XMPlay is a universal, free and portable music player developed by Un4seen Developments in 1998. It comes with tiny file size (less than 500 KB), compact and clear UI, powerful extensibility (skins, plugins, visuals and other add-ons), support to all popular audio formats, low memory usage, programmable music playback support, drag-and-drop operation support, complete keyboard shortcuts, and more. In short, it can compete with any premium music players, including foobar 2000 and Winamp.

In my opinion, there is only one thing to focus on for any music players - music play itself, so any functionality or design that has nothing to do with this is gaudy and burdensome. This is why there is only one audio player - 1by1 in my computer. But it may be replaced by Boom Audio Player from today, there are 3 reasons for this decision: the latter has better audio quality; supports more audio formats; supports playing the audio track in a MP4 video directly.

Winamp was first released in 1997, and had taken the world since Version 2 (released in 1998). From Version 3 (released in 2002), Winamp started losing a lot of users. The subsequent V5 and V5.x are both powerless. We can see that, even now, Winamp still hasn't given up the hope of rebirth! While the key to its fate is its frequent owners' change hands (being acquired by AOL was a fatal mistake) and indecisive business pattern and profit model (free -> commercial -> free) - reduced to a pure trade good, which made iTunes perfect.

PotPlayer is a new generation of multimedia player developed by KMPlayer's original author Kang Yong-Huee, after he joined the Daum company (a web portal in South Korea). With relatively small size and clear UI, PotPlayer achieved good support to most of video formats.

AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) is the most widely used, compact voice standard in the mobile communication systems (its audio file size per second can be controlled at about 1KB). It was known as the most common saving format for mobile phone audio recording (including old-fashioned ringtone formats) and widely recognized by each big mobile phone manufacturer. At the same time, it is also the only audio format that implemented loading vocals in the MMS.