A simple alternative to the big music players

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.

Spider Player is certainly a very good looking player and not only that, it makes life easy where listening to music is concerned. The good news is that now, Spider Player Pro is now effectively free. The Basic version has been discontinued and replaced by Pro. Formerly, Spider Player had some limitations such as it didn’t have Last.fm support, radio recording were limited to 5 minutes, you could only rip a CD track and convert one file at a time and you couldn’t use custom encoders. However, all these limitations have been removed in this latest version.

The look is obviously a key part for the developers and they’ve even included a “tuning” bar in Spider Player’s 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, equalizer 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 in Spider Player, 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 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 minimized, the player also sits neatly in your system tray so it’s well integrated into your OS. Spider Player is one of the best Mp3 players I’ve tried outside of Winamp although it lacks the plugins of the former.

Altogether, Spider Player is an excellent package which now offers all the features of the Pro version for free.

Fixed:Converting feature preview didn’t work in the FREE version ofSpider Player, now it’s possible to convert one track at a time againOther:”Spider Player Basic” renamed to “Spider Player FREE”

Changes

• Fixed:Converting feature preview didn’t work in the FREE version ofSpider Player, now it’s possible to convert one track at a time againOther:”Spider Player Basic” renamed to “Spider Player FREE”

Spider is an alternative music player that can be placed alongside Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player and Music Match Jukebox due to its multifunctionality. It offers the following features:

• Cool bass and amazing sound quality (thank you Un4seen© !)
• Unicode support
• Powerful tag editors for: ID3 v1 & ID3 v2 tags, Vorbis tags and WMA metadata
• Grab music from CDs
• Rip music into MP3, WMA, OGG or WAV
• Song lyrics editor
• CD-Text support
• Internet streaming (stream files from internet and listen to internet radio)
• Sound effects
• Multilanguage support
• Skins support
• Customizable icons for file associations (via icon libraries)
• Customizable spectrum analizer and oscilloscope visualizatons
• Convenient searching through playlist
• *.m3u playlists support
• Ten-band equalizer with presets editor