CoolPlayer and WinAmp are two excellent media players that offer users a wide selection of features. Both have their own good points as well as bad points. They also have their own differences. Users would prefer using both or choose one according to their own preferences when it comes to listening to audio files.

CoolPlayer is a good audio player that falls under the freeware category. CoolPlayer can play most of the popular music files available and makes use a simple user interface and fairly easy to understand menus. Its other features include an advanced play list editor, support for WinAmp plug ins, and an 8 band equalizer to improve sound quality to one's preferences. What makes CoolPlayer a good thing to have is that it is small enough as an audio file application and yet packs quite a lot of cool features.

WinAmp is another media player that has been around for a long time. It is a proprietary media player that was developed by Nullsoft but is also considered freeware just like CoolPlayer. It can also play most of the more popular music file formats out there such as mp3, MPEG-1, MIDI, FLAC, WAV and WMA. It is also one of the players for Windows that support playback of the Ogg Vorbis format. WinAmp also supports playback of Windows Media Video as well as Nullsoft Streaming Video. For other video files, WinAmp uses the DirectShow API.

CoolPlayer is first and foremost an audio player. It is known not to play audio CD's. But it can be configured with plug ins to playback video files such as mp4, WMA FLAC ans AAC formats. It is considered an open source application so developers can have their hand in trying to improve on its number of possible features.

WinAmp offers considerable flexibility in terms of support for a wide selection of audio and video formats. But it can be quite large a file to download as compared to CoolPlayer. In terms of customization, WinAmp allows customized skins developed for the player by third party developers.