I find winamp3 a resource hog like everyone else, but also, it's not nearly as powerful as winamp2. WA2.9 with the new media manager and movie playing thing does everything 3 does and more (other than dynamic skinning). If you just look at the WA3 options page, it's got half the options WA2 has. And where's the jump feature in WA3? That was like the coolest thing in WA. The find in WA3 just doesn't cut it. But WA3 has a completely new codebase and is still currently in its relative infancy. The really configurable, scriptable design is really cool and I'm sure it'll develop into a really great player. But until it "matures" a little, I'm sticking with WA2.

As for crossfading, I rate the native XF WA2 .dll does it better. The XF in WA3 stutters when fading between different audio formats like wma/mp3/ogg or whatever (at least on my rig. Dunno if they fixed that yet).

And Real is more of a commercial b*tch than even MS. Look at all the adware, spyware and hog that it wants to load up on system boot. I never touch the thing. If there's something only available in .rm or .ra, I grab the latest converter and dump it into divx before watching it in mplayer2