Free music player & tools

Ok, so you've downloaded a few free albums from the links in previous posts and probably have a decent collection of stuff from iTunes and your own CD's ripped to your hard drive. This week I will point you in the direction of a superb alternative to Windows Media Player for your music along with a couple of handy tools to optimise and organise your mp3's and some other audio formats - all for free.

WINAMP

Winamp has been around for a long time and is still my player of choice. Easy and intuitive to use, Winamp can handle all popular music formats and many video types as well. Import music into the library, create and save playlists, edit tags, listen to online radio and download podcasts.

There are thousands of skins, plug-ins and visualisations available to let you get the most from Winamp and modify it to your needs. I find the cross-fade and normalise plug-ins really handy when DJ'ing parties, often using a visualisation for some eye candy. Other plug-ins include lyrics, karaoke, alarms, equalisers, enhancers and more.

All this is in the free version, if you need more you can always upgrade to pro but I have never needed to. Get either version here Winamp

  Mp3Tag

Correct tagging of your Mp3's is probably the best form of housekeeping you can do with regard to your music files. Properly tagged files are a great help when it comes to searching for tracks and organising libraries and playlists. 
A tag will give information such as artist, title, album, year, genre along with embedding a cover or artists image. Mp3Tag will do all this and is the ideal tool for the job. Customisable features include  filename to tag or vice versa, auto numbering, case conversion and batch conversion with which you can tag an entire album in seconds. 
Supports many other audio formats. Download from Mp3Tag

BonkEnc

BonkEnc is a simple yet versatile ripper and converter with a basic interface. There are options to rip to MP3, AAC, MP4, FLAC, AIF, VOC, OggVorbis, AU, WAV and convert between formats with various bitrate/quality options and CDDB support. Download here BonkEnc
A newer version, now renamed fre:ac free audio converter is avalable from here  fre:ac