"De-tuning" Modern skin
 

Is there a way to de-tune winamp in order for it to use less system resources? On the computer in my room it only has a 400 mhz CPU, and the modern skin eats up resources like a turkey sandwich. The reason I still wanna run the modern skin is that many of the options such as crossfading and scaling are only availible witht the modern skin. Thanks for the help in advance!

Cross-fading is built into the DirectSound config. Prefs > Output > DirectSound. it doesn't matter what skin you use.

In the Modern Skin config you can turn off a lot of the fading and animation effects.

If your system is still too slow you will need to use Classic Skins instead.

Prefs -> Modern Skins -> General tab
Move "Timers Resoltion" slider to the right (eg. try 70ms, then 100ms, etc)

You didn't say what your Windows OS is, but if it's Win2k or XP, then try unchecking "desktop alpha blending" (Alpha Blending tab)

Apart from that, there's not much more you can do, except for maybe disabling beat detector vis in stretched mode, and maybe disabling the spectrum analyzer/oscilloscope.

Config Tray -> Options:
Songticker -> Disable scrolling
Misc -> uncheck "enable beat vis"
Notifications -> never show
Drawers -> uncheck 'animate'


Other possibly relevant settings:

Prefs -> Plugins -> Output -> DirectSound -> config:
Buffering tab: enable cpu usage control

Prefs -> General Preferences
Priority class = idle
(If you have any problems with this, then move it back to 'normal' later)

Found a great solution to this problem due to Zarko Jovic's hard work. He made a port of the modern skin into classic format, which takes up much less resources. here is the link: http://www.winamp.com/skins/details.php?id=138231

I'd like to be able to do the opposite - is there a way to hack the Modern skin so it uses Desktop Alpha Blending?