Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player was first introduced to the world in the fall of 1991, with the introduction of Windows 3.0 with Multimedia extensions. This happened after Creative Labs added digital-audio sound capabilities to the PC platform with their Sound Blaster series of audio cards.

Since then, Windows Media Player has been a part of the Windows Operating System. When Windows Media Player was introduced, it featured support for only WAV and Audio CD, however today, you can listen to 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound with SRS WOW. Digital Rights Management (DRM) has also been implemented in Windows Media player helping users to rip music and also keep them secure. Windows Media Player started off as an audio player only but has evolved into what its name suggests, a true media player.

The current version of Windows Media Player (WMP) is 11, which is one of the best versions of WMP available to date. WMP 11 has native support for most video and audio formats, however some of the most popular formats such as DivX and XviD are still not supported, and you need to download and install these codecs to enable their support in WMP.

Installing Windows Media Player is extremely simple and you can download it from here the size being approximately 12 MB. You will be asked a few questions during installation pertaining to customizing your player. Once the installation is done, here is what you will see.

Windows Media Player 11

There are a lot of functionalities in Windows Media Player that are available by default which you can use. For instance, every time you insert an audio CD in the player and if you are connected to the Internet at the time, then WMP can retrieve data from the internet for your audio CD. This helps in cataloguing information.

Similar to Winamp, Windows Media Player 11 also has equalizers and visualizations installed by default. However, these are not enabled in the typical installation and you will need to enable these (if you want to) when listening to music. WMP 11 also has SRS WOW support by default, which can be enabled in addition to the equalizers present in WMP 11.

WMP 11 also lets you listen to online radio stations and view the latest movie trailers. The new High Definition support in WMP 11 also lets you view HD trailers in its full glory, provided that you have a good broadband connection too.

Similar to Winamp, you can also download and install visualizations and extensions for WMP 11. Check out wmplugins for the latest and greatest on WMP 11.

WMP 11 has become an indispensable part of the digital audio revolution that hit PC's about 11 years ago. For most new users, WMP 11 represents digital media to them, and they are not looking for alternatives. WMP 11 has more than enough to satisfy them!

The Good: Windows Media Player 11 has a simple and visually effective interface; excellent performance, especially with large media libraries; and solid integration with Urge, its de facto music service.

The bad: Windows Media Player 11 has some bugs to work out, though we didn't notice any major ones. Plus, there's no podcast directory yet.

The bottom line: For Windows XP users, Windows Media Player 11 is a must-have upgrade. It's Microsoft's best jukebox effort to date, thanks to a thoughtful redesign, impressive performance, and a ton of useful features.

Musicmatch Jukebox

Musicmatch Jukebox has long been a major player in the digital audio player category, however it always came in third. Mostly because of its resource hogging nature and also because it has remained a shareware player from the beginning. Another factor is the limited enhancements that are available for the player. But these does not in any way make this player a lesser mortal. Musicmatch Jukebox was one of the first players that let users on to the completely new world of online radio. Another first was the "try before you buy" shopping style of online music, which later became a rage with iTunes (their marketing strategy and pricing was much better). Something better than what iTunes offers is the sampling of what you are getting before you buy a song. You can savour different genres of music for a little fee every month, which was possible only with this player earlier but is now available on most players.

Musicmatch Jukebox 10

Musicmatch Jukebox was bought over by Yahoo! Inc in 2004 and is in version 10 currently. The free version of MusicMatch Jukebox does not offer you much in terms of features however the Plus or the paid version allows to rip CD's and also convert music from old tapes to MP3's.

Musicmatch Jukebox has its fair share of fan following, however with new players coming up every other day and older players getting a makeover of late; Musicmatch Jukebox does need to renew its looks.

The good: Radical interface upgrade offers speedier performance and customization; On Demand subscription service nicely integrated into jukebox; remote access to On Demand; share playlists with non-Musicmatch friends; all-in-one player, ripper, encoder, burner, online radio receiver, music manager, MP3 player loader, and download service; secure songs transfer to MP3 players; supports Universal Plug and Play devices; even more customizable; Auto DJ incorporates On Demand tracks.

The bad: Audiocentric jukebox has no support for video or photos; annoying "upgrade to Plus version" offers; some may balk at playlist-centric design.

The bottom line: This music jukebox/subscription service/store combination does it all, but its playlist-centric interface can cause confusion.

FastStone 4in1 Browser

FastStone 4in1 Browser is a FREE multi-window Web Browser with a built-in Web Server, a fully functional FTP Client and a drag & drop Image Viewer.

It enables users to surf the web, run a web server, transfer files between his computer (client) and servers, clean IE records, view and capture images from web pages within one single application. It is a fast, stable, skinable and 100% Free!

The FastStone browser looks like a cross between Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but behaves more like IE. It also has inbuilt support for IE and can import from and export to IE seamlessly. This is especially useful if you are creating a Web site, since you can send images from here directly to IE for preview in a browser or even configure FastStone to display them so.FastStone has a powerful inbuilt image viewer that enables users to capture any portion of the screen-a rectangle or an irregular area-to the image viewer, the clipboard or a file. It also allows users to drag and drop images from Web pages and view them within a magnified format and to resize, crop, rotate and save images in different formats.

One of the other major features of this browser is its ability to capture screenshots. It's a three-click process. Clicking on the 'computer' icon next to the address bar will pop up a menu that gives you the choice of the destination to which you want to save the screenshot (image viewer, clipboard or file). Once you've chosen the screen, it will be sent to the destination you chose.

Download it now.