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...that is a dead link: https://www.winamp.com/legal/e.... Also the privacy: https://www.winamp.com/legal/p... Let's hope it get fixed.

...that is a dead link: https://www.winamp.com/legal/e.... Also the privacy: https://www.winamp.com/legal/p... Let's hope it get fixed.

I have one issue with your list (otherwise it's great) Winamp while it is great, it seems abandond at last update was in 2014 an according to this post The company does not seem commitrid.

http://www.winamp.com/

Although it's been a bit of a quiet decade... The last release was version 5.666, in 2013, but the bits I use it for still work just as good as ever.

According to DJ Egg, who appears to be the only developer left, the latest public beta appears to be stuck in the dread Swamp of Legaldepts

MilkDrop is still the best visualiser, bar none, and the LineIn source still works perfectly.

It runs on a laptop plugged into a projector that paints the ceiling at our band's gigs with a 1920x1080 screen at 60fps. It is frequently admired and commented on.

http://forums.winamp.com/showt... mind you it was shoutcast related.

I remember when I figured out how to use wwwamp https://github.com/royrico/hal... and several .pls files to have automatic DJ source switching when it required custom solutions back then although never did write it up so can't remember off hand what I did.

Looks like yes.

I believe the problem with UI/UIX is more general than people realize. In short, it's the classic solution searching for a problem. For years and years, we've had loads of small improvements and innovations in UI implementations. It's really come a long way from the very first attempts at it (hello DOS and mainframe systems!), but it seems for the longest time the industry got stuck in the typical Mac OS-look. So in the late 90's, there was a surge of "cool" music players (WinAMP) and whatnot, that started to break from the old principles, with apparent success and "coolness" that others wanted to possess too.

The problem is, whoever tries to copy the true innovators, are often really bad at the game, so you get these really bad clones, and clones of those again. It's sort of a downward spiral where the herd is constantly trying to up their game, hoping for the same success as the true innovators had. In the meanwhile, these old innovators died, probably because, despite being good innovators, they were terrible at business!

This fad-driven development (FDD) has lead to horrible design-ideas over the years. Acolytes tend to swarm to these like flies on shit: hiding infrequently-used menu choices, unnecessarily increasing complexity, nagging popup notifications (ie. in taskbar), hiding the menu itself(!), adding sidebars with questions in Control Panel for "extra navigation" (MS Windows), limiting usability (everything Apple), forcing touch-interface onto suspecting desktop users (MS Windows), extra widgets, applets and whatnot in addition to the iconized desktop (MS Windows), forcing 3D requirements to a 2D experience (Unity), ...

Don't read me wrong: There's alot of good intentions and some good ideas in the UI/UIX-space that have far evolved since the early days, days where just displaying a window with a menu required arcane amounts of magic. For instance, W3C accessibility, universal and reactive design, and whatever they call it these days. Much of it are not really all new ideas, but it's compiled and packaged in a more understandable, copyable and standardized format, to more effectively distribute the core ideas.

The problem is, for true innovation to happen, there has to be total ownership and compensation for the innovators. When that doesn't happen, they merely become followers and copiers, which really doesn't bring that much innovation on the table. True innovation is also more risky, so you both pay more and risk more. In most cases, it makes sense for businesses to lean on the conservative side. Capitalism along with most human organisation, sadly enough, rewards the averages more consistently in the longer run, and need to heed both business and politics as well.

It all boils down to the basic requirements problem: What is the problem you want solved?

There's just never one final answer to that question.

Captcha: detail

I'm listening to Winamp 5.666 right now. Winamp is still being actively developed. I strongly prefer it over things like iTunes and Amarok. The compact design that hails from the era of 800x600 being a common resolution is very nice, the playlist is very compact yet the font size is configurable and the list is resizable, and if I want to listen to anything I know, I just hit "j" and start typing. The only things that are remotely as good are clones of Winamp. Ugly full-screen grey-white music players with tons of space between screen elements are garbage as far as I am concerned.

Nothing ever truly competed with Winamp. It has a great and DISCOVERABLE interface with heaps of easy-to-find hotkeys. Winamp is like the Windows XP of music players; Amarok and iTunes and everything else like that is the Windows 8.0 of music players: crap interfaces, slow to get around, takes up way too much space, and hotkeys aren't discoverable enough. They might as well be RealPlayer from 1998.

