I've never gotten my keyboard extra keys to work on winamp, until now. This is a program that lets you run command-line args to winamp. Just thought I'd share it.

This one is good for creating keyboard shortcuts to do basically anything in Winamp: KeyController.

You should try out the VLC multimedia player. It can be controlled via command-line out of the box:

http://www.videolan.org/doc/play-howto/en/ch04.html

vlc --key-<function> '<code>'

VLC has no dependencies on extrenal codecs, and plays almost every common audio and video format: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, DVD, VCD, Windows Media streams, etc. Best of all, it's open source and available for both Linux and Windows platforms.

To be fair, WinAMP 5 has better skinning support. It also sports a Media Library feature. If you like that type of thing, then stick with it.