Audio players usually feature a sophisticated interface full of buttons, lights and other types of eye-candy. But there's always an exception to the rule; in this case, it's foobar2000.

foobar2000 is exactly the opposite of what you would expect in an audio player. It features the simplest, most minimalistic interface you'll ever see in this kind of program. But don't get me wrong, because this doesn't mean you don't get any interesting functionality.

To begin with, foobar2000 is extraordinarily fast – it hardly took half a minute to index my huge music library – and extremely light on resources. You simply won't notice it's running. Also, as foobar2000 can be controlled with customizable keyboard hotkeys (or media keys, if your keyboard has them) you don't really to open the program's window.

Like I said, foobar2000 hides a bunch of interesting features under its simple appearance. It plays a dozen formats (the list of which can be easily expanded with additional components), features gapless playback, supports full Unicode, includes advanced tagging functionality and even lets you rip audio CDs and convert files from one format to another, provided you install the necessary plug-ins.

In all, foobar2000 would never win a design contest, but it's undoubtedly one of the lightest, fastest and most functional audio players you'll find.

If you value lightness and functionality over appearance in an audio player, don't hesitate: foobar2000 is the program you're looking for.

Download foobar2000 1.2.3 in Softonic

If you’re looking for a really minimalist audio player, you’ve come to the right place. Boom doesn’t require installation and automatically reads and plays the audio files on your computer, no matter which folder they’re stored in. The program works with all popular formats and delivers high-quality audio.

Being so simple, Boom doesn’t include any extra features or configuration options. All you get is the standard playback controls, plus filters to list your music by genre, artist, album, folder and more.

Boom is the perfect app for those of you who love simple, fast audio players. If you need more features, you better turn to other alternative players like Winamp or AIMP.

Boom is a fast, minimalist audio player with no extra features that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Download Boom 1.0.6 in Softonic

LyricWiki harnesses all the power of Wikis to allow you to compile and enter your favourite band and artist lyrics into a very simple and user friendly database.

LyricWiki has been designed to work via the context menu which can be opened via a right-click on the main window. The real appeal of the program is that it can perform synchronization with several different audio players simply by clicking on the player's name in the Player menu. These players include Foobar2000, Winamp, WMP and musikCube. If LyricWiki cannot detect the song that is playing, there is a help section in the FAQ's that advises you on how to solve the problem. The other nice thing is that, if you want to print out the lyrics, you can export lyrics in text format or XAML. XAML has been included so that you can maintain the elegant look of song sheets in in LyricWiki but unfortunately, it's only available with Internet Explorer as Firefox is not supported yet. This is a real shame as the song sheets look much better in their original format than simple text but it's a minor point on what is generally an excellent program.

For music lovers and those that want to link their music player to a lyrics database, LyricWiki is an excellent choice.

Download LyricWiki 1.4 in Softonic

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Download EvilLyrics 0.1.9 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