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Eric's site, Winamp Unlimited, expands a little on the Winamp situation, and also has comments on most of the news articles that've been published regarding the topic.

If you missed it in the last discussion, he also has written a past article on what some of the ex-Nullsoft kids have been up to.

It's weird talking about myself in the third person.

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With the two founders of the company gone (Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper) and now Steve as well, it seems the soul the company is gone regardless of who still might be present.

Tom and Justin came up with Winamp originally, and worked together on the rest of Nullsoft's treasures including SHOUTcast, W.A.S.T.E., and Gnutella. Tom said goodbye last month, for undisclosed reasons.

Hmm... how about Winamp? You can continue to download Winamp 5.05 from their website, and the announcement said they will continue to release minor updates, such as security patches and plugin support. Unless you change to a brand-new streaming format that only a new player supports, why should people switch away from Winamp? Just because AOL is letting the rest of the Nullsoft team go, it doesn't mean that you have to stop using a program that really whips the llama's ass.

Just use the iPod support plugin in Winamp. Not only does it let you sync and listen to your iPod in Winamp, it allows you to "Copy Selection to Hard Drive". There are still some kinks in it. It has a habit of creating literal album names for directories (which is a problem for DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...". Windows doesn't like them ellipses).

Of course worse comes to worst I navigate into the iPod in Windows Explorer, CTRL+C all the directories and CTRL+V it onto my Harddrive. No big deal.

If you're trying to set up OGG streaming, use jetCast or something for Winamp-- it works with Winamp5 just fine.

Winamp5 will also play OGG streams just fine-- but I personally use FooBar2000.

For the record, I cannot believe how good OGG vorbis sounds at just 64kbps VBR. Beats the pants off of 128kbps CBR MP3 for streaming.

Just a note, there is now a Winamp plugin (53 user reviews, majority positive) to interface with the iPod. Still not the same as the player being recognized as an external USB drive and copying files to it, but this caters to the pro-Winamp non-iTunes users.

Sounds about right, so in the spirit of imagining user requirements, I'll simply describe what I have done: I've got a P3 450 MHz running XP Pro, with 300 GB of hard drive space. I'm using the optical digital output (SPDIF) from my soundcard driving a $9000 stereo system, so I don't want to fool with any kind of lossy compression, so I use FLAC. I use Winamp as the player, since there is a FLAC plug-in for Winamp, and a webserver plug-in. The webserver plugin allows you to send http get requests to Winamp to send commands to it. Then I have a perl script that scans my directory structure (spanning multiple logical hard drives) for all FLAC (and WAV, and mp3), and generates an HTML file that has a (per album) table of contents, which is hyperlinked into the webpage body. In the body, you can play an album, any one song, or "create a playlist on the fly" by simply checking checkboxes (per song). This webpage is served by an Apache server, which is also running a Perl CGI script, which receives the commands from the webpage, and dispatches the appropriate commands to the Winamp webserver plugin. Additionally, I can control my pre-pro from the same webpage, by using Win32SerialPort for Perl, and the pre-pro's serial port. Lastly, I have a set of scripts that: (1) Convert WAV files to FLAC (for use right after ripping a CD) (2) Convert WAV/FLAC files to mp3, and copy them to another PC, where I maintain my iPod directory. (3) Copy these mp3 to my PC at work. Now I only need to use Apple's COM interface to automatically update my iTunes library so I don't have to go into iTunes and tell it to add a new folder! Almost forgot to mention, the main reason I think the web interface is such a good idea, is because: (1) I can control it from any computer on the network, and (2) Using either an RF keyboard, and/or a standard universal remote and Girder, I can have full control of the stereo from my couch. For now, I have a 17" monitor in my stereo rack (yeah, it ain't pretty), and use PHP commands to make the web page text large on that monitor. Long term, I plan to have a 50-60" LCD or DLP projection TV, which will be much nicer.

iTunes is quite lovely, shares well across networks, and is easy as pie (I quite like the Party Shuffle feature).

WinAmp features the same (lovely with some skinning, anyway) and you can get plug-ins that turn it into a web-server for controlling which song to use over the network. Sharing across the network can be accomplished with an SMB share.

Then of course there's everyone's favorite *snore* Windows Media Player. There's really no excuse for using this.

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Here is an entertaining article on the event, along with a close-up of what the stars might look like.

