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WinAmp's Death Greatly Exaggerated
robyannetta writes "In a previous story, we heard that WinAmp was
down for the count. Apparently, this is not the case.
Here is a note by Eric Caoili that says "No we weren't axed. We haven't even seen anyone with an axe. There was this one guy who came up to us to axe us a question, but that's about it.""
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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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You are correct that it's a media player, and that there are lots of media players out there. But IMO, WinAMP is the ideal choice for music. WMP doesn't have the functionality and extendability that WinAMP has, and many other free media players are clogged up with overly fancy interfaces and/or just don't perform as well.
WinAMP always was free. There's a "pro" version with extended capabilities, but at no point was there NOT a free version that did everything any other media player did (and often more).
And I do not recall WinAMP ever being open source. There is an extensive SDK available, but the program itself is not available in source form... at least not through any legit channels that I could find.
=Smidge=
Perhaps you didn't notice because 3 scared you away, but 5 is far more closely related to 2 than 3. They realized how bad 3 sucked, and then skipped a whole digit just to tell you how cool 5 was. And it really is pretty nice. Better than what else is out there, anyway.
:)
All of the major security holes for Winamp that I recall had to do with the fact that it has a component that embeds Internet Explorer. And I've never seen a case of winamp-related "spyware" that doesn't involve either use of IE or other blatant stupidity.
So back off
Rating System? Winamp5... Check.
Automatic playlists? Make lists with search queries... Check.
iPod management plugin? ummm... Check.
What were you saying again?
This is my opinion. Everyone has a right to my opinion.
Even in its corrections /. acts like a tabloid...
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Winamp still has one advantage--the huge collection of plugins. I'm a video game music junkie, and the only reason I still run winamp is to play SPCs, NSFs, PSFs--the dumps from the audio processing of emulated games. If iTunes could use winamp input plugins, I'd use it all the time.
Using a dialect to make a joke isn't a racial slur. It's an appeal to stereotype. And while linguistic stereotypes are often tied in the lay public to other sorts of stereotypes, such links are not an inherent part of language, and imo (and in the opinion of other linguists) linguistic stereotypes shouldn't be confused with racial or discriminatory stereotyping. Language use doesn't confine itself to racial borders.
And besides, you could just as easily say he's just making fun of any number of groups who play up talking like that, like rappers (some of whom you'll note are white).
There are lives at stake here!
winamp used to rock. Then for some unfathomable reason someone decided that winamp needed a built-in webbrowser. A WEB BROWSER FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! As soon as I learned about foobar2000 I ditched winamp for good. foobar2000 is also Unicode compliant; winamp won't do unicode without really ugly kludges. That makes foobar2000 perfect for mp3 files with east asian language file names/ID3 tags.
NO CARRIER
Winamp stopped adding useful features / improvements (for me) after version 3.0... iTunes and WMP10 are much better, with song rating / automatic playlists (song I didn't heard in the past week I like, yes thank you).
Why anyone would pay for Winamp is beyond me. The free version does the job... like a bunch of programs out there. Of course, brand recognition, nostalgy and all...
Yes, they never added any wonderful features like WM & iTunes, such as DRM. I love winamp, I've used it since early 2.xx. It's small, works well, is minimilistic, tastefully designed, has responded to multimedia keyboard actions for a long time, it has great visualizations. I have a 20GB iPod, and the playlists I make in Winamp are usable by Ephpod to load onto my iPod. I don't use iTunes because it only allows you to synchronize your iPod with ONE computer. Ephod doesn't care if you plug your iPod into 9 different computers and get songs from all of them. If you tried that with iTunes it would replace everything on the iPod with what was on that particular computer.
Sure I kinda liked the rating thing, but iTunes' playlist support sucks ass.
Most succinctly put: WM, iTunes, Real Whateverthefuckthey'recallingitnow, and especially Musicmatch PieceOfShitBox are all bloated pieces of crap. Not to mention you can get a virtually limitless supply of plugins for winamp to do damn near anything. Some people want to be able to burn playlists from Winamp. The free version is plenty for me personally.
Question everything
I've tried several versions of iTunes now, and I just don't like it. Where are the customization options? I'm not just talking about skins and interface and such... everything just seems very inflexible. If you use iTunes and only iTunes for all of your ripping/downloads, then I'm sure its great. But if you're using other programs to aquire and manage music, it sucks.
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders. You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them. (You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.) Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Also, after using iTunes to edit some ID3 tags, my database ended up corrupted and I had to delete it. Fortunately I had only been using iTunes for a few hours, or I would have lost all of my song play counts, playlists, etc. Go to Apple's support forums and you'll see database corruption is a frequently occurring and very annoying issue.
