Will you switch from Winamp2 to Winamp3 now that it's final? Options

[Pri3st]

Winamp 2 is just so light than I can use it also when I am playing games. If I want media library and video player capability , I just can use media jukebox.

[rjamorim]

Well, there's no MPC plugin for Winamp3 yet, but there surely is an AAC plugin.

(Thanks to Menno for some hasty code changes to support latest SDK)

Grab it here:

http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/files/cnv_aacpcm.exe

Regards;

Roberto.

[[JAZ]]

I wonder... could the media library be made as a General Winamp2 plugin??? That would definitely made the Winamp 2 really complete.

I say this because, if I'm not wrong, the media library is a component, and thus, one could make a winamp2 plugin that loads winamp3 components (or even, a thinger!)

What do you think?

[madah]

Been trying WA3 a little bit now... it's awful SLOW on my system (Celeron 450).. for instance, it takes several seconds to change between the different tabs in preferences, and when bringing back WA3 from minimized state... with WA2 all this happens instant, so I'm going to continue to use WA2...

[Volcano]

The first experience I had with Winamp3 was just pathetic, I've hardly ever seen so many bugs in a matter of five minutes.

I added all my MPC and Ogg files to the media library - but the "Oggies" just wouldn't show up. A Winamp restart did it.

I then opened the file info for one of the Ogg files - Winamp3 opened the file info for a completely different file, which is located way further down the media library list. WTF!

Further criticism:

[list] look extremely cool IMHO.

CU

Dominic

[guruboolez]

Originally posted by Volcano
[*]The program can't handle letters like "é", it displays weird charachters instead. (Screenshot...)

Strange : WA did a good job for that, with all accents : É, È, é, ó, ø, à, ù, î...

http://membres.lycos.fr/guruboolez/AUDIO/Winamp3.png


Seen many bugs on Media Library too (esp. missing files). But I forgive WA3 : Media Jukebox do not support APE2, and can't do the same job.

[Wish]

Originally posted by Volcano

[*]In one case, the Media Library displayed two numbers in front of every song, one in yellow and another in green, for no apparent reason at all. Unfortunately, I didn't capture a screenshot with this - it looked quite funny, though.

This is actually a feature for WA3, try Alt+Click a few songs in WA3's Playlist. It enqueues them independent of the Playlist order, really handy once you realise how useful it is.

[Somebody]

Not me, no sir!

[Volcano]

OK, I stand corrected on those two points. The incorrect display of accents seems to be my system's fault - still, it doesn't happen with Winamp2.

Those yellow numbers popped up suddenly out of the blue, that's why I thought it was a totally senseless bug.

[Neo Neko]

Resources while playing Vorbis files.

Winamp2 - CPU <=1% - RAM 11Mb
Winamp3 - CPU <=1% - RAM 14Mb


This was with the default skin and no desktop alpha on an AMD Anthlon XP 1600+ with 256Mb PC2100 RAM.
___________________________________________

Asside from the lack of maturity I see no disparraging resource hogging. But there's no plugin support for format "X" you say? Well Winamp2 was missing format "X" at one time as well. You don't like the way the media library behaves? Don't use it or change it. The guys over at nullsoft have given you the ability to tinker with and change almost the entire program! As Peter said there is no way to have done this for Winamp2 without completely rewriting it as Winamp3. The aplication is yours to remake in your own image!

What I find most exciting is the fact that Nullsoft are looking at going multiplatform with this! Finally a unifying multimedia player.

Rather than complaining about what Winamp3 does not have we should add those things! I think we should start an archive here of script modds, components, and skins specifically related to HA. How about an integrated ABX suite in Winamp3? It is only waiting for someone to write it! With Winamp3 the sky is the limit! Almost litteraly. Lets take the initiative and run with it!

[peekpoke]

> Will my old plug-ins still work?
Nope.

> Will Winamp3 no longer be free?
Yep.
There are many items that Nullsoft would like to include in Winamp3 that cost
Nullsoft licensing money per-download. So the Pay version of Winamp3 will
include these items.

> Will it take more system resources? '
Yep.
Winamp3 is A LOT more 'powerful' then Winamp2, so yes it will take more
system resources.

> Will Winamp3 be open source?
Nope.

> Does Winamp3 sound better then Winamp 2.X?
NO. It is the exact same decoder used in Winamp 2.X.

> Is the Winamp3 Equalizer better then Winamp2's?
Nope.

> Can I stream SHOUTcast?
Currently there is no SHOUTcast DSP plug for Winamp3. Don't expect seeing one
any time soon either.

[Volcano]

There are many items that Nullsoft would like to include in Winamp3 that cost
Nullsoft licensing money per-download.

Do you possibly know what kind of features that's supposed to be?

[peekpoke]

Originally posted by Volcano

Do you possibly know what kind of features that's supposed to be?

MP3 Pro, MPEG2, MPEG4, whatever someone wants to charge AOL money for.

Funny part is, there is now a FREE MP3 Pro plugin for WinAMP 2.x.

Word in the NULLSOFT forum seems to imply that AOL forced this release date, and that up until recently there was always just 1 person working on WinAMP3.