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Tried it too once, too bloated for me. Try winamp, especially the 2.9 version if your into light.

CDEX
IRFanView
Winamp
iTunes
FireFox w/AdBlock and various other extensions
Some music
Assorted pictures
Spybot & AdAware
XP SP2
DefilerPak
Novell VPN client
Citrix client
Farbrausch demos
PuTTY
and the all-important XEvil

It's just MS's WMA format that iTunes can't play, but neither can any other player anyways.

That's not exactly true.

Well I'm now better off buying CD's then using DRM telling me how many computers I can put it on. Here are a few things I found interesting from their privacy policy...

"Microsoft also provides a service that lets you move your own secure content..." Gee thanks M$ for letting me put the content I purchased where I want to

"Unless the migration limit has been reached, a new license will be returned that enables use of the content on your new computer. Microsoft keeps track of the number of migration licenses granted for content that was first licensed on your original computer and allows a limited number of license migrations."
Great so if I move it to my work, laptop and home computer I might not be able to play what I purchased? Furthermore, how does this work since my laptop / home run Gentoo Linux?

I'll be sticking with ANYTHING BUT THIS.
Thanks for deciding to licence my music for me, M$ how nice of you. Not even Real does that, come on!

What about the Atlas 3 and the Atlas 4? Did these guys take counting lessons from the RIAA?

No, they took it from these guys.

winamp, ogg vorbis and Creative have all helped, along with whoever coded the synths that Deep Dish use.

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What many people don't realize is that Winamp 5 IS Winamp 2 (Check out this this article.). It's the same code, but with extra plug-ins bundled in. The user can choose which plug-ins or features he wants to include or not include when installing. So I'm not sure how you could call the application bloated when the app installs only what the user feels he or she needs.

What happened to Winamp 4?
You're not imagining things. Yes, we skipped a version number

Skip the debating, go straight to the source!

but i think another format is just going to confuse new users.

We're almost there with real, live updating, smart playlist support now (which no other third party iPod-capable app has yet, that I know of).

Ha ha! Too bad it's Real Media! I hate that thing... repeatedly crashed under Win 2K, couldn't turn off its auto start/integration/advertising, had trouble uninstalling it. It was fine when I first used it back in the Win 3.x days but since then it has bloated into, quite possibly, the ugliest media player I have ever seen.

Show me a service that works with WinAmp (and on other non-MS platforms too) and I would gladly open up my wallet. Seriously.

I was actually just discussing this with a few friends yesterday. I wasked them whether they thought streamripping music off of shoutcast stations using winamp and the streamripper plugin was illegal. We came to the conclusion that no, it wasn't because it's obviously the same thing as recording the radio with a cassette recorder. I also brought up the question of since it's obviously not illegal to share music with your friends in a car or something, what's so different about broadcasting it over the internet? You're sharing it with your friends, albiet 1,000 of them. Hey, if you had a big enough card you could do it there, why not the net? You can apply so many situations to these kind of questions, it just gets ugly. I think the RIAA needs to realize the path of destruction is paved by good intentions.

I have a small LCDCrystalfontz screen (20x4 or something like that), that with LCDriver (I think that's the right one) you can use Winamp to display the titles onscreen and even do waveforms, along with a slew of other things. It's not as big or as potentially pretty as that might be, but.. It's sweet none-the-less.

I don't see other popular media players using the standard windows UI. Do you?

The above is a moot point, anyway. Keeping the UI of an application consistent with the UI of all the other apps on a particular OS is very important if you want to increase the rate of adoption. Media players are an exception because just about every media player fux up the UI to a confusing level.

Take the look and feel of another popular open source media player as an example. When my mac buddies look for a video player capable of playing mpeg-2 (or whatever file-type it is they're having problems with that day) if I point them to VLC, they love it! It looks and feels exactly like any other mac application they use, from the metal UI, to the menu at the top of the screen, to the double-clickable .app bundle and high-res icon. They end up accepting it alot more easily than an application that didn't fit the Mac look and feel. Similarly, when you run VLC in Windows, it LOOKS and FEELS like a windows app, and on linux, it LOOKS and FEELS like a linux app. Hell, on BeOS, it looks and feels like a beos app.

I think it would be a step backwards for FireFox to consolidate on a single theme across all platforms.

