I never quite understood why someone would use Winamp to play videos because this functionality was introduced into Winamp when several other great software video players like VLC, Mplayer or BSPlayer were already in existence. I therefor decided to compare the lite version of Winamp 5.5 against my favorite music player XMPlay.

The Winamp executable has a file size of roughly 2.2 Megabytes while XMPlay one of 340 Kilobytes. The XMPlay folder has a size of 1.9 Megabytes after installation while Winamp’s folder one of 6.6 Megabytes. The first noticeable difference can be found if you open both players without a song and take a look at the Windows task manager.

XMPlay uses roughly 550 Kilobytes of memory in idle state while Winamp lite uses 1.37 Megabytes. I decided to load a seven Megabyte mp3 file into both players. XMPlay was using 2.52 Megabytes afterwards while Winamp 5.5 lite was using 3.88 Megabytes. The difference between both players rose from roughly 800 Kilobyte in idle state to 1.3 Megabytes in idle state with a 7 Megabyte file in the playlist.

I pressed the play button in both players and switched back to the task manager. Winamp 5.5 lite was now using 6.24 Megabytes of memory while XMPlay was using 3.84. The difference rose to 2.4 Megabytes.

Last but not least I decided to see how both players would do when playing Internet radio streams. XMplay was using 3.53 Megabytes while playing a 128 Kbit stream while Winamp used 7.66 Megabytes.

The conclusion is that XMPlay has a far better memory management than Winamp. The real important state is of course when playing music files in the music player and this is where XMPlay really excels. This means, if you really want a “lite” player you should switch to XMPlay instead of Winamp 5.5 lite.

Read More:

XMPlay Homepage
Winamp 5.5 beta download

So, where is the alternative to deleting the files because they are basically useless to you ? You could try some programs that rip the DRM out of the music files to be able to transfer and use the music on your new mp3 player. Please note that using those programs might be illegal in the country where you are living, make sure you know what you are doing before downloading and using them. Not that someone would be able to find out.. The world needs more disclaimers like this, don’t you think ?
The first program that is able to remove the DRM is QTFairUse. It can be downloaded from Rapidshare, the link was published on the forum thread that I linked to. The second tool is myFairTunes which does the same and converts the mp4 file to mp3 as well. I do not think that it makes much of a difference which program you will be using. I suggest you download one and if it does everything the way you want it you stick with that.

I don’t need them at all because I do not buy music, videos or other media in stores that add DRM to the files or demand a ridiculous amount of money for the media.