BUFFERING *snicker*

This FLAC plugin works for me with Winamp 5.24 (admittedly an old release), though I can't vouch for 24/192 files.

Maybe we should get together a petition to have WA made FOSS?

Someone's already on to it: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=373763

(Quick link to the petition.)

I would love to have winamp back. now if they supported something other than windows.

I hate itunes. I firmly believe it should be three pieces(media player, Media Store and Media Sync). but I have yet find another music player on the mac that actually works.

Winamp for Mac.
Winamp for Android.
Winamp for Windows.

Stop buying your music from Apple and you don't need the store portion of iTunes.

I would love to have winamp back. now if they supported something other than windows.

I hate itunes. I firmly believe it should be three pieces(media player, Media Store and Media Sync). but I have yet find another music player on the mac that actually works.

Winamp for Mac.
Winamp for Android.
Winamp for Windows.

Stop buying your music from Apple and you don't need the store portion of iTunes.

I would love to have winamp back. now if they supported something other than windows.

I hate itunes. I firmly believe it should be three pieces(media player, Media Store and Media Sync). but I have yet find another music player on the mac that actually works.

Winamp for Mac.
Winamp for Android.
Winamp for Windows.

Stop buying your music from Apple and you don't need the store portion of iTunes.

Or as an alternative to Songbird on Windows which doesn't do Podcasts (and doesn't look like it ever will) Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ is pretty good, especially if you pair it up with Winamp http://www.winamp.com/ for Shoutcast streaming radio.

Since I was (unexpectedly) upvoted to 5 here, I'll expand a little on what I said. It's not just hearing the extra details, but also because I enjoy the key change too, and the way the timbres change when the music is slowed down (or indeed sped up).

I use this add-on (which is for Winamp, but semi-compatible with Mediamonkey too):
http://www.winamp.com/plugin/pacemaker/12689

How many commercial applications can copy songs to an iPod?

There aren't many, but there are some. Winamp has been able to since the 5.55 release in March of 2009. It works well, too, I might add.

Winamp. Been around since 1997, even has native iPod sync support.

Please. "Online music sales" and "music library manager software" are not, by any means, the same thing. Apple may have a de facto monopoly on the online music business, but iTunes is definitely not the only music library manager out there, and it isn't even the only one capable of playing files purchased via iTunes. Songbird and WinAmp (yes, that's still around) are two alternatives that come to mind, either of which could easily be made to support -- via proper and official means -- the syncing of iTunes's XML library file with a third-party device. Writing software to do it themselves is also an option for Palm, and one they're clearly capable of, as they've written sync software for ages.

The bottom line here is that Palm is being lazy, and now they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by intentionally violating the USB spec. If Apple wants to prevent devices that violate the USB spec from connecting to its computers, by all means, go ahead. Who knows what other parts of the USB spec Palm might be planning to selectively ignore in the future?

p

You're kidding, right? Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially /[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing. Of course having my player realize to look there periodically is better than it staring dumbly at me until I tell it to.

Have you ever looked at what itunes does when you tell it to organize your library for you? When you just keep your hands off?

songs/artist/album/song.mp3

if its part of a compilation its:
songs/compilations/album/song.mp3

hardly disorganized. Trivial to find anything if you ever need to do it manually. But you don't ever need to. It may not be what you would have chosen but so what? iTunes makes it trivial to sort by genre or artist or whatever you like... if I type 'card' into itunes quick search, it instantly pulls up the Cardigans track from the Romeo+Juliette sound track, along with its appearnace on a compilation disk I got free with some jeans. So the fact that they aren't together on the disk doesn't affect me. I can also browse by album, artist, genre, and trivially filter them.

I can define smart playlists that track how and when I've listened to track and sync it onto my ipod based on that. When I sync my ipod, it automatically rotates a chunk of music I like but have listened to recently with music I like but have not, while keeping my favorites on at all times. I can rerate tracks on the ipod itself, and it syncs back to itunes... etc, etc, etc.

Face it its an above average music player.

The truly sad part about your comment is that Apple could probably have this "advanced" feature added in two hours of work.

I agree they could. They could also add all sorts of pointless dangley bits and features to satisfy people like you, but then it wouldn't be the simple elegant app that it is. I'm not saying your feature idea is bad, but its pretty necessary. Especially since, on OSX at least, its relatively trivial to write an applescript to do what you want here.