Winamp featured this iPod plug-in not too long ago in this hilarious article: Have Winamp, Will Travel.

This seriously is an awesome plug-in. It does pretty much everything I want it do with my iPod (file/playlist transfers, syncing, media management, etc..), except integrated with the media library in Winamp, which I much prefer over iTunes' interface. It even has a few features that other apps like ephpod doesn't have. The ads are great, too.

While developing a competitive audio portable against the iPod certainly is a possible feat, there's more to the iPod's success than just the actual player. What about ease of file-transfers and syncing? The iPod killer has more to beat than just the iPod. It'll have to beat the iPod-Winamp combination.

While yes, existing portables have their own merits, very few of them are supported by an application like Winamp that can flawlessly sync my audio files (and ratings and playcounts) from my media folders to my iPod, or reverse-syncs my iPod so that my media folders match up with what's on my iPod. It'll have to beat Winamp's intuitive artist/album views, ipod-media library integration, mp3 transcoding, and other features...

Winamp and the iPod "just work."

With iTunes and ITMS, I can use PlayFair (renamed to something I can't remember offhand) to have no DRM at all and convert to MP3 at will if I were silly enough to own a lump of plastic player music and was not an iPod. Can you do that with your WMA?

Yes.

ANY music file i have used so far can be converted to mp3.

1. Download Winamp
2. Install and load up the files you wanna convert.
3. Go to Options > Preferences, under Plug-Ins > Output click on "Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in" then click configure and set the directory you want to save the WAV file.
4. Now play all the music files you want to convert. This will rip out just the sound of the file in wav format to the directory you specified.
5. Now take that wav and either play it or convert it to mp3 with something like cdex.

Basically if you can find a way to play music you can convert it into a DRM free file.

If they're planning on touting Real Player's supported formats, they've got a long way to go.

Out the box, Winamp can play MP3, MP2, MP1, AAC, WAV, VOC, VOX, AIF, AIFF, AIFC, AUD, AU, SND, SVX, MIDI, MID, KAR, RMI, MUS, HMP, HMI, MSS, CMF, GMD, XMI, MIDS, MIZ, HMZ, MOD, XM, S3M, STM, IT, MTM, ULT, 669, FAR, AMF, OKT, PTM, OGG, CDA, MP4, M4A, WMA (lossless and pro, drm/no drm), AVI, MPEG, MPG, M2V, WMV, ASF, OGM, NSV...

If you have Real Player/Alternative installed, you can even just play the Real audio or video files through Winamp. Same goes for Quicktime. You can just stick with the good stuff.

FLAC, SHN, MPC, M4P/M4B, and many others are supported easily supported with plug-ins. And I'm SURE I've forgotten to list a couple formats that should've been mentioned.

If they're planning on touting Real Player's supported formats, they've got a long way to go.

Out the box, Winamp can play MP3, MP2, MP1, AAC, WAV, VOC, VOX, AIF, AIFF, AIFC, AUD, AU, SND, SVX, MIDI, MID, KAR, RMI, MUS, HMP, HMI, MSS, CMF, GMD, XMI, MIDS, MIZ, HMZ, MOD, XM, S3M, STM, IT, MTM, ULT, 669, FAR, AMF, OKT, PTM, OGG, CDA, MP4, M4A, WMA (lossless and pro, drm/no drm), AVI, MPEG, MPG, M2V, WMV, ASF, OGM, NSV...

If you have Real Player/Alternative installed, you can even just play the Real audio or video files through Winamp. Same goes for Quicktime. You can just stick with the good stuff.

FLAC, SHN, MPC, M4P/M4B, and many others are supported easily supported with plug-ins. And I'm SURE I've forgotten to list a couple formats that should've been mentioned.

A lot of Windows users have done pretty good without the SDK so far, in terms of iPod connectivity. If you need any proof, just look at ml_ipod, the open source iPod plug-in for Winamp. It integrates itself seamlessly into Winamp's media library and even has a couple hidden features you might not see with iTunes or even in other 3rd party applications like Ephpod. I know more than a few people who've already switched to Winamp for better iPod connectivity, including myself.

Strangely enough, I've actually heard developers say they won't even touch the SDK: "The .h file is 10k lines. iTunes' bloat is infectious."

