Windows Media Player , Winamp Media Player and iTunes Music Player which one?

Firstly we have Media Player by Microsoft this is of course bundled with every copy of windows, or windows media player can simply be downloaded or upgraded through the Microsoft website.

It’s come on in leaps and bounds since it was first unveiled to the world, and today it can play most forms of video, sounds etc, if you find a file that it will not play the chances are someone somewhere has already written a CODEC for it which can simply be installed, giving windows media compatibility with even more media types. It also has the ability to rip audio from CD, create your own playlists, download audio info from the web, plus a host of other features.

To a certain degree though some of this does come at a price, each release of media player has been larger then the previous and has become a little slower, one way to rectify this is to turn off it’s ability to download information from the web, I noticed a good performance increase when switching off many of these bells and whistles.



Next we have Itunes media player , again this is another totally free piece of software, but how does it stack up against windows media player and winamp, firstly it is intended for audio files, and it does this very well, but it does get left behind with video media files, but then again it was designed with audio in mind and offers the largest legal mp3 download store on the web, it also has a great interface which is user friendly and has lots of great features.

Winamp media player was one of the very first media players around, there are simply loads of add-ons on the web which can enable it to perform all kinds of different audio video wizardy, the only thing that really lets the Winamp media player down is the price, the cut down version is free, but the pro version at the time of writing this article is $14.95, it has a many more bells and whistles such as the ability to tune into the shoutcast radio stations, but is it enough to justify the extra cost? I’ll let you make up your own mind on that one.

So in short if your looking for a audio only application, itunes media player does take some beating and is our choice. If your looking for that bit more and want something that can play multiple formats of both video and audio then the media player is the best choice.

As for winamp media player it’s hard to decide where it fits in, it offers pretty much the same as windows media player , but to get all of the extra bells and whistles it does cost extra. Checkout our other Windows Media Player articles

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