You're right. Downloading or ripping the music directly into a destination folder is voodoo magic.
ripping music? itunes does this for you. why would you use 2 pieces of software for this?
downloading music? you mean using a torrent or something? Yeah, because dragging it to the itunes window is the hard part.

Congratulations. I'm happy you like people making your UI decisions for you, but not everybody agrees. To insult them by pretending that must mean they're 13-year-old goths or have "unhealthy fascination[s]" just makes you an asshat. Period.

I take it you haven't browsed the extensive library of Winamp themes?
http://www.winamp.com/skins/browse/2

Take a good hard look, find me one that's objectively better than itunes from an HCI perspective among their top rated? hell, find one anywhere on the site.

I think gimmick terminology is stupid too, but now could you possibly nitpick for no good reason any more than this? It has to be some sort of a record.

I'm sure I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't been in the summary. That the submitter felt it important enough to mention is what made it important enough to rebut.

At the end of the day I think its great that amarok and songbird are available for OSX; I don't even think it shouldn't be on slashdot... I just don't agree with the submitter with respect to the relative merits of itunes vs the new comers.

how do you get that music onto the iPod? Oh yeah, you need to install iTunes

iTunes is nice on OS X at least. There are plenty of alternative ways of getting the music on there if you don't like iTunes. Windows friends seem to like Mediamonkey or WinAmp.

What's a Google? Around 10^100
What's a Yahoo!? A crude or boorish person.
What's a WinAmp? Some sort of political blog.
What's a Slashdot? HALTING ERROR
What's a Firefox? A group of crop circle enthusiasts.
What's an eBay? An employment agency.
What's a NewEgg? Another political forum, this one invite only.
What's a Lightwave? Some sort of fan-fic blog.
What's a Nero? Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar) was born in 37 A.D. and died in 68 A.D. (pp. 154)
What's an Outlook Express? Some sort of torture device.
What's a Visual Studio? A far more subtle tourture device.
What's an AutoCAD? An employment agency.

Really, you're on the net, there's no excuse for not knowing this stuff.

Or for free, but kind of the other way around:
http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details/39214/reviews ;-)

It would actually be interesting if that plugin simulated the "vinyl warmth" well too, and not just other features of it. From the reviews, I'm a bit unclear about that, but they are giving it a high score. Hmm.

Winamp does it pretty well for me.

I think the answers may depend of invites to this party. :)

There are some good visualization plugins for Winamp...
http://www.winamp.com/plugins/browse/1

Nope, because I prefer Winamp for that. :)

Not sure what features you use, but have you tried winamp. With the various add-ins winamp can duplicate almost everything listed in the original post.

I'm sure, that if car manufacturers could send out patches and fixes through the ether for almost no cost, they would. They could then dismiss, some, lawsuits against them by saying "We're sorry that your wife is dead, but you didn't apply the patch which stopped your bonnet from flying open at 70 on the motorway."

The FAA and the Airline industry do something similar. If there is a small mechanical fault that is the cause of a plane crash, the FAA will specify the amount of time airlines have to fix it based upon the cost of the dead against cost of fixing the fault. As for the shrink-wrap licences on aeroplane seat or tickets, I wouldn't give them any ideas. They may not be legal but I think they'd like to try them out.

As for bug-fix-only releases, I assume you don't mean free patches or upgrades. I would say that Winamp comes pretty close to these. Check out the version history and you will see that in many releases, the number of "Fixed" entries outweigh the "Updated", "New" and "Improved" entries.

The problem with OSS is that there are just too many choices.

You're entirely right. Thank god that with closed source, there's only one media player to choose from. And only one web browser. I'm so happy that there's only one closed source mail client too!

I would make my point further, but my comment would be rejected as spam...

It's not preferential. Other companies can make products that interoperate with PlaysForSure.

Really? Then show me where I can get a software player not made by Microsoft capable of playing PlaysForSure Media!

• Nullsoft Winamp
  Can I play my purchased music from services such as the new Napster, MusicMatch, MusicNow, or BuyMusic.com through Winamp 5?
  Yes. Yes you can.
• Amazon Unbox video player
• Musicmatch Jukebox

In particular, show me where I can get one that works on operating systems other than Windows!

In contrast, other software companies are prohibited from licensing FairPlay. Some companies want to license FairPlay so that their software can play iTunes Store media, but Apple refuses to license their DRM.

