What Winamp Did Right.

[drivetheory]

Having used Winamp since the days of Starcraft and Napster (ie. college) it's been my audio player since. Hell, the only reason i even created a forums account back here in '06 was because that was the first time i actually ran into problems with Winamp. Winamp has just worked beautifully (practically flawlessly) for me for many, many, MANY years- and will for many years to come I hope...


For me, at least, the top 5 things Winamp did right were:

- Support for almost every audio file format (mostly natively or via a small 3rd party plugin).

- The Advanced Visualization Studio (it provided the visuals for soooo many after parties on weekends at the house, good times... good times indeed) and eventually Milkdrop 2 (it has grown on me over the years but AVS is still my first love).

- The versatile Plug-ins system supporting a plethora of input, output, and DSP addons that have made winamp that much better.

- The media library, tracking my audio listening habits for over a decade past and hopefully a decade more to come.

- SHOUTcast Radio (especially in the early-mid 00s post rave era, else i never would have found DIGITALLY IMPORTED).


My Winamp



PS.
Sign that Change.org Winamp petition, not because making Winamp open source will save it, but because it's a quantifiable way of showing that Winamp matters to you, and that is what may save Winamp...

[djpete]

so true.
and nicely said here too..
Sign that Change.org Winamp petition, not because making Winamp open source will save it, but because it's a quantifiable way of showing that Winamp matters to you, and that is what may save Winamp...

[Koogle]

If it wasn't for cPro (http://cpro.skinconsortium.com/) adding better functionality into winamp such a playlist search!!!, chapter list a-b repeat lists!, and just giving skinners an easier way to make decent skins (at least some) then I think I would have jumped ship years back.

Though it would have been hard seeing as there is just less flaws in winamps design compared to other players. And it still has a lot of really good plugins that just add to its already great base functionality.

Also prefere the single user interface with the awesome media library built in but never in the way if you don't want it.

The only thing missing from winamp was a proper tabbed playlist interface like aimp3 with the options to control it for when adding songs from medialibrary or external opening mp3. It's a shame aimp3 has that stupid old style winamp2 design of seperated interfaces before it was possible unify the components into a proper seamless SUI, while its media library is the ultra suck it doesn't even look like it fits in.

foobar is just a joke, still its lightweight which is code for bare minimum crap to me, its like it never left beta, and things winamp provides out of the box you need to spend a lot of time setting up like more plugins and columns ui.. sure you can get something reasonable in the end for one specific type of gui setup (actually skinning it is a nightmare), and its media library is crap and very much a player centered around just playlists and album art really no comparison to everything winamp brings to the table along with +plugins+cpro+skins etc

I'll be keeping my winamp setup for as long as I'm still using windows, hopefully if its open sourced it can finally get a new life fork instead of being left in stagnation like it has for so long under AOL.

[zackbuffo]

For me the parallel handling of Media Library and playlist makes Winamp outstanding. Simple as that.

Since I use Winamp I couldn't find any other palyer in the web, that had this special approach.

Not to mention other pros like flawless useage of libraries and playlists with 10k songs and beyond. No interference in my data structure (like iTunes does... at least at the time I tried it ) is another one, cool plug-ins (special thanks to DrO's ) etc. etc. ...

[Koogle]

"For me the parallel handling of Media Library and playlist makes Winamp outstanding. Simple as that."

yup.. tbh windows media player came close with wmp9 with its own media library/playlist which I thought was going in the right direction, but then it just never had the same skin, plugins and general power functionality and options that winamp provided. Not even close really.

[956400]

one thing missing from playlist functionality, i suppose, is having multiple "current" playlist editors being opened from .m3u files.... like having multiple instances of notepad open for multiple txt files. and being able to save them accordingly. AND have files playable from them.
i guess this was done via the playlist tree in the media library, but you cannot play files there.

still, a small omission on such an awesome software.

[Aminifu]

Media library Smart Views is another great feature.