Some music players are so complex that you spend more time fiddling and customizing them than enjoying your music.

If this sounds like thinly veiled criticism of iTunes then it is a little bit I guess but the point is that some people don't want online stores, most played lists etc, etc. QuuxPlayer is a simple and straightforward player that has you up and running in minutes and includes a 30 band equalizer.

However, the big draw of QuuxPlayer is Wireless Gamepad support which means that you can control it in a unique way from just about anywhere in the room as long as you in range of your receiver. The look and feel of QuuxPlayer is certainly unique in comparison with other similar efforts. However, the developers already seem to be going against their philosophy of keeping it simple by adding automatic lyrics download, control locking for child management and an automatic directory monitoring service for updates amongst many other things.

That said, QuuxPlayer definitely occupies a unique position in the world of music players and if you've got a gamepad, you should definitely give it a whirl even if controlling music in this way is a bit odd.

Download QuuxPlayer 2.0.6.13 Standard Edition in Softonic

According to some happy users, Spider Player is so good that it could even rival Winamp in the popularity stakes for basic players one day. It's certainly a very good looking player and not only that, it makes life easy where listening to music is concerned.

The look is obviously a key part for the developers and they've even included a "tuning" bar in the skin which allows you to change the tone of it according to the mood you are in. As with Winamp, I like the fact that you can also divide-up the player as you like. For example, when you open it, the main playback window, equaliser and playlist are all joined together. But you can split these up as you like and place them in various parts of your desktop for easy access. To control playback, you can simply drag and drop the status bar and it responds very quickly. There's also a pitchshifter, echo and reverb bar to play with.

One nice added little extra us that Spider Player also has a built-in ID3 tag editor and CD ripper that can burn in MP3, WAV, OGG and WMA formats. Once minimised, the player also sits neatly in your system tray so it's well integrated into your OS. This is one of the best Mp3 players I've tried outside of Winamp although it lacks the plugins of the former.

Download Spider Player 2.3.5 in Softonic

There's nothing better than having the lyrics to your favourite songs with you on iTunes. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't include a lyrics retrieval tool but you can get round it by adding this program.

iTunes Lyrics importer or "iLyrics" automatically searches the net when you click "Get Lyrics" and downloads the song lyrics based on their titles. It has a huge databank to choose from thanks to the Lyricswiki project which allows users to upload the lyrics of their favourite songs. Because of this, you're more likely to fine the lyrics of obscure songs rather than other lyrics sites which concentrate more on mainstream offerings.

Normally, iLyrics will give you a direct hit and provide you with exactly the song you were looking for. However, occasionally it will confuse the song with another one but you only have two modes "Update automatically" or "Manual Mode". If you select the former and it finds the wrong lyrics, note that you'll lose the old lyrics and they will be replaced by lyrics that may be wrong. If your initial experiments prove to be a bit dodgy, then I'd recommend using the latter mode which gives you control over whether to definitely replace the lyrics or not.

An excellent addition to iTunes which has a huge resource of lyrics to draw from although be careful which mode you use.

Download iTunes Lyrics importer 1.1 in Softonic

Most of us who own an MP3 player or play digital music on a computer will admit that it’s possible to get a little precious over your audio collection. There’s something very satisfying about having a hoard of music with the correct track and album names for each song. Not only does it look a lot cleaner in your player, but it makes it a darn sight easier to organize your collection and manage playlists. Ensuring that all the tags in your audio files are correct can be a thankless task, but there’s plenty of software around that will make a much quicker job of it.

mp3Tag is one of the better tag editors around, allowing you to edit the metadata (the information about a track’s name, size, album name, artwork, etc.) with a good degree of autonomy. The app lets you rename files based on this tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, and create playlists. It carries out its dutiesdoes the job very well too. For instance, the program has a much cleaner interface than many of its rivals and is smaller to boot, making it very quick and responsive.

If you find that you have a lot of different audio formats on your machine that you want to keep in check then mp3Tag is perfect. It supports virtually every major audio file type, so you can edit tags for Ogg, Musepack, and AAC/MP4, besides just MP3s. tThe program isn't just a tagger, as it also includes cutting and joining functions that perform pretty well.

Perhaps the biggest boon though is the inclusion of a link-up with the online FreeDB database to import tags from the appropriate album, spelling a swift end to those MP3 albums you get with track names like ‘track01’, ‘track02’, ‘track03’, etc.) While the data returned from the FreeDB is sometimes erroneous, it’s generally pretty good (though probably not quite as quick as the import tool in Tag&Rename).

It’s fair to say that mp3Tag is one of the clear leaders in its field, and considering it’s a freeware app, it’s well worth downloading if you want to clean- up your music collection. Tag editing is very quick and once you’ve given your audio the mp3Tag treatment, you should find it so much easier to organize your tracks.

Download mp3Tag 2.41 in Softonic

Master your keyboard and become a real typing ace. Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor is an instructive program aimed at computer novices who wish to get professional level typing skills through an enjoyable learning experience. It also provides an exciting way for more advanced users to hone their typing skills.

The first thing I liked in Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor (TTTT) is that it holds your hand from the start. As soon as you launch the program a rough looking, yet friendly Viking greets you and will guide throughout the lessons. You can always rely on him if you have doubts or questions. The first exercises are meant to teach you how to place your hands correctly on the keyboard and how to type common letter associations. As you move on the difficulty rises and you are asked to type longer key words at a faster pace.

