I have always been a bit of a Winamp fan on my windows machines as it is simple to use, has 8 trillion skins that you can download, and the developers seem to have a new release like every 9.2 minutes. I was curious about the new apps that may be out and did a quick google search on “mp3 applications” and the first link that came back was for this story here on CNN. I have to say that at first I got a little on the excited side as the article showed that the most popular app was still Winamp – then I saw the date that the article was posted: November 26, 1999. Two things, it iritates me that the content I want from a search engine should be up to date, and second how is it that CNN can write an article 10 years ago and still have it show up on the top of the search results? Bastards!

So who is good? Recently I have heard loads of noise about MediaMonkey. Have I used them? Nope. But the good news is that according to their site they are on version 3.0 which indicates that these guys are serious about sticking around. Furthermore, their feature set is impressive and on par with Winamp.

If you are an iPod fan then chances are you use iTunes, which is a slick application that I despise with every ounce of my core. Why you ask? iTunes has the tendancy of allowing you to buy music and then encoding it so that it works only with the iPod you first put it on. Needless to say this makes me want to throw my iPod through the nearest wall.

I stumbled upon Jinzora which many people swear by. Jinzora support a a wide cariety of formats, many of which I have never even heard of, and is presently on version 2.7.5, which they call Obsidian. Great news is that it seems to be entirely free whereas most of the others have a free version, which includes like 7 features, and a paid one that includes everything.

Last but not least is Virtual DJ which has the highest download rate on download.com. This application is athetically pleasing, beautiful actually, and seems to have a litany of features a mile long. 168,000 people can’t be wrong can they?

After much digging, thats about it folks. If you know of any that are awesome and have some life to them please email me and I will get them up here for the crowd.