I assume NULLSOFT has two uses to AOL:

1. For now it provides forced advertising, anyone who downloads WinAMP for the first time has their system splattered with AOL links. Is that worth a 2 or 3 million a year? Maybe.

2. Provide some kind of AOL branded media player to replace the Microsoft Media Player which has ties to AOL competitors. It also allows AOL to get into the 'media portal' business.

AOL is big on version numbering, notice the heavy emphasis in their television advertising on new AOL 6, or new AOL 7! I assume the same people who run that division have say over NULLSOFT.

One question I'm sure we are all asking is - if NULLSOFT has at least 14 employees, how can it be that only 2 are working on WinAMP 3?

[rc55]

From what I can see, Nullsoft appears to be a company that is incapable of taking itself seriously. To me, WinAMP was more of a "kewl app" that turned into something far more useful in time however it has yet to shake off its "supar-leet" look.

Yes, there has been some pretty nice things appearing because of nullsoft, notably:

- Application Skinning (although there are pro's and con's with that - I always use the main skin)

- Gnutella (p2p serverless file trading - however AOL has discarded this and the project is now in the public domain)

- Visualisation Plugins (probably wouldnt have happened on other applications if it wasnt for Nullsoft)

- Promotion of the mp3 format

From my point of view, I think Nullsoft has alienated its users by releasing a broken half finished player. After about 4 years of development on the original Winamp code (come on, I dont think it's ever had a complete rewrite!). Second of all, having this player support video is a bad idea! A hell of a lot of things are broken in this release and when it steals file associations and cant launch the file successfully it makes me want to tear my hair out!

Further alienation is to be expected because the two players just feel different. With Winamp 2 right clicking on different parts of the interface had different effects/menu's, now with Winamp3 its quite a bit different. It's just devoid of any logic really and broken also.

Makes me wonder how Freeamp/Zinf is coming along... :/

Ruairi

[peekpoke]

Originally posted by rc55
Yes, there has been some pretty nice things appearing because of nullsoft, notably:

- Application Skinning (although there are pro's and con's with that - I always use the main skin)

Although it's this very fixed size bitmap based skinning that is my #1 problem with WinAMP. If it was a custom interface with color definitions that was coded instead of skinned, we'd have some hope of WinAMP 2.x being usable on high resolution displays. Instead we have "double size" mode which is a crude double pixel scale of those very same bitmaps. Yuck!

Anyway, I'd like to add two more items to NULLSOFT's list of acheivements:

1. SHoutcast, Free MP3 streaming internet radio. Although it looks like it's being snuffed out in the USA.

2. PIMP (now called some kind of generic name (NAIS?)), the free, small, fast, installer. Excellent stuff! Used by all sorts of programs, for instance the latest ZoomPlayer (recommended Video player) uses it as an installer.

[rc55]

Oh yeah - that too! My bad

[Sawg]

Originally posted by peekpoke

2. PIMP (now called some kind of generic name (NAIS?)), the free, small, fast, installer. Excellent stuff!  Used by all sorts of programs, for instance the latest ZoomPlayer (recommended Video player) uses it as an installer.

PIMP was the original Plug-In Installer (It stood for somthing, I forget what). From PIMP came SuperPIMP which was a more powerful installer use for Winamp it's self. It is now called NSIS: Nullsoft (SuperPIMP|Scriptable) Install System.

[Volcano]

Plug-in Mini Packager.

NSIS rocks, I couldn't agree more. (PiMP is all right for simple Winamp plugin installations IMHO - it takes 2 minutes to configure and does basically the same job as NSIS in this case.)

A far better achievement of Nullsoft's than Winamp3.

[Caleb]

get over it.

this final version should stink just as 2.0 or 1.0 did

only that it is much more complicated.. and it stinks less

It takes time to port all that wa2 had to wa3 coz its a different program and it uses different code and plugins (im talking about the way they are coded).

Just wait and i bet that wa3.01 will kick major butt(ox)!
hey, what do u think will be with wa3.81?? heh.. c'mon people stop comparing wa3 with wa2! maybe it does lack a few features from wa2.. but give it time, and love, and ull see it will love you back

[sony666]

What I see as a user: Winamp3 = Winamp2 + media library + advanced skinning + crossfading + video player capability + internal routines to factorize large numbers for the NSA (must be some reason why it's so slow).

Muhaha I like that NSA theory

All I need is a humble mp3/ogg/ape player, and WA 2.81 does that just fine now. I had a brief look at the 3.0 final, which btw is a horrible monster and I pray for it's death

[ger@co]

For those of you who still can't play mpc, ape of flac in Winamp3, just copy and paste your Winamp2.xx "in_xxx.dlls" into your Winamp3 plug folder and you should be able to play them all. That's what I did and they work fine.

Later.

[ger@co]

Oops!

[Sawg]

http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/mpc/winamp/

Winamp3 MPC Converter

[transmute]

Hex yeah I'm switchin' jigga!

Can't beat havin the vizualizations runnin in the window and on the desktop!
Its far more hypnotic!

I would'nt really consider it to be lacking any features that I care about.
They'll have all the details ironed out soon enough.

!werD UP

[Neo Neko]

Ok Sawg. We won't forget it!