Where you need to reproduce a certain key combination a pair of virtual hands shows you how it’s done on the keyboard. Whenever you make a mistake the letters will appear in red and you will hear a beeping sound. You can check statistics to see with what keys you make the most mistakes. Not one to overlook a detail, TTTT even gives you tips on how to sit correctly in front of your PC so that you don’t tire too quickly. For the more experienced, you can also set your Words Per Minute count to see if you are typing on par with professional standards.

Once you feel more comfortable with your typing skills you can try them out in the two games provided by TTTT: Safari Park and Brick Factory. Both challenges give you a time limit to type certain key associations. You can adjust the speed to make it more difficult.

The Songseeker option blends iTunes to Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. This option can detect what song you’re playing and will download the lyrics if you click on the iTunes logo in the right hand corner. The program will display them and you’ll have to type in the correct characters. This is another way of learning how to type, and what’s more, you can enjoy your favorite song at the same time.

Depending on the language you’ve chosen when you installed TTTT, you can set the type of keyboard you are using. For example, English users will have a choice of UK, US and Dvorak keyboards.

If you don’t feel at ease with your typing skills, I strongly recommend using Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. You’ll be able to learn at your own pace and will improve thanks to a multitude of exercises testing your hand placement, dexterity and speed.

Download Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor 4.7 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

Sometimes, the most popular apps are not always the best choice. For instance iTunes, which may be too big a download for someone who just wants to manage the songs stored in their iPod. If this is your case, take a look at this little app.

Its name is Yamipod, an acronym that summarizes this program’s main function perfectly well: Yet Another Manager for iPod. That’s it. Without even needing to install it on your system, Yamipod will take care of your iPod content management, providing you with a clean interface and simple, easy-to-use tools.

Once you copy the program to your PC, you can run it straight away, although it won’t really work until you plug in your iPod. Yamipod will then scan its contents and list all your MP3 folders and files on its interface. Also, the program does not launch automatically when you connect the iPod to your PC, which may be a nuisance for some but certainly a relief for others. I prefer to take control over when and why my software starts up.

Yamipod’s simple interface displays a list with all the songs stored in the iPod and allows you to perform different managing tasks. For instance, you can browse through your music by artist or album, check the playlists you’ve created or view extended information about each song. You can even listen to music with the built-in player. However, we should note that we had some problems testing this as the player didn’t seem to work properly.

Perhaps the most interesting function is the possibility to copy both MP3 and AAC files to and from the iPod, which makes it very easy to update your music library. If you want to copy music to your PC from the iPod, select the songs and click on the “Copy song to...” option in the context menu. To copy them back to the iPod, just drag and drop the files from the Windows Explorer onto the program’s interface.

Finally, another very interesting tool is the “Remove duplicates” utility. No matter how careful you are, you’ll end up having duplicate songs in your iPod, especially if it’s a large one. Yamipod will find them by comparing ID tag data and file sizes, showing a list of possible candidates before actually deleting them.

Yamipod is certainly no serious competition for iTunes but still, it’s a very interesting option for those of us who own an iPod and need a simple, neat and easy-to-use file manager.

Download YamiPod 1.7 in Softonic

Do you have music files? Do you want to organize your audio collection by artist name, album and songs title? Or you have MP3 player and want to see the correct tags on a display? 1st MP3 Tag Editor can help you!

Our tag processor can edit MP3, Apple iTunes M4a, Musepack MPC, WMA, OGG Vorbis, WavPack, FLAC, APE, WAV files; rename a group of files and folders by tag information; generate tags by filenames and folders path; change capitalization; create Windows Media Player and Winamp playlists; export information to text files and MS Excel; automatically download lyrics and album covers; delete unused MP3-tags.

If your files are without tags and filenames look like track01.mp3, track02.mp3 etc, 1st MP3 Tag Editor can emulate Audio CD header and import songs names from FreeDB. Another great feature is support of Amazon services - just enter artist name and get names of all the tracks from the selected album.

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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

Lyricsnapper is a free tool that retrieves lyrics from the internet. It can be used in two ways. By itself, you can enter the artist name, and song title and the lyrics for that song will appear. However, the most useful way to use this tool is as an add-on to iTunes. When connected to iTunes, it will automatically download lyrics as songs are playing. This iTunes add-on can update the "Info" of your iTunes track to include the lyrics. You can modify the lyrics that are returned as a search, and save those to your iTunes library.

Download Lyricsnapper 0.7.1 in Softonic

This program is a companion for iTunes. iTunes Album Browser analyses your music collection, collates the full albums that are contained within it, and displays the album covers (or spines), with various sorting and filtering capabilities to get to the music you want quickly and intuitively. It retrieves album art from Amazon automatically if required. It can also display album reviews, song lyrics and all other songs from the playing artist.

If you are a REAL music fan and want to listen to music as it was intended, as full albums with tracks in the correct order, then this is the program for you. However, it's also possible to use it as a "jukebox", to mix and match different tracks from different albums as you require. It's also possible to collate "best of" albums by artist or genre, using your own personal ratings.

Download iTunes Album Browser 2.1.37 in Softonic