material.

Octoshape can be used to multicast stream audio (Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WMA) and/or video (MPEG-4, Nullsoft Video, or WMV and other codecs), or any other stream of data, over the internet. Octoshape uses peer to peer grid distributed bandwidth to minimize the load of the broadcaster's bandwidth where each listener/viewer will relay parts of- or the whole stream they download to several other nodes in the grid.

This is the trick behind octoshape, because it makes the grid 100% stable with no interruptions in the sound or video when peers logoff.

Download Octoshape 1.0 in Softonic

SurroundCast is a Digital Surround HD Radio Player with over a 1000 commercial/free stations! Featuring iPod support and advanced SRS WOWXT - Circle Surround II- and Spatializer technology- Users can experience 3D Sound even with 2 speakers! SurroundCast includes AudioModeling, VST and DMO Playback Engine. Experience Radio like never before!

Download SurroundCast 1.3.5.2 in Softonic

With URGE you can not just listen to regular music tracks, but you can also check out exclusives from MTV, VH1, and CMT. You can choose from hundreds of quality playlists, play interviews from a huge archive and keep up to date with your favourite group using the in-built blog reader.

• Millions of songs. All music, from hip hop to country to jazz
• Total music mobility. Transfer your music to compatible portable music players
• More than 500 playlists. Styles, Must-Haves, TV shows, Celebrity, Years, Cities, & more
• Music and more from MTV, VH1 AND CMT. Stuff you can’t find anywhere else
• URGE Feeds. New music delivered straight to your PC and portable music player
• Features, profiles, interviews and blogs. From leading voices in music
• More than 130 radio stations. Professionally programmed. CD-quality. Commercial free
• Rip, burn, sync. It’s never been easier

Download URGE 1.1.9058 in Softonic

With RadioJockey you'll be able to listen to and enjoy more than 10,000 radio stations worldwide playing your favorite music. Now you can listening and simultaneous recording from radiostations at the same time. The records are stored in MP3 format with ID3-Tags and separated by artist and title.

See what this program has to offer:

• Listening and simultaneous recording of InterNet radio in MP3 format
• Create and manage playlists
• Import audio files to playlists
• Export playlists to your mobile MP3-Player
• More than 10,000 radio stations in database
• Manage your favorite radio stations
• Automatic creation of ID3-tags
• Automatic separation of the titles
• MP3-Player
• Play folders
• Automatic software update information

Download RadioJockey 4.0.4 in Softonic

Potaro is an application for streaming audio and video over a local network and the Internet. Stream MP3, MPEG, AVI, and other media files over the internet. Watch and control your home TV over the internet. The built-in web server allows multiple users to connect and view live streaming audio and video from your web cam, TV tuner card, or the music CD in your CD-Rom. View JPG, GIF and BMP images stored on your disk drives.

All you need is a JavaScript enabled web browser, Windows Media Player, and a broadband connection at your remote location. Potaro will stream any media format as long as you have the DirectX filter installed on your PC. A user name and password is required for access to the server. Security includes the ability to allow or block IP addresses.

This is what Potaro has to offer:

• Stream MP3 and other audio files
• Stream MPEG, AVI and other video formats
• Play audio and video files from a M3U or PLS playlist
• View images stored on your disk drives
• Play CDs and DVDs over the internet
• Stream audio from your sound card
• Stream video from a web camera
• Watch TV anywhere by streaming video from your TV Tuner card
• Change channels on your TV tuner card
• Comes with a plugin for the USB-UIRT Infrared device. USB-UIRT will allow you to change channels on your satellite receiver or cable box

Download Potaro 1.1.0.9 Beta in Softonic

Vibe Streamer is a free MP3 streaming server that allows you to connect and stream your music using only a standard web browser so you can play your music anywhere.

After you've installed Vibe Streamer and start it for the first time you're pretty much all ready to begin sharing your music. All you need to do before starting your streaming server is to add one or more users and the directories that you want to share.

Before someone can access your stream server he has to have a user account and a password. You can manage the accounts on your streaming server from the "Users and groups" tab. Right-click inside the user or group list to bring up a menu with the availible actions.

A great way to share your music!

Download Vibe Streamer 2.06 in Softonic

DOT.TUNES allows you share your iTunes music securely with friends, family and clients across the internet.

Publish any number of Artists, Albums, Playlists or even your entire iTunes Music Library with 1-Click, then listen to your music via your web browser, Sony PSP or web enabled phone. You can even stream your tracks to your website or MySpace page with our custom flash player.

Why pay to podcast when you can publish your own radio shows, TV programs or music mixes directly to your loyal fans? DOT.TUNES liberates you from the middleman, allowing automatic distribution of your audio and video creations to iTunes users with one-click podcasting. Invite your audience to your server and keep them in the groove.

DOT.TUNES is also the perfect remote control for your home iTunes/AirTunes setup. Use any computer, PDA even a web enabled mobile phone as a remote control for iTunes. Choose what song will play from across the room, another room or even from outside. Free yourself from the range-limitations of bluetooth & IR remotes.

Download DOT-TUNES 3.0b1 in Softonic