For a while now, computer users have been waking up to the real threats that exist while browsing the web. Every day, more turn their back on the established vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer and opt for the hottest open source project on the net, Mozilla’s Firefox. But there are plenty of alternatives that offer great features, and one of those is Avant Browser.

Based on Internet Explorer, Avant will import all your favorites automatically and also keep your settings intact. As such it makes a good alternative to the popular Firefox browser, which shuns all things IE, and may seem slightly too foreign from the conventions that many users have built up while using Microsoft’s browser. Although Avant Browser is based on the Internet Explorer engine, it doesn’t fall victim to the same security vulnerabilities (although no-one is claiming that it’s invulnerable), and while it’s at it, adds some great tools designed to enhance your browsing experience.

The Flash blocker is an effective way to keep memory usage of the browser to a minimum or to simply cut out those over-elaborate ads that invade and take over many web sites. To appeal to a wider audience, there are quick links that let you quickly translate pages to a wide selection of languages, or you can customize the look of the browser using the many skins that are included by default. Of course, no modern browser could claim to be complete without tabbed browsing and Avant really delivers the goods with a system that allows you to even reload tabs after you’ve closed them.

In fact, this browser has some of the best extras that we’ve seen to date, in particular the system whereby tabs can be resized like normal program windows letting you display multiple site windows side-by-side, within one browser window. There‘s also a useful toolbar item that displays tags describing the page that you’re on. Click on a tag and you open a list of site that result from a search using that tag or keyword; brilliant! And the piece de résistance is an automatic session saver that lets you open up all the sites you were browsing when you last closed the program.

Avant Browser is relatively unknown as a mainstream browser and as such is not restricted from experimenting and taking the best ideas from the big hitters, as well as adding its own nuggets to the mix. What you get is a very impressive selection of tools in a browser that will even run your Microsoft update without objections. Definitely worth consideration if you are thinking of changing browser.

Download Avant Browser 11.7.15 in Softonic

UltraStar is the PC version of the famous karaoke game series for Playstation - Singstar. The game works just like a traditional karaoke system: it plays the song and displays the lyrics simultaneously, so that you can sing along your favorite artists.

The original point about UltraStar is that it gives you a score according to your artistic abilities. The game analyzes your voice pitch and evaluates how good you are when you sing, allowing you to improve and polish up your syle.

Being an open source application, UltraStar is under constant development. There's a very proactive user community behind the program who works hard to improve the program itself and also to create new song files to sing along.

Download UltraStar 0.6.1 in Softonic

FreeRip is a freeware Windows application that lets you save audio CD tracks to Wav, MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis or FLAC audio files. FreeRIP is also an audio file converter and it can convert audio files from one of the named formats to another.

Converting your audio CD collection to digital audio files to move to your portable digital audio player (including iPod), mobile phone, car audio system, or whatever, is a matter of minutes with FreeRIP. Just start FreeRIP, put audio CD in and click on Rip button.

FreeRIP is a CD ripper, this means that it can record digital audio tracks directly from audio CD to files onto your hard drive (this process is known as "ripping"). You can save tracks as CD quality WAV files or encode them to a lossy (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA) or lossless (FLAC) audio format.

FreeRIP supports extended tagging and ID3 v2 standard, so that you can add information to audio tracks like artist name, song title, lyrics and so on, and FreeRIP will store them in the audio file itself. It also provide access to FreeRIP CD Database, an Open Source, collaborative CD information repository. It also provides backward compatibility with well known freedb CD database.

FreeRIP lets you convert audio files from a format to another: its integrated audio converter helps you to convert as many files you want between the most famous audio formats.

It also includes a contextual search button to help you finding information, images, videos and lyrics about the selected track or artist. Find a song lyrics in few seconds: select the track, select "Search Lyrics ..." menu option and browse search results to find what you need.

Download FreeRIP MP3 3.091 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 6.0.3715 in Softonic

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

Harmony Assistant is a all-in-one software product with digital audio capabilities. Its harmonizing capabilities enable the composer to build quickly and efficiently tunes that include accompaniment, multiple instruments and drum patterns. Its full page edit and engraver modes will ease editing and page setup of your scores.

A wide range of music symbols will enable to edit scores of great quality: notation capabilities are immense. Using the page mode, you will edit the score just as it will be printed on paper. The Engraver mode will make look it nice. Score input can be performed through the mouse, computer keyboard or an external MIDI keyboard.

Harmony Assistant comes with its own embedded software synthesizer (SoftSynth), which provides high quality output on basic sound cards, even without any external MIDI device, and includes hundreds of different instruments. Harmony Assistant can load and save in many formats (MIDI, WAV, AIFF, MP3, OGG, TAB, ABC...).

