bobafred

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Winamp 5.5 - 10th Anniversary Edition

Monday October 15, 2007

11:47:24 am - Hearing, Nerdish - Comments (14)

I’ve used Winamp for many years. I think Cyanbane first introduced me to it way back in college days, probably around ‘98. It’s better than iTunes. There I said it.

The default skin for the new version is pretty nice looking (and gigantic). Usually I use a compact style theme and let the player sit top-right on my desktop with a little transparency, but I figured I’d give the new look a go. I like it so far. This version also adds album art support and other things I probably won’t use much. Basically, they’ve just continued the solid music listening experience. That’s good.

Really, the best part about Winamp has always been the global hotkeys. Being able to pause the music without the app having focus is great — especially at work. I seem to remember this used to be a 3rd party plugin, but has been part of the default install for awhile now.

Now, if only there was a Linux port…

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Radical Georgia Moderate » Georgia Carnival: Edition 21
    Friday, October 26, 2007 09:57:46 am

    [...] believes Winamp is better than iTunes. There, he said [...]

Comments

  1. mrpbody33
    Monday, October 15, 2007 12:15:11 pm

    People actually still use Winamp? That is just crazy!

  2. bobafred
    Monday, October 15, 2007 12:39:46 pm

    i am a person, and i use winamp - so yes.

  3. griftdrift
    Monday, October 15, 2007 12:52:52 pm

    Whoa. Tenth annivesary? I actually had the beta version of the first Winamp. Now I really feel old.

  4. bobafred
    Monday, October 15, 2007 02:59:13 pm

    i know. it’s crazy.

  5. cyanbane
    Monday, October 15, 2007 03:58:36 pm

    I am very surprised there is not a nix version of it. I had always just assumed it existed.

  6. bobafred
    Monday, October 15, 2007 04:58:47 pm

    there isn’t, that i’ve seen. definitely not an official version. and unfortunately, it just doesn’t work at all with Wine. i still haven’t found the perfect replacement since switching to Ubuntu at home.

  7. Greg
    Monday, October 15, 2007 11:31:37 pm

    Winamp died after Winamp 3 came out, at least for me…

  8. bobafred
    Tuesday, October 16, 2007 01:38:31 pm

    i agree that winamp 3 was shit. but, winamp 5 was a return to awesome. my understanding was they ditched the 3 codebase and went back to 2, but added in the niceties of 3 (modern theme support, media library, etc).

  9. j2brown
    Thursday, October 18, 2007 07:13:59 am

    For my linux listening needs, I’m happy with Audacious:

    http://audacious-media-player.org/

    But there are many other choices available, from something iTunesy like
    Amarok, command line tools like mplayer, and even the dreaded RealPlayer.

  10. bobafred
    Thursday, October 18, 2007 01:11:48 pm

    hey, thanks.

    i’ve tried audacious and it feels like winamp, but i missed the media library feature. i might re-install and give it another try, though.

    currently i have amarok and rhythmbox in use, neither of which i’m completely in love with.

  11. Thomas
    Friday, October 26, 2007 09:53:01 am

    I used to love WinAmp. And I still keep a lite install of WinAmp around, just for those times when I want to hear an mp3 without loading the entire iTunes app.

  12. Joel
    Wednesday, December 05, 2007 11:24:41 pm

    Until Apple fix the performance issues in iTunes. ITunes will always be rubbish. Winamp is great and now I can play my music from my ps3, fantastic

  13. jonny
    Saturday, February 02, 2008 05:10:33 pm

    I too dropped winamp a long time ago!!!! all the moving parts never staying together… BUT NOW!!!! Wow! what have they done to music players! ten times better then any player out there. sooo customizable. CD Art! and it does wonders for ordering large amounts of music. At one point I really was into itunes. Screw them and there incompatibility. Plus Winamp plays EVERYTHING! OR should I say “.evythg” (bad joke)

    I do have a few problems on vs. 5.2. Album art won’t change sometimes! and many of the auto find fail. But getting art is a easy, simply paste from Google image straight into “file info”.

    same artist with different spellings (i.e. The bird and the bee v.s. The bird & the bee) come out different) come out as two different artist. auto-tag does not fix this some times and has even been known to cause it. :(

    Auto tag Crashes my program if I do more then 20 songs or so. :(

    the program it self crashes. (but I don’t know if that is MS OS or Winamps fault)

    lastly, it does not run in linux. :( I think I’ll try it with wine.

    All in all I’ve never seen a better player. I’m giving them some time to make it better, fix the little errors… Over all, way to go winamp.

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