That said, I'm not sure if I agree with Norway's decision to ban FairPlay. This might be excessive regulation.

Foobar? Winamp? iTunes is one of the worst music players I've used.

What I can't figure out is why anyone uses WMP other than the fact that it comes with Windows. I explicitly uninstall the thing and then use the K-Lite Codec Pack. It comes with every codec known to man and most importantly Media Player Classic. I've tried others, including WinAmp, but nothing comes close to the sheer speed of MPC. Admittedly, for ripping MP3s, I do tend to use WinAmp. But that and Internet Radio and Internet TV are the only things I use it for. If I want to listen to MP3s, watch any form of video file, or watch DVDs, the K-Lite Codec Pack and Media Player Classic are the way to go.

What I can't figure out is why anyone uses WMP other than the fact that it comes with Windows. I explicitly uninstall the thing and then use the K-Lite Codec Pack. It comes with every codec known to man and most importantly Media Player Classic. I've tried others, including WinAmp, but nothing comes close to the sheer speed of MPC. Admittedly, for ripping MP3s, I do tend to use WinAmp. But that and Internet Radio and Internet TV are the only things I use it for. If I want to listen to MP3s, watch any form of video file, or watch DVDs, the K-Lite Codec Pack and Media Player Classic are the way to go.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't understand why people would prefer a media player that can't even let you sort through your library by artist, genre, etc. I find it horribly confusing to use iTunes with this limitation, especially with a large media database.

As another user posted, I think the Winamp developers got the media library interfact perfect. It was simple, organized, and efficient. Even though they have also gone off to the wayside with lots of unnecessary bloat [winamp.com], at least they got the concept right.

  What are Rips?

With every great form of artistry, there will always be people who will steal the work done by others. With the advent of computers, this has become an ever more common situation. Look at the music industry for example; its basically evolved into a landscape of pirates versus the Man. The record labels suing anything that threatens their copyrights out of existence, only to ensure they get paid for the content they own. Their intent is to put all the Napsters of the world out of existence.

The same horrible thing has happened to the world of skinning and plug-ins. There are thousands of extremely talented artists and coders out there constantly fighting the millions of people who have been trained by the piracy of their music to think that stealing other peoples work is okay. These artists, most of which are not getting paid, have had their work repeatedly raped over and over again.

What to do now...

So when I say stealing, what do I mean by that? Any time you take the work of someone else in any capacity do any of the following qualifies as ripping:

- Taking a skin or plug-in and posting it on a website or public forum without the original authors permission.
- Taking a skin or plug-in and making modifications to it, in any form, and posting it on to a website or public forum without the original authors permission.

Assuming that you stumble across a skin or plug-in that violates those two conditions, then the next thing you should do is post it in these forums. Do not rant and rave in the review of the offending violator, it will not help the skin or plug-in get taken down because we will never notice it.

In order to help us get rid of these rips off the site as fast as possible, were going to need you to let us know in an orderly fashion. Basically, we need two things from you, a Component ID number which lets us know exactly which skin or plug-in it is, and also a link to another place that has the original skin or plug-in available download so we can verify that the rip is actually a rip.

Just write a post in our forums with the subject stated as Component ID [number goes here] and within the post, please write the URL to the original skin or plug-in. Feel free to also write any comments you might see fit. Thats about it. Thanks a lot.

I think the point was that they are a legitimate distributor that "plays for sure", since they distribute mp3s without DRM. But I must question your "spy/adware" comment...

First of all, there is a difference, between spyware and adware.

Secondly, I've been using their service for almost a year and have never had adware pushed on me. Frankly, the first site's description of the adware looked like shortcuts to sign up for their services. "Desktop and start menu links"? Come on...

I'm not even sure how accurate this information is. It was last updated almost a year ago. I do have an option to uninstall the eMusic download manager. And if you're concerned about your personal information being shared you can opt out. Most people do not seem to have a problem with is, as eMusic is the second largest legitimate download service.

Also, how do they "push" these files to you? Based on the links you provided it sounds more like Winamp and other free software are bundling these shortcuts to help support their business.

I will say that I hate spyware, adware, and malware as much as the next guy, but it sounds like you're mostly spreading FUD here. I like eMusic and haven't had any problems with adware from them. Do you work for Apple?

If you realy want to report accurate info about the demo scene:

Those sound loops come from FastTracker and FastTracker2 (FT2 is now free !), their file extensions are respectively ".mod" and ".xm".