With MyrScript, the embedded programming language, you can add your own features to the program

More features:

• Complete score editor, with unlimited number of staves
• Page mode editing
• Automatic harmonizer
• Accompaniments & drum patterns in a few clicks
• Tablature calculation for miscellaneous string instrument
• Tablature calculation for Harmonica, diatonic accordion, wind instruments...
• Completely scriptable application. Many open-source scripts are available.
• Embedded softsynth : does not need any hardware other than a sound card.
• Midi, Kar, MOD, S3M... import
• Digital tracks (possible to import WAV, AIFF, MP3, OGG...)
• Wav-to-note pitch tracker, noise reduction, formant-compliant pitch change, ...
• Gregorian notation
• Chord diagram library for various instruments
• Enables to build custom instruments from digital recordings
• Lute tablatures
• Street organ card printing
• Karaoke and multi-voices lyrics are actually sung.
• Enable visitors of your Web site to view, transpose, play or print your scores

Download Harmony Assistant 9.4.6 in Softonic

Zortam MP3 Media Studio is an all-in-one MP3 application that contains an MP3 organizer for performing a range of tasks quickly and easily. Features of the program include searching and cataloging MP3 files into an MP3 library, and editing ID3v1 and ID3v2.3 tags (ID3 Tag Editor).

The program can also be used for converting audio CD to MP3 and WAV format (CD Ripper) using CDDB (Internet Compact Disc Database), complete with support for ID3v1 and ID3v2.4 tags. You can normalize your MP3s (Mp3 Normalizer), search for song lyrics from the internet (Lyrics Finder), and preform a batch lyrics and cover picture update from the internet.

Zortam also facilitates converting WAV to MP3 files and vice versa (WAV/Mp3 Converter), managing M3u playlists (Playlist manager), renaming files using ID3 tags (Mp3 Renamer), searching for duplicate MP3 files, (Find Duplicate MP3s),and listening to MP3's using your favorite player.

Download Zortam Mp3 Media Studio 8.30 in Softonic

Bring your music collection into perfect order with TagTuner. Watch as TagTuner completes media file information, renames and plays your music. The album info search allows you to get media file tags along with CD covers, and rename your files on the fly. Use the built-in Tag Editor to edit tags manually. Play and handle your music without looking to other applications, switch between your favorite playlists with HotTunes.

Now you have plenty of ways to edit your media files tags. TagEditor is the most powerful tool. You can edit one or more tags at once, load lyrics and covers for any of supported media files, one by one, for entire album as well as for thousands of selected files. Or clear all tags at once. You can also edit a single tag directly from the Explorer like file list or within the Playlist View. Status Column shows you the presence of cover images and lyrics in each file.

Download TagTuner 1.9.0.1409 in Softonic

ALSong is a Live Song Lyrics MP3 player with everything you expect in a modern MP3 player, as well as some extras that make ALSong more than just "yet another mp3 player".

Live Song Lyrics let you listen to your favorite tunes and read the lyrics in time to the music.

Find Music Fast in the ALSong Playlist. More than just a list, you can easily organize music inside your playlist, on disk, in special albums, in ZIP files, and in virtual folders. You can quickly browse and search your music your way because everything is setup to make playing your music as easy and fast as it should be.

Create Music Albums to organize your music or easily take with you. ALSong albums have a special customizable interface for you to decorate your favorite music with images and pictures however you like. And since ALSong music albums are portable, you can take them with you on any USB key or other portable storage.

Download ALSong 1.53 in Softonic

As an aspiring guitar player myself, I'll take any help I can get at trying to improve my strumming and picking.

iPlayMusic is a user friendly guitar learning pack which aims to help even the most novice player come up to speed. However, note that this particular download is not actual learning software. It merely gives you access to pick and choose from the hundreds of tutorial videos and packs available from the iPlayMusic Download Store or updates any iPlayMusic packages you may have already installed.

Therefore, this software simply works as a standalone product that acts as a gateway to the rest of the developers products although there are a few free video tutorials and samples available from the Download Store. Everything else will cost you anything between .99 cents and $35. The basic tutorials are just that - unless you're a complete beginner, you won't want to learn too much about the mechanics of a guitar or how to play a G chord. However, the videos on sale look like truly comprehensive learning packages some with over 4 hours of videos complete with GarageBand and Acid projects, pre-encoded iPod videos, and special songs by famous artists not available in the Download Store. All come with split screens showing you the correct hand position, the lyrics and right posture.

If you want a gateway to a huge database of user friendly tutorials and beautifully presented learning videos, then iPlayMusic will have you rocking out in no time.

Download iPlayMusic 1.5.0.68 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

If you're looking for not only a media player but also a recorder aswell, then JetAudio basic is a super solid solution that's packed with features.

It's secret lies in the ability to not only reproduce formats but convert them and even record audio and video. You can convert among all the major audio file formats and convert analog audio to various formats. There are also several visualization features including Sound2Vision tag editing for MP3, OGG, and WMA files plus you can add basic sound effects including wide, reverb, and x-bass. It would have been nice to have had a few more sound effects here but it's not really big on graphic equaliser effects. You can control the speed of audio playback and also perform cross-fading between two songs which is useful if you want to use it as a party and turn yourself into your own DJ. There a re a few skins to change - there should be more - and karaoke fans are not left behind either as there is an options to used synchronised lyrics with kareoke audio files. You can even search for lyrics via "Leo's Lyric Database" although the number of songs is very limited and sometimes the lyrics aren't correct anyway.

A very useful all round player for anyone that would like to do more than just playback their audio files.

