Archived from ListenSmart.com, November 3, 2003. Historical; not current advice. Software, prices and links are as they were then.
Source: Wayback Machine capture.
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Windows Players
Windows Media Player Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
Windows Media Player is very powerful and versatile player that allows you to play almost all popular audio files, including MP3, WAV, MIDI, Real Audio, and video files, including MPG, QuickTime, Real Video, and AVI. It also has the ability to play anything from low-bandwidth audio to full-screen video. Additionally, when accessing an audio or video clip, Windows Media Player checks to see if the required codec is installed. If not, it will automatically search for and download the codec for you, and then play the file. Above all, Windows Media Player is the most flexible and convenient player for accessing multimedia content.
RealPlayer 7 Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
This is the only player you need to get all the great RealAudio and RealVideo content on the web. It supports the streaming audio and video formats, thus allowing you to avoid all the download delays -- i.e. the sound bytes run while being downloaded, not after. RealPlayer's new SmartStream™ technology eliminates rebuffering and enhances audio and video quality. Its preset audio and video channels make finding content an easy task. Also new to the RealPlayer is its Take5 feature. Take5 offers daily updated multimedia content to users seeking entertainment. More than 100 media partners provide the portal's content in the form of daily headlines, comedy features, and music news.
RealJukeBox Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
RealJukebox is piece of audio software that lets you listen to your CDs as you convert them to MP3 (or RealAudio) format. RealJukebox not only gets artist and title information from the online CD Database (CDDB), it also can automatically group songs by album, artist, and genre as it saves them to your disk. Thus allowing very easy management of your digital music collection. It has the ability to play a very broad range of digital music, including CDs, RealAudio, MP3, Liquid Audio, A2B, and other universal music formats. Additionally, RealJukebox features helper wizards and tips to guide you through common activities such as playlist creation, music sorting functions, and support for skins.
Winamp Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
Winamp is a player that showcases a wide array of features and an impressively malleable interface. In addition to your audio CDs, Winamp supports MIDI, MOD, MP2, MP3, S3M, XM, VOC, WAV, WMA, AAC (via plug-in), and VQF (via plug-in). It features a 10-band equalizer, a drag-and-drop playlist, a mini-web-browser, and streaming audio capabilities. But possibly its most popular feature is its ability to support skins, or alternate player faceplates. After a quick download, Winamp can take on just about any appearance you choose.
EarJam IMP Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
The Earjam IMP plays all popular music formats, and supports all popular music devices. MP3, Windows Media, standard CDs and more. Burn your MP3 collection onto CDs you can play in your car. Or load up your RIO or Nomad with your favorite jogging tunes from your CDs and MP3s. The Earjam IMP does this all automatically, ripping and decoding and transcoding and burning and all that technical stuff, with just one click. For you CD-Burner fans out there, this is the best burner engine in the business. The Earjam IMP supports virtually all CD-Burners, at full quality and full speed. You will be burning your music collection onto CDs at the full speed your recorder can handle.
PCDJ Phat Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
PCDJ Phat (Pretty Hot And Tight) is uniquely capable of playing or mixing two audio or video files at the same time without the stuttering or gurgling associated with typical jukebox audio players. It streams radio beautifully, has it's own record cases, and you can set it up to play automatically. PCDJ Phat is a cool player with tons of sophisticated features for music enthusiasts. It delivers sound of the highest possible quality.
MusicMatch JukeBox Windows 95/98/NT Homepage | Download
MusicMatch Jukebox 4.0 is a quality player that can both play your favorite audio CDs and encode them directly to MP3s with remarkable speed (about 5x faster than normal play time). Using Xings's encoding technology, the audio CD is digitally extracted and encoded directly to MP3 format with no intermediary WAV file. It manages MP3s with its integrated playlist editor, and houses them within its built-in music library. Additionally, there is an Auto DJ features that creates playlists automatically based on your sorting preferences. MusicMatch Jukebox also features CDDB support, allowing you to access artist and song info via the Internet.