Media/Music Player Rundown - Nullsoft Winamp

Winamp used to be the second best music/mp3 player available; nowadays it's way down the line.

So what's it good for? As far as I can tell, the free version of Winamp can't do anything that other players can do. Nullsoft Winamp is owned by the almost completely evil AOL and - ever since they bought the player to use as a build-in for their god-awful AOL dial up garbageware - the Winamp player has been a shell of its former self.

There are a few good points, though. Winamp does a very good job of managing and making playlists of your song collection. It also does a pretty good job of playing video, especially streaming video.
Audio quality has always been topnotch but if you want it to rip a CD, the free version of the player does it at the amazingly slow 2x speed. It doesn't rip any music into an mp3 format, in fact it doesn't rip into AAC or Windows media formats, either.
If there are any selling points for poor old Winamp, it just happens to offer free XM Satellite Radio (which you can listen to for free at AOL's website) and it's fun to customize your player with skins, plugins, and visuals.

Sorry, but unless you pony up $19.95 (and we don't do that here), the free version of Nullsoft's Winamp just doesn't seem to be able to cut it anymore.

To see for yourself, download Nullsoft Winamp 5 (free version) here.