I need an MP3 / WMA player for windows. I just need it on a small laptop loaded with mp3s and WMAs to be used in a party. What would you recommend? All I need is crossfade and maybe some visuals (not critical).

WinAmp? Foobar? VLC? Any other?

Thank you!

I'd definitely say Winamp. It's had crossfading plugins available for well over a decade now.

Of course, I can't exactly vouch for it. I haven't used it since version 2.x, because I didn't like the direction they took in version 3. I see they're on 5.6 now, which is lower than I would have thought, given that this was about 11 years ago... Man, looking at the screenshots in the Wikipedia entry really brings me back

KMPlayer has a lot of "stuff" I never use.

WinAmp. I still use it in the "classic view". Has looked the same on my desktop for more than 15 years.

Same here.

I installed winamp + crossfade plugin (one of the many out there) and it is working fine

Awesome! And if you're interested in the old school, you can get any of the older versions of Winamp from here. I just installed 2.95 for nostalgia reasons. It's just like I remembered it

Will we, one day, look at WinAmp and feel like we (I) feel when looking at Commodore 64 games?!

I also installed some Volume Normalization plugin, and it seems to work too (only tested on 3 or 4 random MP3s, and I am not even sure how different their respective volume was otherwise. So by "works" I guess I mean "it does not crash").

You don't need to install such an old version. If you install the most recent version and select the "classic skin", it'll look and act exactly the way it did 15 years ago.

MediaMonkeys quite useful as you can browse your collection and add to/reorder the "now playing" playlist if you need to as things go along quite easily.