The latest iteration of Windows Media Player adds a lot of useful bells and whistles, succeeding in many ways as a competitor to iTunes for Windows. A tree-style file directory makes it easy to find the music you want quickly, and a simple search box gets you where you want to go immediately. A five-star rating system lets you rate your music, then organize it by rating, so it’s easy to group your favorite songs. Drag-and-drop functionality and a handy Create Playlist button take any confusion out of the process of making your own playlists. Creating the perfect mix CD is equally as easy–simply drag and drop songs into a Burn List in the right panel, then click Start Burn to finish. Ripping was reasonably fast on our test machine, and the program let us pick our preferred bit rate and audio file type.

WinAmp 5.3 took some long-needed steps to improve the old-school media player, with support for AAC encoding, CD burning, and a robust file-management system. WinAmp 5.56 ups the ante with strong support for portable devices, including iPods, the ability to sync non-DRMed files to your PC from your device, an optional new interface layout and a built-in browser for media discovery.

These days, a great number of people are not only finding the majority of their entertainment online but are also conducting a fair amount of their social lives there as well. In such times, it’s great to have a quick and simple tool for downloading, editing, sharing, and transferring media. RealPlayer for Windows already had most of that down, offering a sweeping array of features, from one-click video downloading to automatic transcoding to social network sharing. The latest offering focuses mainly on improved device integration and an even smoother user experience.

After 10 years and with millions of users worldwide, Apple’s QuickTime player still provides one of the best solutions for digital media. Whether you’re watching streaming movie trailers online or diving headlong into QuickTime as a creation platform, you’ll find little to quibble about in this veteran player.

Adobe’s latest version of the Flash Player browser plug-in is just as trouble-free as previous versions, existing unobtrusively in your system until Web-based animations, games, or ubiquitous Flash ads require its services.

The latest version downloads and installs quickly, and will probably always require a browser restart. Our tests turned up nothing to make us scratch our heads, and upgrading from version 9 to the current one has fixed for many people a bug that caused embedded video to freeze.

You need a Flash Player to experience the Web at its fullest, so users at any level of expertise should have no qualms about installing or upgrading to Flash 10.

WinRAR is a 32-bit / 64-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager. WinRAR’s main features are very strong general and multimedia compression, solid compression, archive protection from damage, processing of ZIP and other non-RAR archives, scanning archives for viruses, programmable self-extracting archives(SFX), authenticity verification, NTFS and Unicode support, strong AES encryption, support of multivolume archives, command line and graphical interface, drag-and-drop facility, wizard interface, theme support, folder tree panel, multithread support and Windows x64 shell integration. WinRAR provides complete support for RAR and ZIP archives and is able to unpack and convert CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, Z, 7-Zip archives. WinRAR is available in over 40 languages.