Download JetAudio Basic 7.1.0 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

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

When it comes to server management, you shouldn't take any chances and Acronis® Disk Director® Server 10.0 provides you with powerful partition and hard disk management utilities to ensure that your servers operate at 110%.

The developers have a long history of providing support for all Microsoft operating systems and the program has now been updated to support Vista. The program is essentially divided into 4 different components. The Partition Manager allows you to resize, move, copy, split, and merge partitions without losing your data. Partition Recovery meanwhile allows you to recover accidentally lost or deleted partitions. The Disk Editor is a disk drive repair tool that allows you to perform advanced operations on your hard disk drive, such as restoration of boot records and hexadecimal editing. Finally, the Data Destruction utility allows you to wipe out all data from a deleted partition and from unallocated space. All of this can be achieved directly from the Command-line interface so you can create scripts for application tasks. In addition, the program records all actions in an Application log for later reference.

For network administrators or those running a server that need a surefire solution, this is about as professional (and expensive) as it gets.

Download Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 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

With more and more multimedia content filling your hard drive, it’s increasingly important to have some way of managing it all. Teen Spirit is an all-in-one media player and organizer that aims to do exactly this with a focus on usability. A highly user-friendly interface and one click access to album information make this a great application, particularly for music lovers.

If you use Windows Media Player to manage your audiovisual collection then you’ll certainly find Teen Spirit a breath of fresh air. Although the look is not quite so slick and polished, the system for obtaining extra information about a track, album or artist is far better. Teen Spirit works by assigning tags to your music files which are then used to search for the appropriate lyrics and other associated information from several databases including All Music, Net Covers and of course, Google. By casting the net so wide, Teen Spirit tends to return much more extensive results than Windows Media Player. However, be careful with the tags. If they are not specific enough, Teen Spirit tends to retrieve completely the wrong information. Another useful feature is that it stores all this information locally so that you don’t need an internet connection to view album info once you’ve retrieved it for the first time.

You can create multiple music collections by simply adding the folder paths that contain your MP3 files, search through your collections and sort the file list in several ways. Teen Spirit also keeps track of the files you play, lets you review statistics and generates a personal hitlist based on which songs you listen to most. You can also do all the other usual things such as rename files, create playlists and edit ID3 tags. However, you can’t customise the interface in any significant way – there are no new skins for example – and you can’t drag and drop music from one playlist to another very easily. Teen Spirit also lacks an equaliser of any kind although the developers say they are working on a DJ function which will hopefully incorporate one.

However, Teen Spirit performs far less impressively with video files. There’s no info retrieval feature for these and the playing controls are limited. In fact, we found that although it clearly separates your videos from your music, you’re probably better using an external application with more features for video playback.

Teen Spirit is a great application for those who have huge music collections and feel their current music player doesn’t give them enough album info or doesn’t organise files very well. Seeing the right album covers and reading the artist bios really brings your music alive so even if you’re happy with your current music player, you might find you get more out of your collection with Teen Spirit.

Download Teen Spirit 0.93 in Softonic

Jay Brain is a very original audio player both in its graphical design and functionalities. It supports many popular formats and also Internet streams, which can be conveniently added to an auto-saving playlist.

The program's functionality is a bit tricky. All tasks are showed under the same window, even when you browse Windows File Explorer to add music to the playlist. This can sometimes lead to confusion but once you get used to it it's no big deal.

Audio quality is good and what's more, can be tweaked with some special effects. The program can also find the lyrics for the song you're listening to on the web.

Jay Brain is meant to be a basic audio player that can be extended with more features by means of plug-ins, but unfortunately I couldn't find any. I would have specially appreciated a new skin, as the one included by default makes menus hard to read. Hopefully more coders will join the project in the future (thanks to the GPL licence) and we'll see a super-powered Jay Brain later on.

A small audio player with support for many formats and very promising features.

Download Jay Brain 1.1 in Softonic

DestroY MediaPlay is one hell of a flexible media player - it plays video, audio files, DVDs and can even display and play music online.

Not only this, but it features a mini web browser with which you can surf the net. It terms of flexibility, this player is hard to beat. The list of formats it can play is seemingly endless including asf, asx, wav, wma, wmv, ogg, mpg, mpeg and snd amongst many many others. The DVD players is also pretty impressive featuring full support for CDDB so there's no need to label your tracks manually once they are converted to mp3 format. The players also supports some audio streaming although it's designed mainly for SHOUTcast and Icecast streams.

The interface is pretty cool for a free player although it seems like there are only 7 alternatives to the default skin. However, there is an effective Spectrum Analyzer and Oscilloscope plus it supports Drag & Dropping of tracks plus the scheduling of tracks. This can be done by track number, date and up to a set limit of daily, weekly or monthly. In addition to all this, there are hotkeys configurable and you can type in the lyrics for your own karaoke sessions. Add this to an ID3V1/V2 & OGG tag editor, DirectX sound effects and Playlist HTML export and you have a pretty impressive package.

A very comprehensive and modern looking player but it could do with some more skins and slightly more streaming support.

Download DestroY MediaPlay 1.4.0 in Softonic

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