Spider Player

For the most part, media players don't impress us; we've seen a ton of them, and few of them offer much in the way of advantages over ubiquitous programs like Windows Media Player. Every now and then, however, we come across one we really like. Spider Player is a sleek, full-featured audio player that allows users to perform a variety of tasks with their audio files. We were quite impressed with both the variety of the program's features and its attractive design.

The program's interface is nice to look at, with a color scheme that is predominantly gray with blue and orange accents. The application operates much as any other media player does. Users can open individual audio files or directories and create playlists with their songs. A built-in equalizer makes it easy to customize playback, and the program also supports streaming online radio. Spider Player does much more than just play audio files, however. The program also allows users rip tracks from CDs and to convert audio files between a handful of formats. We've seen many programs that contain one or two of these features--Download.com is, in fact, overflowing with audio converters--but we're not sure we've seen a program that contains such a useful, well-organized collection of audio utilities. We appreciated that Spider Player wasn't bloated with useless options that serve no purpose except to confuse the user. The program's online Help file was adequate. Overall, we found Spider Player to be both aesthetically pleasing and practical--a combination we don't often run across.

Spider Player is free. The program installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.