Winamp, the Groovy Llama
There are a lot of different applications availiable on the web that let you listen to music. Windows comes with it’s own called Windows Media Player but it doesn’t always do the job. You can also download ITunes which has a few neat tools to manage you media library and play video files. Another not so well known but tends to get packaged with HP and Compaq’s Personal Computers is Musicmatch Jukebox.
These are all capable of playing music files such as: .wav, .mp3/4, and .ogg but my single favorite freeware application is called Winamp by Nullsoft, part of Time Warner. It’s been around since 1997 and has grown a lot since. It has a lot of features that keep me hooked on it like: it’s variety of skins, it’s ability to play any video’s in a sizable window, and has plugins for ripping CDs to mp3s and for music visualizations. Winamps visualization plugin is called: Advanced Visualization Studio or AVS and allows for customizable designs and effects that can be saved as a “preset”. The music visualizations are wonderful and winamp now has the ability to make your desktop wallpaper a visualizations. While this is very taxing on your system it looks amazing will impress your friends who like that kind of thing.
Winamp is my choice out of all the windows media players. It’s skin’s can be minimized to create very small skins that take up a very small percentage of your monitor. It’s dockable toolbars let you customize it’s look and can support Internet radio and Internet television.