I can understand the iPod not being able to play WMA/OGG/FLAC/etc. for now due to limited CPU power (even though lots of other MP3 players can do it just fine), but I don't see any reason why iTunes shouldn't be able to play them.
For me, Winamp 5 is the only tool that gets the job done, and I'm relieved to see it will be sticking around!
- because HTML doens't render linebreaks
- because I'm to damned lazy to keep track of the numbers in my list
- because it makes me look super 1337 even though it's so simple
Remember, it's spiffier when you use it!That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Doesn't sound like you've really tried iTunes at all, actually. Let's look at this paragraph:
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders.
Simple solution: drag-and-drop the files from the folder into iTunes. It's a song database, not a filesystem with automatic indexing, and it's never been touted as such.
You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them.
Or you can add the specific songs you just ripped or downloaded, instead of dropping the entire music folder again. And of course it takes forever, if you're telling iTunes to make duplicate entries.
(You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.)
So now you're whining because you told it to create duplicates but it's not identifying them as precisely as you'd like so you can remove them after the fact?
Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Meanwhile, Winamp can't rip and burn CDs unless you pay for the functionality, doesn't provide an easy way to share songs across a network (no, shoutcast is neither easy nor simple), and you have to use third-party tools with limited features to sync with your iPod. I agree that Winamp has some advantages over iTunes, like a smaller memory footprint, but your problems with iTunes all seem to originate between the chair and your input device.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
Winamp 5 can just be set to search for the latest version, or it can be checking for info on the music you are playing.
If it's checking for updates, try this:
1. Rightclick some blank area of the skin.
2. Click "options" on the resulting menu, then click "preferences".
3, On the "winamp preferences" window that results, go to "general preferences". Find the checkbox labeled, "Check for new versions of winamp at startup" and uncheck it.
Also, the "jump to file" subsection under "general preferences" may have another box that says "check for new version when winamp starts" Just in case, you may want to see if you need to uncheck this one too.
If winamp seems to be getting information on the current file, even when you don't have the media library open, go to that same window, and where it reads "Select your internet connection type", try telling it the computer is "not connected to the internet".
Who is John Cabal?
Actually, they did. WinAMP will play FairPlay'd AAC using the Quicktime libs, the exact same way iTunes does (you might need a plugin, can't remember).
If you tried that with iTunes it would replace everything on the iPod with what was on that particular computer.
You can select manual control and copy whatever songs you want from however many iTunes libraries you want.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
To the casual listener probably not, Winamp is still much "sleeker" graphically. Of course music player should be more about the sound (Tell that to cell phone companies). That's where foobar comes in, although its not open source, you basically know how the entire "signal path" goes from the music file out to whereever you go. You can't really say the same thing for any other players (well you can tell, but it's much more difficult). For example, bet you didn't know most mp3 *clips*, it's just how mp3s encoding do (some samples will go beyond the range of the bitstream "wav" output, thus clip). Foobar lets user deal with the (hard) clipping, either through limiter (soft clips) or something like Replaygain. Another thing is the common sample rate conversion (44.1k->48k) problem with bad resamplers from AC97 soundcards (AC97 does everything is 48k, most music [CDs] are 44.1k), custom SRC was one of the first things in foobar. They also got things like kernel streaming (as oppose to DirectSound) if your a stickler on bitwise perfect output. Of course now it's grown into so much more. Most of these stuff most users won't care, or won't know enough to care, but the point is, foobar lets you control the signal path. Any critical listener would tell you the cleanest signal path is the best you can hope for, unless your equipment has known flaws which need major fixups. Check out hydrogenaudio's forum it's hosted on, these guys are major hardcore audio geeks (the "technical, scientific audiophiles").
I am a longtime WinAmp user also AND I still use it. I have tried other players and nothing comes close for all the reasons stated by others previously.
I just wanted to "ditto" the comment above on the issue of bloatware. All too true.
I run winamp 5 on a POS server that would have you gamer types just weeping with what a POS it is. I'm keeping it because it has ISA slots on the board and hell - it does the job. Winamp has no problems on that old POS system.
Seriously, does it have to do more than just do it's intended job and be stable?
I don't really get this talk about playlists and so on. Make your freaking playlist and save it for future use. Create a directory named M3U in your MP3 directory and then save your playlists there. What's the problem? Don't tell me you want automated playlists - get into your music, make your own freaking playlists just like a real music lover does.
For one brief instant we all figured winamp was dead. The internet news sites picked it up, people were downloading every version known to man for archive, and we were all focused on winamp once again.
Welcome to the world of the rumor-feeding news cycle.
We have been played.
Actually, if it was a scheme by the WinAmp people to get attention, it backfired on my behalf... I went looking for a replacement and found Quintessential Player. It offers what I need, including Ogg-support and my favorite skin, so I switched and it'll take some serious incentive before I switch back.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --