List of Best WinAmp Plugins?

[ChiggyChiggy]

Recently ive decided to go back to Winamp being my player of choice, mainly due to the Autotagger function of it thats managed to fix up a good deal of my 25k tunes and plugins that allow it to play some extremely obscure formats (like music from old video games and such). That and ive seen some pretty badass visualizations that id just loove to try out!

However, i dont know where to start even! (i did a clean install of Windows so i lost my prev list of plugins and everything Winamp related) And looking through Winamp's list of plugins, theres quite alot of... how do you say... rubbish, to put it nicely. A good deal of the stuff available from what ive seen were basically just DSP's and unusable cartoonish looking skins.


So i come to the forum, where several of the plugin developers themselves and users of Winamp that know best can guide me to know the best that Winamp has to offer!


What do you guys use, and why? So far ive come to discover FFSoX that brings FFMPEG's ability to play virtually anything to Winamp, but what else is there?

If you know any other plugins that extend Winamp's ability to play more formats please tell!

[Batter Pudding]

You are right that most of those plugins were abandoned. Or the feature has become native to Winamp.

If you want decent Winamp plugins that add real features, check out DrO's plugins.

http://winampplugins.co.uk/

Make sure you read the front page first as he is updating his site, so best links are the ones which have seen active development in the past few months as noted on his home page.

[musicf8]

I think I still have the VQF plug-in for the few VQF files I downloaded back in 99/2000, besides that I really like the ml_ipod plug-in because it offers much more flexibility than the stock ipod plugin, but because of that I am stuck on version 5.63 since it crashes any newer one.

Both of those are pretty much abandoned. Besides those I use cPro2 because of the extended themes and whatnot.

edit: I just noticed you asked for plugins for formats... my bad.

[djnforce9]

I agree that there are TONS and TONS of worthless plugins released (most of which haven't had an update in years or are older versions than the one found on the author's website). However, here are some of the useful ones that I use. All work with the latest version of Winamp.

Jasper's File Writer:

http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/dev/filewrite/

This is quite old but still fully functional and there has not been any new plugin that matches it yet. It let's you output to various formats including mp3, flac, ogg, etc. You do require the respective dll's for mp3 and ogg but in the former case, Winamp is already bundled with the LAME encoder. I use this to convert from other formats including CD Audio (good alternative with the native CD ripper does not work).

FFSOX Player 2:

http://in-ffsox.sourceforge.net/

This beast of a plugin essentially replaces several included plugins such as Directshow (in_dshow), in_mp4, in_flv, etc. It works way better in my opinion as I found the bundled Winamp plugins had issues such as playing audio but no video depending on the codec. Just be sure to install the FFSOX library (instructions on the site itself), delete the redundant plugins, and set up the file extensions you want to use with FFSOX PLayer. My settings are:
AVI;MKV;WEBM;MP4;M4V;MPG;MPEG;M2V;FLV;WMV;ASF;AIFF;AIF;MOV;RM;QT;M4A;M4P

Stereo Tool:

http://www.stereotool.com/

My all-time favourite DSP plugin. It allows for incredible audio quality given the correct preset. You really need to experiment with different ones to find settings that suit your tastes. There is also a forum where people have shared their own presets. This plugin is technically shareware but there are only restrictions placed on certain functions such as the de-clipper, Natural Dynamics, and FM Transmitter. Everything else is free to use.

ChipAmp:

http://www.chipamp.org/

Not sure if you like listening to NES, SNES, N64, etc music but if you do, that bundle is for you. It has all the latest chiptune plugins nicely packaged together.

SynthFont Midi Plugin:
http://www.synthfont.com/Downloads.
(scroll down to in_aSyFon).
Not sure if you listen to midis still but this lets you feed a soundfont into midi playback rather than relying on the awful built-in software synthesizer that comes with Windows. Personally, I like using it with the free General Midi library SGM-V2.01

http://www.gamefront.com/files/21458874/SGM-V2.01.sf2

NOTE: Delete in_midi.dll from the plugins directory if you're going to use this as you will no longer need it.

Album List for Winamp:

http://albumlist.sourceforge.net/

Great if you organize your music library into separate folders and want to quickly and easily en-queue them into winamp's playlist. I remember this functionality being native to the old and longtime defunct Winamp3 but never re-implemented thereafter. This plugin adds it in nicely.

Outside of that, Dr0's plugins are great too as musicf8 said. Check there as well. Hope that helps!

[Aminifu]

User thinktink has also donated some useful plug-ins to the Winamp community. Look in the thread linked below for one providing Opus support.

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=347029

[Sabine Klare]

I could post a list, but then my posting would become too long. It is better to grab one of my latest .txt-files from here (ooops, I should edit my blog again):

http://www.lastfm.de/user/SabineKlare/journal

Time Restore & Autoplay is very good. I didn't use the Skin Manager yet, but I had installed all these plugins from the former Winamp Essentials Pack (that pack, which is compatible with my Winamp). I have also MiniLyrics, Plane9, Morphyre, the visualizer from Soundspectrum, Last.fm and some more. I am still hestitating to install the plugin ClassicPro, because maybe it could crash Winamp, although I have found a beautiful cPro2-Skin as memorial to a dead music-platform (is it really dead?).

I will wait a year, until I know exactly, what has happened or what will happen in the future...

[MSF]

This might be the difficult to say which one is better, because most of them are not supported anymore. But if you would like to download most popular (I would like to say all of them, > then 400MB) plugins I would recommend you to download from here http://www.mywinamp.com/winamp-plugins/