Just about any player will play both of those formats.

Right, but I prefer WMP9.

Windows Media Player 9 is the way to go

Heres an article about winamp2.x, 3 and 5 if anyone is intersted.


http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1021601.html?tag=fd_ots

Windows Media Player 9

Winamp 2.9x because of visuals, plugins, skins (though WA3 free form skins rock). 5.1 Sound!!! Lets see WMP9 give you a center channel.

Oh and BTW Winamp and WMP9 use the EXACT same directsound codec, so there is no way WA or WMP9 can sound different. Unless for some reason direct sound is polled diffferently from app to app.


For you people with 6 speakers you can download the 5.1 Output plugin for Winamp, its kinda buggy but you do get your center chan!! There is also an A3d output plugin too, but i can only get 2 chans to work probably because most Mp3s are encoded in 2 chans.

When you have over 50GB of media, having the auto-generating library feature of WMP is very handy. While I have a gazillion MP3s to keep track of, it's still much nicer than pulling the original CD from storage just to hear one track from it.

I use winamp because it is small and unintrusive. It can sit right at the top of the screen, always on the top layer and in a small amount of space and stay out of the taskbar. WMP can be minimized but the skins are all but-ugly and you usually lose a lot of functionality and as far as I can tell you cannot set it to always be on top.

Anyway, that's winamps advantage as far as I am concerned.

WinAMP uses it's own library for MP3 decoding.

WMP9 is my player of choice. Winamp2 used to be my music player of choice, but I prefer to have an all-in-one player. All-in-one, I think WMP9 kicks everyone's butt. They finally caught on to some of Winamp's innovative features like "enqueue".

Francis