INTERACT FORUM

If you owned Winamp what would y'all do, assuming you needed to make money to support its development?

-=Tim=-

I never liked Winamp, i thought it was crap from Day one, No big loss

AOL wasted there money in more than one way, this was just another example.

We should all be plugging MC!  Responses to the article include comments like, "With foobar2k slowing development, all we're left with is WMP10."  Like hell!  

Dunno bout u lot. But i loved winamp2.91.

Justin Frankel left AOL before winamp3 started, his stock options having vested and him 70mill better off..not bad for a program that plays music.

It was light, easy to use, quite tolerant of badly encoded files and amongst the first to offer support for cue files. Well it didnt but it supported a huge eco-system of plugins.

I did not like v3 and have not even bothered to look at v5.

Of course these were the days when my collection was under 100GB. I found after that it got harder to keep track of stuff which is where a media manager like MC comes in.

FB2k is not bad for what it does. Its harder to pick up and has its own quirks. Its very minimalist and appeals to those with a technical bent. The learning curve is a bit steeper than with MC.

I would say FB2K picked up steam after winamp3 came out, cos ppl wanted options that Winamp was never going to address as they did not fall into their demographic for it.

I really liked 5, However before I discovered 5, JRiver came out with the Panes in 9.1 and I immediately bought it.

WinAmp isn't bad, But MC is a billion times better.

What?  Winamp and MC are in the same category.  Winamp (at least the more-loaded versions) has its library browser, which is a lame attempt at media file organization.  MC of course has a library.  Winamp plays audio and video files.  MC plays audio and video files.  Winamp has visualizations and plugins.  MC has visualizations and plugins.  Winamp burns and rips (again, the Pro version).  MC burns and rips.  And on and on.

I don't hate Winamp, but I sure don't love it, either.  I think that as a player, MC crushes it like a grape.  The main reason I say this is that MC's organizational features are better.  You can't play music if you can't find it.

For what its worth, this is what I feel about Winamp.

Winamp is what I feel actually started the digital media revolution in the past.  Without Winamp, I seriously doubt MP3 would be so successful in becoming the compression format for music. What Winamp does is allow our underpowered computer in the Pentium era to be able to play compressed music with what is minimal specification. Of course, when it first started out, it wasn't exactly a resource saver also. But it manage to evolve and stay with the times, cutting down on the resource it needs to decompress a MP3 file and playing it back with each version update, and also at the same time, keeping its interface minimal, making it as user friendly as possible. This allows it to be very popular and helps kick start the digital media revolution.

Winamp 3 was undoubtly a piece of sh*t that is unstable, resource hogging and very very bloated. But from what I can see from Winamp 5 (which was Justin Frankel last project before he left the company) is that they manage to shed most of the problem that was with Winamp 3 and still manage to incorporate more features into it. Even though Winamp 5 is not a very power media player, but I would still recommend it to many novice user in computer as it can be very very easy to use. I know that MC can also be easy to use, but after trying to teach my sister how to use MC for a few times, I find that MC learning curve is still quite high (which is altogether another topic).

I would be sad to see Winamp (Nullsoft for this matter) die out as they produce some of the best software around like NSIS and Winamp.

Just my 2 cents in the middle of the night......

I would hate to see Winamp go.  I use to listen to streaming music.  MC manages my home library, where I care about quality - secure ripping and ASIO playback.  But, let's face it, listening to streaming music via MC is like a trip to the dentist.  At least with V10 anyway.  Is V11 any better?

Wow - I wish my experience with streaming music and MC was like that.  I don't remember the error I kept getting anymore, but only every 3rd attempt or so would connect.  And some of my favorites (Radio Paradise) would never connect.  I admit I did not attempt much debugging.  Winamp has a nice Media Library interface that automatically pulls up the top 500 streams, which provides all the choices I need.  Maybe I'll have to give MC another try with streams.  mhorton - are you using V10?

And, come to think of it, my trips to the dentist have been pretty O.K. too.  Still not at the top of my list of things to do!  (I really hate that part, after they clean your teeth, when they then floss your teeth.  Some dental assistants are gentle, but some really snap that floss down into your gums.  Ouch!)

Ian -

Thanks!  I still have Winamp as the default (for the moment) but I used the 'Open URL ..." command to set up a couple of stations in a playlist group called "Radio Stations".   By sending the entire playlist to Playing Now I can simply click around inside Playing Now to select stations.  And I used the "Artist" field to type in the name of the station.  Works great!  Maybe I'll be able to drop Winamp soon.