"Also, the SDK should allow people to play AAC files (including those purchased from iTMS) through WinAMP"

There have been Winamp plugins to support the DRM'd iTMS AAC's for some time as well.

First of all, there is already an iTMS input plugin for Winamp. It has been around for some time. It uses the existing QuickTime SDK to play the music.

This new SDK has nothing to do with that. Now, I haven't exactly had much time to review it, so I could be wrong, but what this new SDK looks like is scripting support for manipulating the iTunes interface. For instance, you can write scripts which build playlists, tag files, etc. Basically, this allows you to automate tasks that you might otherwise perform through the iTunes UI.

On Mac OSX, such functionality has been available via AppleScript for some time. In fact, many OSX programs expose functionality like this via AppleScript -- a practice I wish were more widespread on other systems.

Of course, Windows doesn't have AppleScript, but it does have COM, which I guess can be used in vaguely similar ways. So, they have exposed all this functionality via COM instead. The download includes some example scripts written in Javascript for creating playlists, removing dead files, etc. Of course, since it's COM, you can use pretty much any language you want to access it (including C/C++, though I wouldn't recommend it for this sort of thing).

Kudos to Apple for doing this. They could have been snotty and kept the scripting abilities exclusive to OSX, but they instead chose to support both platforms equally.

But, no, I don't think Winamp or WMP have anything to gain from this. Sorry.

You can make trillian transparent to different degrees when it does or does not have focus
trillian

winamp 5 does transparent windows too.

Copying from one drive to another on the fly like this can introduce lots of tiny errors. They're not that noticable, but the preferred method of getting an exact copy is to use something like EAC to extract to the hard drive first, then burn to CD.

Umm... Sorry, no.

Although errors can theoretically occur, for the PC to not catch it, you'd need an enormous amount of corruption over a small area, that produces reproduceable false reads, with the correct CRC. Not bloody likely.

Theora doesn't have a working windows codec.

Sorry, I maybe wrong, but what about this?

The nullsoft video format which by the way is embedded in winamp uses it...

• Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.). Foobar and Winamp with a little tweaking open almost instantaenously, while iTunes lags behind on starting up. Even when minimized, iTunes is taking up far more CPU than a media player should (even more than WMP!).
• MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
• Queueing. Once again, something included with XMMS, Winamp, and even MMJB. If your listening to a huge random playlist of songs in Winamp, but want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then shuffling the rest. Or you can hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.
• Downloading Songs Off iPod Through The Media Player. Instead of assuming your user is doing something criminal and (flimsily) preventing them from easy access to the songs on their iPod, why not give them the freedom to move songs back and forth onto their hard drives. ml_ipod, a plug-in that lets you manage your iPod through Winamp's media library, not only allows you to transfer songs from your iPod, but lets you even "reverse-sync" them.
• Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
• Gapless playback on iPod. This is a big deal to audiophiles, and I'm really surprised by the iPod's lack of support on this. The Rio Karma does this. Why not iPod?

Though I'll admit that the join-tracks feature was much-welcomed, what else did iTunes users get? Instead of downloading songs with propietary DRM, now we can encode our songs with a new proprietary DRM--songs that won't play on anything else? I think I'll stick with FLAC. The ability to publish my important music playlists for the whole world to see? I think I'll stick with Audioscrobbler. A free song from another bland RIAA-sponsored band? Epitonic has always provided a good sampling of independent artists and their music for you to try out. A wishlist to download those Top 40 songs later? Well, why don't I just download the songs now off allofmp3 now with their ridiculously low prices, in whatever format I want, without DRM? Import unprotected WMA files? Winamp

• Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.). Foobar and Winamp with a little tweaking open almost instantaenously, while iTunes lags behind on starting up. Even when minimized, iTunes is taking up far more CPU than a media player should (even more than WMP!).
• MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
• Queueing. Once again, something included with XMMS, Winamp, and even MMJB. If your listening to a huge random playlist of songs in Winamp, but want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then shuffling the rest. Or you can hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.
• Downloading Songs Off iPod Through The Media Player. Instead of assuming your user is doing something criminal and (flimsily) preventing them from easy access to the songs on their iPod, why not give them the freedom to move songs back and forth onto their hard drives. ml_ipod, a plug-in that lets you manage your iPod through Winamp's media library, not only allows you to transfer songs from your iPod, but lets you even "reverse-sync" them.
• Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
• Gapless playback on iPod. This is a big deal to audiophiles, and I'm really surprised by the iPod's lack of support on this. The Rio Karma does this. Why not iPod?

Though I'll admit that the join-tracks feature was much-welcomed, what else did iTunes users get? Instead of downloading songs with propietary DRM, now we can encode our songs with a new proprietary DRM--songs that won't play on anything else? I think I'll stick with FLAC. The ability to publish my important music playlists for the whole world to see? I think I'll stick with Audioscrobbler. A free song from another bland RIAA-sponsored band? Epitonic has always provided a good sampling of independent artists and their music for you to try out. A wishlist to download those Top 40 songs later? Well, why don't I just download the songs now off allofmp3 now with their ridiculously low prices, in whatever format I want, without DRM? Import unprotected WMA files? Winamp

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

I agree about 7-Zip, except that it doesn't do multivolume archives - it'll extract RAR multivolume, but cannot create them.

As long as I'm posting, here goes my top 10

Windows (after all the patches, of course)

1. Firefox (or whatever it's name is during the week of the install) (also MyIE is sort of neat)
2. Latest version of Outlook (usually as part of Office - gotta have email, but GOTTA take the plunge and transition to a better email client...)
3. Putty
4. WinAmp
5. PowerDVD
6. Yahoo Messenger (it's sad, but I still like it better than GAIM et al...)
7. WinSCP
8. Windows Privacy Tools
9. Adobe Acrobat Reader
10. BNR2
11. EverQuest!

Linux

Nothing! RedHat (Fedora) comes with all I need. Though the programs I update right away (and use most often) are:

1. NMAP
2. Mozilla
3. Apache
4. SSH
5. SSL
6. PHP
7. TinyProxy (Essential for bypassing my employer's content filter)

Ok, so TinyProxy isn't part of the base install. Whatever.

That's about it. I don't really use Linux as a primary machine, and I rarely use the graphical interface on it. On the Windows box I will also usually install a better editor, though it changes about every install. WinVIM is my current choice. And of course, the latest codecs for QuickTime Alternative and XViD.

are all y'all nuts? Reinstalling the OS once a month or even once a year? Holy shit! My current box is 4 years old and I've never reinstalled the OS and hope I never have to.

Once a month I consider rather excessive, but for a Windows box, reinstalling at least once a year greatly reduces the kruft. After a clean install, you can feel the improved responsiveness.

Anyway, my list of the first ten (+1 x2):

0) Turn off half of the default Windows crap (services, the recycle bin, CD autostart, etc), and perform assorted registry tweaks to stop Windows from acting like a crippled DOS-box-with-GUI (ala Win95) with only 64MB of RAM (such as LargeSystemCache, NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate, CompletionChar, and DisablePagingExecutive).
1) PageDefrag, which keeps your registry and pagefile in a single contiguous file (though you should always have your min and max pagefile the same, so that doesn't get fragmented in the first place).
2) AntiVir. No sane person goes without an AV program, and IMO, this counts as the best of the free ones (for that matter, I consider it better than Norton as well - Slightly more awkward autoupdates, but it doesn't hog system resources). Best of all, as a non-USian program, it doesn't deliberately ignore "official" virii such as the FBI's Magic Lantern.
3) AdAware. We all know what it does.
4) SpyBot. Ditto, and it catches some things that AdAware doesn't (and vice-versa).
5) Mozilla, of course.
6) Winamp. I still prefer the v2.x series, but, gotta have at least one of them.
7) TeraTerm Pro and TeraTerm SSH. Technically two installs, but only a moron would use unencrypted telnet these days.
8) Calypso, a really nice (and free-as-in-beer) email program. Want the latest, greatest features in your email program, making it all but indistinguishable from a full-featured web browser and media player? Don't use this. Want a safe medium for text communication, with fairly powerful regexp filtering? You'll consider Calypso a godsend.
9) The GIMP. 'nuff said.
10) Finally, a compiler (or three... The next dozen installs after this one would include various other dev tools). Currently I still prefer Borland C 5.02, sadly not free. Although advancing technoology has already made it basically obsolete, it has what I consider the most straightforward IDE of any development suite out there.
0, part 2) Repeat step 0, since by this point Windows will have tried to undo half of my changes from the first time.

Okay. Ego-post of the day done.

Amen to the comments on EditPlus! Great damn program for the money.

I have more than 10 in my "start from scratch" install, so here goes:

• Acrobat 5
• AdAware 6
• EditPlus (the best damn win32 text editor.)
• Macromedia Fireworks
• Microsoft Remote Desktop (damn good Terminal for Win32)
• Microsoft Office (counting it as one program)
• Nero
• Offline Explorer Pro
• Putty (god bless Simon Tatham!)
• Screen Calipers
• Trillian
• TweakUI
• VirusScan Enterprise
• WinAmp
• WinZip

I'm going to have to check out FileZilla... I've used CuteFTP, LeechFTP, and some others... I've never found one I'm completely happy with. PDF Creator and SpyBot SS look like good programs to have too... thx for the links!

Cygwin usually goes on a machine after a while, but it's an "install as needed" item. I've decided to use RealAlternative instead of installing RealPlayer for the rare occasions I need to view a RAM stream.

1. Trillian Pro - I use AIM, Y!, ICQ, IRC, and MSN chat clients. I use Trillian to notify me of updates to RSS feeds. I also use it to check POP3 e-mail accounts and Y! and HoTMaiL accounts. I also order my buddy list into Groups and Sub-Groups. Trillian also logs all chats which comes in handy on occasions. I also download the Aikon3 skin for Trillian. Trillian support secure profiles in case you have multiple people using the same install of Trillian.
Trillian website
Aikon 3 website w/Trilliain screenshots

2. Firefox - Light-weight, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing rocks. And the plugins are very useful. All web designers should use the "Web Development" extension for Firefox. It allows you to automatically resize any webpage, disable images, cookies, java, ..., validates, and so much more. Save a lot time for the web devs. The "EditCSS" extension is cool because you can run your own CSS on other people's websites (make Slashdot fit your blog theme). Oh, and the Mozilla Google Toolbar for Firefox is a "must install". (I also install the Google bar for IE).
Firefox website

3. Microsoft Powertoys for XP (TweakUI) - A Microsoft download that allows for extra and powerful control of XP. Basically, it allows you to make some neat changes to your Registry that allows for increased productivity and usability. Tweaking XP made easy.
Microsoft Powertoys website

4. Versaverter - a neat little units converter that came in very helpful during my Engineering education. It has virtually every unit imaginable.
Versaverter website

5. Winamp5 - Light-weight MP3 player. Also play other media formats both audio and video. Skinnable, scalable, dockable, and extendable. I use only this program to playback MP3's. I like docking my Winamp screen at the bottom of my monitor. It's only about 20 pixels high. I also like right-clicking an MP3 folder and selecting Play in Winamp.
Winamp website

6. BS Player - Light-weight Video player. Playback video in half-time, double-time, resizable video screen, skinnable, commandline support, and more. My favorite video media player as I haven't found a player that gives me more control of the video I am watching.
BS Player website

7. Colorpad - tiny little .exe and GUI eyedropper utility. Use the eyedropper to get the HEX or HTML value of any pixel on screen. I don't think there's any current support for this app. Still, it's very handy and takes up little screen area with the right skin.
Colorpad @ Deviant Art

8. Winzip - compress and decompress files. Duh.
Winzip website

9. TravelAxe - Find cheap hotels from around the world. Puts information from popular travel websites into a sortable spreadsheet. Sorts by price, 1,2,3,4,5 Star rating, and more.
TravelAxe website

10. Musicmatch Jukebox - The only reason I install this software is to convert my audio CDs into MP3 archives. That part of this software is powerful and flexible. Don't use it for anything else.
Musicmatch website

1. FireFox, how else am I going to find and download the rest?
2. AVG AV, so that the next 8 actually are what I want.
3. Net Transport, to get the next 7 faster.
4. WinRAR, some of the rest require extraction, and whatever one might say about WinRAR, I prefer it.
   
5. WinAmp, so that I can listen to RadioStorm while I wait for the rest to download.
   
6. Trillian Pro, so I can tell everyone I am reinstalling.
7. NoteTab Pro, I paid for it for a reason after all.
8. OpenOffice.org, so that I don't have to wait an hour for it to download when I need to use it later.
9. Scorched Earth 3D, for a little fun.
10. Synergy , check it out if you wanna know.

