Spider Player – Free music only media player

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:45:45 +0000

Despite the fact there are an inordinate number of media players available, it is difficult to find one that is quite as well rounded as Windows Media Player; the application included as standard with Windows. Many other media players are either overloaded with features you will never use or stripped down to the point where the few extra features you are likely to use on a daily basis are missing.

Just recently, however, I was pointed in the direction of Spider Player, an application that is available via a free download at www.spider-player.com. Admittedly this is just a music player and does not support videos files but focusing purely on audio allows it to excel in this area.

It offers a 32-bit sound processing irrespective of the specification of your sound card which should ensure a high quality of playback of all your audio files. The player also supports 5.1/7.1 surround as well as traditional stereo/mono audio files.

Standard features such as the ability to open individual files and create and save playlists are also included along with a wonderfully simple equalizer panel which is available at all times. This can be minimised if you should wish but this feature, along with the DSP effects manager allows you to customise the sound of the playback to your personal taste.

Along with supporting every conceivable file format, Spider Player will also allow you to convert existing audio files in to another format; for example to change a WAV file to a small MP3 file. This is provided in addition to the ability to rip tracks directly from a CD and then convert them in to a number of formats including MP3, WMA and OGG.

Direct access is provided to a number of Internet radio stations and can record up to five minutes of transmission to any one file (recording time is unlimited in the professional version).

While the standard design of the player is relatively pleasing as it is, the player is fully skinnable with a variety of designs available for free from the developer’s website. If you would rather personalise your own player, there is a skin development package available for download from the website.

Users who require the ability to play video may be best looking into downloading the excellent VLC Media Player, one of the many alternatives mentioned in Click over the years, or sticking with the faithful Windows Media Player. For those that are primarily concerned with music, Spider Player certainly comes highly recommended as although the claim “The Ultimate Music Player” may seem rather grandiose it certainly comes with all the features I could hope for without any of the chaff I would have previously tolerated.

Readers Questions

admin — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 15:11:47 +0000

I’ve received a couple of e-mails in the last week which I thought I’d share with my Click readers.

It was interesting to read your article about YouTube last week although one of the disadvantages of this website is that it has not been possible to download the videos on YouTube for offline use. This means that you will not be able to view the videos away from an internet connection, and if one of the videos is removed for any reason you will not be able to see it again.

This problem is solved with YouRipper (free from www.snapfiles.com/get/youripper.html) which allows you to download any YouTube video as a Flash video in .flv format. YouRipper acts like a video recorder for YouTube, and allows archiving of your favourite material.

The .flv format that YouRipper will save the video as cannot be played in most of the common media players but it can be played in the freeware FLV player which is available as a separate download at http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/FLV-Player-Download-27852.html. This is a useful piece of software as it is a nuisance to be permanently tied to what is available online at YouTube.

Ian MacMillan, via e-mail

Another good find there by Ian and another piece of software for me to add to my rapidly expanding collection. I see a particularly good use for this program would be downloading music videos then converting them to AVI format with a free program such as Riva (www.rivavx.com) with the intention of then compiling them to a CD or DVD.

Until recently I have been able to transmit & receive photographs in the format JPEG however, I find now that although photographs are received I cannot open them. I get a message to the effect that Outlook Express restricted the opening of the attachments due to unsafe content.

The sources are well known to me so I know that the images are no unsafe and moreover, messages that contain photographs that were previously openable have become unopenable. My AVG anti-virus reports on each e-mail ‘No virus present’ and AdAware reports no critical objects.

Keith Wheatley

This is an extremely common problem for many people hence I have chosen to feature it in Click this week. Microsoft in all their wisdom decided that in a recent update to Outlook Express that they would disable the opening of all files attached to e-mails. Whilst some would consider this prudent security I consider it to be over the top, especially when you consider the files you are discussing couldn’t possibly contain a virus as they are not executable.

There is an easy way around this fortunately so when in Outlook Express click on the ‘Tools’ tab, ‘Options’, then ‘Security’ and then make sure that there is no tick in the ‘Do not allow files to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus’ box.

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Spider Player – Free music only media player

Readers Questions