I’m a big fan of freeware – there are many commercial companies out there that try to sell you bloated slow and over-featured software for a premium price when all you really wanted was a simple skinnable MP3 player that you could run from your USB drive.
This section is a feature of my favourite freeware tools.
Xion is a great little MP3 player that is fully skinnable and runs from a USB Drive. It’s fast, it doesn’t interfere with Warcraft when I’m playing that and there are some lovely skins available for it. :)
The screenshot here shows the Tranceunit skin but there are 400+ skins available for it so there’s bound to be something you like.
Media keyboard support
‘Out of the box’ Xion doesn’t seem to support media keyboards such as the one I use which almost put me off it. I like to be able to skip tracks that are annoying me without having to bring the media player into focus so this is an essential feature for me. You can actually configure a number of shortcut keys for the application and it accepted the special control keys of my keyboard so now it work as well (if not better) than WinAmp ever did.