I install these programs first on new Windows machines.

• firefox
• cygwin (including emacs, ncftp, wget, openssh, grep, sed, and other favorites)
• putty
• ntfilemon/ntregmon
• Java2 SDK
• winamp
• VideoLAN Client
• wget
• WinPT/gpg
• Filzip

VNC, Emacs for Windows, VMWare, CDEx, Vorbis Tools, DaemonTools follow. I like Photoshop but as long as it's crippled (currency watermarks) and activated I'll never buy another license for it.

1] PuTTY

2] WinSCP

3] McAffee VirusScan Enterprise

4] Moz Firefox

5] WinAMP

6] WinZIP

7] SciTE

8] MS Office

(I'm familiar with OO.o and StarOffice, but from what I've seen, MSOffice is the hands-down winner for me and is primarily what keeps me on Windows).

9] Adobe Acrobat 6.0 PRO

10] DBDesigner 4

And that about rounds out the list. After that, I reboot and hot-patch the box with locally stored patches, reboot, THEN connect for new patches.

For a Windows install my choices are :

1. ZoneAlarm Basic - Mandatory firewall
2. Windows Update - Mandatory updates
3. Mozilla - Why would you use Internet Explorer any longer?
4. Winrar - This little program is doing its job
5. Winamp
6. Acrobat reader
7. Putty - An efficient ssh client to communicate with your Linux boxes
8. OpenOffice.org - Word processing
9. Microsoft Office - Sometimes OpenOffice.org can't do the job...
10. Adobe PhotoShop

For Linux my choices are :

1. Update your installation - yum, apt or up2date
2. xmms-mp3 - Enable mp3 playback (freshrpms.net)
3. mplayer - The best video player (mpg, avi, dvd) (freshrpms.net)
4. perl-Video-DVDRip - Add a movie collection beside your music collection (freshrpms.net)
5. CodeWeavers CrossOver Plugin - Enable Microsoft plugins in Mozilla
6. Quicktime (via CrossOver Plugin)
7. Windows media player (via CrossOver Plugin)
8. Shockwave player (via CrossOver Plugin)
9. CodeWeavers CrossOver Office - Run Windows application in Linux
10. Microsoft Office (via CrossOver Office)

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Microsoft Office
3. PuTTy SSH Client
4. WinRAR (will check out Izarc too)
5. WinAMP
6. POPFile, an Email Filter
7. SmartFTP, gonna FileZilla a try though..
8. IrfanView, a free picture viewer
9. NetTransport download manager, also downloads media streams
10. Windows Media Player 9-- its actually pretty good!

Considering the frequency with which I reinstall, here's my list for Windows (post-driver updates):

Mozilla Firefox - a must. even if it's not a necessity straight off as a browser, popup blocking makes it worth having immediately.
Trillian - what friends don't enjoy the logging on and off every 2 minutes as you have to reboot your comp for new settings to take place
SmartFTP - as a web developer this is a must, can't pretend to work without an FTP client.
Winamp (5) - I use it for everything media now. I'm an addict.
WinRAR - I know it's shareware but I still like it's ease of use and modifications to the Windows context menus.
Nero - my burning software of choice
ConTEXT - my editor of choice; see SmartFTP
Google Toolbar - unfortunately, I end up doing a lot of testing in IE and without this, I might as well kiss my peaceful browsing goodbye.
Spybot Search & Destroy - not so much of a necessity immediately, but the immunization qualities are great to set up from the get-go
Ad Aware - see Spybot

1. Cygwin - get the POSIX environment on!
2. PuTTY - the only terminal I've found that handles colors and stuff right.
3. TightVNC - get to some other computer
4. OO.o
5. vim - I'm not even a VI guy, but it's fast and has nice hooks into explorer and I'm too lazy to deal with registering TextPad or whatever. JEdit's also nice, but way too slow for casual use... I usually go straight to emacs for that kind of editing.
6. Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
   • Flash
   • Acrobat Reader
   • StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
7. Winamp - get the groove on
8. MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
9. MultiDesk - usable multiple desktops for Windows... like getting that 10% productivity improvement for having dual monitors without having to pay 100% more in displays. If only it had a visual pager...
10. Windows PowerToys - because every little option matters

More on Linux and MacOS X later, I guess...