Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Welcome back old friend

Back 10 or 12 years ago when MP3's were new and exciting, wow I feel old, I used Winamp. It was a fun, small, efficient MP3 player for windows and I liked it. As time passed it became everything it wasn't supposed to be. It became slow and bloated. If you use Winamp try to remember version 3 without shuddering. As I recall this happened about the time AOL bought it, coincidence? When that happened I stopped using it and I used either iTunes or Windows media player. They both suck. Media player is bloatware and I didn't ever get a good feeling for itunes. It wasn't customizable enough for me. Besides I think the only reason to use itunes is if you are a consumer whore and need something to plug your ipod into.

Anyways, the other day I reinstalled XP so I needed something to play MP3's and I thought, "Why not give Winamp a shot again?". I am quite happy that I did. The interface is a little busy but gives you lots of information about your music, it does the album art thing and has quite possibly the greatest feature ever. Auto tagging. Now your MP3's that don't have tags don't need to languish in the no man's land of your music list. Simply click Auto Tag and wait for the information to be filled it. You can do it for multiple songs at once and I'd say it has about a 95% success rate so far. Even for very poorly named and obscure songs. I really like how customizable the views are. Everything from showing the full media library to a little slit of a program at the top called window shade mode. I'm sure I haven't even started to scratch the surface of this program.

I'm not going to get into all the features but give Winamp a try again and you won't be disappointed.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I used Winamp

Saskboy said...

Winamp was my staple from about 1997 until the early 2000s.

And..
I wasn't sure if anyone had mentioned it to you yet but bloggers are gathering. 12:00 Saturday Oct. 18 at Jerry's Food Emporium. Hope you can make it :-)

Anonymous said...

Ok, I've never heard of winamp. Now I have to go check it out and help me if I like it. I don't like changing but if it's that much better....ok.

Wastehog said...

Dude i always used Winamp back in the day but like you i stopped when AOL massacred it. You sound like you know what your talking about so i might just give it another try. Cheers

Flowers said...

Nice blog. I used winamp too. Your blog looks perfect. keep it up the good work.