I've finally found some time to test this out thoroughly.

Yes, ignoring the SingIt and SYLT plugins, the difference purely lies between WinAmp and XMMS. WinAmp (both v2 and v5) will always end up leading both XMMS and emphatic by around a second towards the end of the song. Both the time-stamps and the actual WinAmp/XMMS time counters display this behaviour.

Curiously this is true both of my VBR encoded mp3 files *and* my CBR encoded ones! So why doesn't anyone else see this behaviour???

A four-minute song is typically a second out towards the end, and a six-minute song is typically a second and a half out towards the end. This is really quite noticable! Of course, towards the beginning of the song XMMS, emphatic and WinAmp all agree.

Ross