OK, why doesn't anyone like Winamp?

It doesn't matter to me that Winamp 3 was pulled. I was very happy wwith Winamp 2. When 3 came out in beta I tried it and I figured the bugginess was due to it being in beta and that they will have it all ironed out. When final came out, I tried it again and was disapointed. It was prettier than Winamp 3, but performed like crap. I am happier with Winamp 2.

It's odd that there is this commotion about WA3 now. I didn't read much news. The plans for a WA5 (WA 2+3) are there for months now. If all goes well it should become a freefrom skinnable player that is backwards compatible with some WA2 features. I am not a big fan of Wasabi. It was never a real API that is usefull for the programs I am working on.

Needless to say that WMP is popular because it is distributed with Windows. Not sure if WMP is really bloated. If they add features then it is not because some MS employee thought it was a cunning plan and his manager fell asleep while approving it. MS has a history of listening very carefully what their strategic partners and the market leaders want. If we look at their API we see something strange. They are adding more APIs all the time, but are not making them available to developers. You have to register to obtain most of them. That is an odd situation because with most of their other APIs it is the other way around. They are expanding them AND making them available to anyone interested.

I am not a RealPlayer fan. Same goes for QuickTime. Instead of using codecs and DirectShow interfaces these players use their weird standards. They are not friendly to the end user either. QT has good quality videos but it keeps messing with my PNG stuff for no apparent reason. RP has a spyware history and makes me very uncomfortable. Of course these players have their own APIs and I don't even want to know what they are about. We have enough formats amd APIs already. In my opnion QT is a native player for the Mac and if it wants it formats to be available on the Windows platform it should do so by using regular codes and interfaces and not by using yet another incompatible player.

Stardock is developing its own player (ObjectMedia) too. It is able to use codecs, DirectShow interfaces and is using a minimum of resources. To make it not just another player it is interfacing with WB, DX, OB and KLP. It's not intended to be yet another media player. It should integrate in the desktop and its windows without becoming intrusive. Needless to say that at the moment it is my favourite player.

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I found that wa2 fit all my needs, I tried wa3 when it first came out, but it was at least twice as slow on my machine (especially with playlist functions). I found all the fancy skinning only wasted space on my screen and didn't add any functionality, in fact it took away most uniform functionality which made wa3 harder to use. Plus there are a few nice little functions on wa2 that I always use that didn't make it wa3, like the "stop after current song" function.

i use windows media player for everything. i have no use for winamp or realplayer sorry...

Winamp3 while pretty was slow and ponderous
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The new Winamp2 was better, but it's media library is terrible and if used, results in a massive increase of the process size.

RealPlayer - slow and ponderous as well.

MusicMatch - ditto. And while it only took a couple of minutes to import 1100 ripped CDs into Windows Media Player and Media Jukebox, it took nearly 2 hours for MusicMatch to import it.

Windows Media Player - alright, a bit slow when dealing with a large media library. But it can't handle PLS file which means I have to save streaming PLS playlists to disk as M3U files in order for WMP to access them.

Media Jukebox - the best all-round, full-featured media player, works quickly and flawlessly with large media libraries.

QCD - The best alternative to Winamp. Fairly lightweight, free form skinning.

Object Media - real nice player that's meant to interact via some other interface such as DesktopX WBAmp, Keyboard Launch Pad. It has the most exposed/remote, program-accessable commands compared to the other players. Unfortunately, it doesn't handle streaming music.

RealPlayer has become a trojan horse for insistent insidious spyware. It will not shut off unless it is uninstalled and sometimes not even then >

WinAmp 3 I didn't like because:

1. I couldn't skin it (I hate XML-based skins)

2. It was excruciatingly slow at times.
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I am not a big fan of Windows Media Player and RealOne because they are bloatware. I hate bloatware. I feel the only purpose to bloating up software is to help the hardware companies sell more memory and faster processors. I have Quicktime so I can view Quicktime files but unfortunately Quicktime has been getting bloated too. I think the Quicktime format is great video compression but it's unfortunate that the only player that can play all Quicktime files is bloating up.

winamp 3 had too many bugs when i checked it out so it was a no brainer to go back to my favorite, winamp 2.91(waiting in anticipation for 2.95). lots of great plugins, reasonably low resources used and a gazillion choices of skins are why. i still use musicmatch for burning purposes. don't feel a need now to go out experimenting with other players and will not use wmp or mm as default player because winamp just blows them away. only reason i use realone is cause mlb.com requires it with baseball package i subscribe to.

Unfortunately, it doesn't handle streaming music.

Brad saw this thread and we talked a bit about any of his cunning plans for OM. We are considering streaming to be part of it. This is not a promise, because there are more features we want to add and my time is limited.

Brad saw this thread and we talked a bit about any of his cunning plans for OM. We are considering streaming to be part of it. This is not a promise, because there are more features we want to add and my time is limited.

Hey, that's cool, MadIce. It would be nice to have (as I've been addicted to internet radio lately) but I understand that there are other priorities and time constraints. If you do eventually add it, then yeah! If not, no problem, that doesn't detract from the fact that it's a really cool media player
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MadIce:

what do you mean your time is limited??? You have plenty of time!! Years in fact. Object Media could be super great by then.

I still like MMJB and I never had any problems with the music library transfers so I don't understand what you guys mean. Isn't it just a point to a directory and all the fils in there are there?

Also I never heard of a PLS file. what type of file for music is that?


xml based skinning was cool for me but I guess allot of people didn't like it. I thought if scripted properly, you could interact with html files and other xml files on line or off and create something more interactive in nature (clock time, date, news feeds, data feeds from website, file interaction, database interaction)

I fealt the media player could basically now through XML be useful to companies, information providers, freer skinning ability, and so on. Object Oriented design is a cool idea and open to change.

I saw such hope for winAMP3... anyhoo, lets see what OM can do. Can't wait until it is released (and for that matter DesktopX 2)

I have MMD2, I didn't know they made a third one. besides, you can still use it, I think... I haven't tried yet

what do you mean your time is limited??? You have plenty of time!! Years in fact. Object Media could be super great by then.

I still have a regular job and some people try to convince me I have a private life.

I still like MMJB and I never had any problems with the music library transfers so I don't understand what you guys mean. Isn't it just a point to a directory and all the fils in there are there?

No. MMJB, like Media Jukebox and Windows Media Player uses a database to hold the media library. However, MMJB's media library is slllllooowwwww (at least when importing 13,000 or more tracks) when compared to Media Jukebox and Windows Media Player. Besides MMJB uses a ton of memory, probably because my media library is so huge. It probably loads the entire media library in memory, much like Winamp3 seems to do
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i use winamp 2 still i never actually tried out 3, didnt see the reason, becasue i have all my winamp controls built into my litestep themes. There are few new "features" i could see coming up that would convince me to switch to any newer winamp, but you never know they might actually suprise us.

I have been using MMJB for a long time now and have never experienced any slowdown with it. Of course, I only have about 1.75 gigs of mp3s. When I put my collection on my new computer MMJB imported the library in a matter of seconds. But maybe the 3.06 P4 with hyperthreading turned on helped with that.

I run Winamp 3 on this system and love it...

would love to see winamp5 be released

I guess the reason I never made the change was that I have my favorite Winamp2 skins that just didn't look right in Winamp3, because of the 'Thinger' (I think that is what is was called).

that makes since. thinger was just so that you could access without right clicking. user friendlyness, kinda like microsoft. I can't believe I said that word!