Those kind of file are called "modules" (.mod => module, .xm => extended module).

The best way to play them now is with the BASS winamp input plugin

If you want to try this out, download modules from all Class Rips by maktone....

To be fair, of course there's a big C64 demo scene with C64 sound loops (.sid files), but you don't actualy find them bundled in PC warez.

AOL sucks. We all know this. So they think that providing their services for free, in an advertising based model will help them.

Yeah, irrelevant to 99.5% of slashdot.

Record vinyl from any external audio source.

Or, if you're lazy and don't want your mp3's as vinyls, just use a Winamp plugin? :-)

eMusic. $0.25 per song (or less!), over a million songs to choose from in many different genres. And what they send you is unencumbered MP3s. No DRM, universal compatibility. Try it out for free by downloading a recent Winamp -- 50 free songs are included. (or sign up for a 14-day, 25 song trial via their website). Support good non-RIAA music!

Note: I have no affiliation with eMusic, other then being a satisfied customer.

It's being sold as an audio CD. You have a reasonable expectation that it will work in your audio CD player(s). If it doesn't, then as far as I'm concerned either the CD or the player(s) is faulty. Assuming your player(s) work(s) with other CDs, the implication would be that it's the CD that's faulty. Therefore, you're entitled to a refund, end of story.

Actually, right from the beginning, Philips has made a stand that these copy protected CD's are never sold with the 'CD-Compact Disc' label on it, since they do not comply with the Red Book standard Sony and Philips published back in 1982.

So if you're shopping for a CD and the logo is not on it, it's a good signal to read a the small print. In my experience, you'll often find copyright notices for the copyprotection on there somewhere. :-P

However, it seems to me that right from the beginning this stuff has gone the wrong way. Hackers and pirates are way more inventive that 'regular' consumers, so any copy protection will be cracked (after all, if it was IMPOSSIBLE to get the audio off there, it would never sell), while Joe Average will never get it to play on his car stereo.

I rip all my CD's to my harddisk, since I like variation, and a big harddrive with WinAmp is a much better CD-changer than a real CD-changer ever will be. I have over time bought several DRM'ed CD's, and none of them have EVER given me much trouble ripping them. Most work was one that required the 'black marker on the outer ring' trick.

My two cents...

It's just been renamed. It's also a bit more complicated to get there now. If you go to Winamp.com, click on the basic player (as opposed to the "Pro" player which costs. Has anyone ever actually bought that anyway?). This gives you four options (it would be three options, but they still give you the "pro option"). Choose the "Lite" option. This gives you the old player.

It's actually good to get this "lite" version instead of old versions because there are a few security flaws in the old one. This "Lite" version is up-to-date with regard to the security flaws, but it has none of the bloated frills of the full version. It's just the good ole 2.0.

Here's the link, by the way: http://www.winamp.com/player/free.php

Winamp + MP3Tag + discogs.com + a lot of spare time = perfectly organized collection.

Funny how winAMP and foobar2000 manage to run faster than iTunes.

Funny also how VLC and even WinAMP manage to not be complete shite at playing videos (and can even do fullscreen omg).

One might conclude that, in fact, Apple just can't handle coding in Windows, or something equally preposterous - because we all know that, unlike M$, Apple's never sued bloggers or screwed over customers or released broken hardware or... oh... wait...

I dared question the illusion that Apple <3's us all, so this is probably going to be modded flamebait - but whatever.

MY MOM KNOWS I'M INSIGHTFUL AND INFORMATIVE LIKE ALL THE OTHER BOYS.

Funny how winAMP and foobar2000 manage to run faster than iTunes.

Funny also how VLC and even WinAMP manage to not be complete shite at playing videos (and can even do fullscreen omg).

One might conclude that, in fact, Apple just can't handle coding in Windows, or something equally preposterous - because we all know that, unlike M$, Apple's never sued bloggers or screwed over customers or released broken hardware or... oh... wait...

I dared question the illusion that Apple <3's us all, so this is probably going to be modded flamebait - but whatever.

MY MOM KNOWS I'M INSIGHTFUL AND INFORMATIVE LIKE ALL THE OTHER BOYS.

... isn't it? Although I use a Mac Mini most of the time, my work PC with Windows 2000 makes some beautiful music with the latest version of iTunes. What's so bad about it? Seems to function precisely as it does in Mac OSX, my iPod syncs beautifully, etc ... what makes it so awful?

Everything already listed, plus the fact that it's approximately twice as slow as MusicMatch Jukebox - anyone else remember -that- piece of shit?

Some excellent, free alternatives include WinAMP and the sleek, sexy, geek-chic foobar2000.

Compared to these, iTunes blows. And QuickTime... well, you didn't mention it, but QuickTime is one of those rare few applications that leaves me completely speechless, save for the word "dogshit" - which isn't even the proper spacing.

I remember installing QuickTime and some of the preferences are a wee bit clunky, but no more so than **chuckle** Windows Media Player **shudder**.

Oh, yes, you -did- mention QuickTime - and you even got all gay about it. I think your subconscious knows what a wretched piece of dogshit it is, and is trying to alert you by TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR THOUGHTS. I'm happy with a crashy old WinAMP, I'm happy with VideoLAN's obtuse interface, I'm even mildly non-peeved concerning Media Player's sluggy sluggishness - but keep QuickTime the fuck away from me. The same goes for RealAnything, too.

Also, I thought Microsoft-anything was always "the worst" with you Apple People(TM). So basically we have one of you charming folk here saying "oh yeah, our media player doesn't suck as bad as... ...WINDOWS Media Player" - in other words, of all the free video players out there, the only one that sucks more than Apple's is... the one that (by definition as interpreted by an Apple Person(TM)) sucks the most? SIGN ME UP.

Adobe Reader: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
Sun Microsystems Java: http://www.java.com/en/
Azureus: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes
Winamp: http://www.winamp.com/
AudioScrobbler: http://www.last.fm/
Mozilla Suite: http://www.mozilla.org/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/
GIMP: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
GAIM: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

I also suggest to get:
B's Recorder gold: http://www.bhacorp.com/products/gold8/index.html
Corel Painter IX: http://www.corel.com/
Powerquest.. sorry Norton Partition Magic: http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/s ystem_performance/pm80/index.html

I'd like to write a small descriptions for each software but I have busy now so this is just fast reply. :)

Seems no one is giving serious answers so i guess i will be the only one

Freeware or open source software:
01. Firefox, http://www.getfirefox.com/
02. Winamp, http://www.winamp.com/
03. Miranda, http://www.miranda-im.org/
04. Media Player Classic, http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli
05. ffdshow, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm
06. CDBurnerXp Pro, http://www.cdburnerxp.se/
07. Daemon-tools, http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
08. uTorrent, http://www.utorrent.com/
09. XnView, http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.htm l
10. ExactAudioCopy, http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
11. Dev-C++, http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
12. 7-zip, http://www.7-zip.org/
13. Real Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternati ve.htm
14. QuickTime Alternative, http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alte rnative.htm
15. Process Explorer, http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/processexplo rer.html
16. Uniform Server, http://www.uniformserver.com/
17. nLite, http://www.nliteos.com/ (sp+hotfix+driver slipstreaming and ability to remove almost anything from the windows installation disc, including wmp, ie, drivers, services, etc, you can get your windows install disc down to 180MB with a 70MB RAM footprint after boot).

Commercial/Shareware software.
01. NOD32, http://www.nod32.com/ - simply the best antivirus software out there
02. Cinema4D, http://www.maxoncomputer.com/ Great modelling/rendering program (also available for OS X)
03. mIRC, http://www.mirc.com/ not the best irc client, but it has a tiny memory footprint/feature ratio
04. Directory Opus, http://www.gpsoft.com.au/ replace Explorer with a far better file manager.
05. UltraEdit, http://www.ultraedit.com/ great editor for many textbased formats
06. Visual Studio, http://microsoft.com/
07. Nero Burning ROM. http://www.ahead.de/ my burning program of choice

The only can't-live-without program for windows I can think of (that hasn't been mentioned already) is winamp.

Most windows apps that I would consider "elegant" are all open source and multi-platform anyway (eg firefox, vlc, xchat, etc).

Download the latest version of Winamp.

Play your favorite tracks and check out the hundreds of presets of the visualization plugin Milkdrop (should be included in your download).

Milkdrop was written by Mr. Geiss, the guy behind the Geiss plugin (created YEARS ago for Winamp ver 2), which is what Apple shamelessly ripped off for the iTunes visualizer.

Milkdrop just plain rules, really puts iTunes' sad excuse for music visualization in its place.