Winamp 5.04 has been released by Nullsoft. You can obtain the lite version here, the full version here, and the pro version here.

Some of the changes include -



For more information on Winamp 5.04, including the full release notes, please see here.

That's great. I hope that means HE AAC in ShoutCast is finally coming.

That will provide a much needed usage boost for HE AAC.

.
Winamp Unlimited has a few words on the release. The new Winamp.com Audio/Video views are really awesome, btw.

Try: http://205.188.234.35:8012/
Of course who knows if and when the SHOUTcast tools for it will be released to the public.

Hi Sawg.

http://205.188.234.35:8012/listen.pls worked for me just fine.

How does this radio sation manage to do this without these tools. Are they related to the Winamp guys?

Elite++

Edit: Too bad they'll probably use AACplus (™CodingTechnologies) instead of the standardized HE AAC name for the format.

Tag is one of the Shoutcast/Nullsoft guys. And it's about *$&#ing time they released this, we've all been talking about it for over a year. Now if we can put the pressure on iTunes and MusicMatch and even XMMS to support aacplus (aac-he, I don't care what you call it) there would be a great critical mass behind it.

Though technically I've had HE-AAC support from another mp4 plugin this is truly a nice update and will pressure the other major media players to get support soon. All in all it looks like a pretty decent bugfix update and I am now running it.

Don't get your hopes up - the HE-AAC/PS-AAC support appears to be completely broken.

It also claims the decoder is from Dolby not CodingTech?!

Edit: It seems to work if the file is in AAC format and not in MP4 container.

Ha ha, in your face, Apple, Microsoft, MusicMatch... . Nullsoft team did it again. Viva la innovation...


I'm sick at streaming WMA. Right NOW.


Isn't it time for my http://www.synapseai.com/waplugin.asp to retire

I guess it's a good thing I went and kept my old plugin. If that's the case then hopefully they'll get it right soon.

Somebody should tell those guys to use the same decoder for MP4 and AAC files - the one which supports HE-AAC v2

I just updated Winamp, but I cannot seem to find any other encoder than MP3, RAW AAC, MP4 and WAV.

I guess it kicks in automatically for lower bitrates.

Which one were you expecting?

The changelog doesn't say anything about a AACPlus encoder, only decoder

It seems Winamp uses CodingTech decoder for .AAC format and Dolby decoder for MP4 format.

The Dolby decoder has bugs in HE-AAC, PS-AAC *and* LC-AAC support - argh!

from winamp unlimited

As for this little part in the credits: “Winamp 5: Final Edition (for now). Dedicated to all our users.” Don’t panic—Winamp hasn’t been abandoned, nor has development been completely deserted. I will try and provide you with more information soon, depending on what I’m allowed or not allowed to tell you.

As I thought, there wasn't a separate decoder for MP4. The plugin is labelled a demuxer.
But maybe this demuxer isn't able of catching shoutcast streams and demuxing it. This work is probably be done by the in_mp3.dll which now contains the coding technologies decoder.

Not too sure what GARF is referring to as a problem with the new Winamp recognizing files created with Nero HE-AAC. I have several thousand files encoded as MP4's. Been running them through the new decoder for a few hours now without any flaws.

Looks like a real winner so far!

http://sjeng.org/ftp/work/winamp.aac
http://sjeng.org/ftp/work/winamp.mp4

Same file, different container. First one works perfectly, second one fails horribly.

edit: fixed links

TOS#8 violation! Did you ABX?

It didn't play here, too.

hm anyone knowing how it detects he-aac from an .aac file?

i assume that should be an answer to my question? still, i doubt the CodingTech decoder will treat all .aac as he-aac, so it has to detect somehow the sbr part

It's signalled in the AAC bitstream.

i thought its only signalled on the container level, but not in adts/adif?

As defined in the MPEG-4 AAC standard, it upsamples all files with samplerate <= 24000 Hz by a factor 2 and leaves the samplerate of files with samplerate > 24000 as is.

Menno

thats defined in the mpeg-4 standard?

what about lc-aac streams with 22050hz? wont they suffer qualitywise from this?

and how will downsampled sbr be handled/detected?

yes

No

Like this:


Menno

A response from Tom on the Nullsoft Beta Mailing list:


(p.s. Don't shoot the messenger )

(menno said it nicer, note that MP4 *container* is not patented)

Yes, the patents require licensing, but since Winamp already supports MPEG-4 AAC + SBR + PS decoding they are obviously already paying for that. There is absolutely no reason to not decode HE AAC + PS from .MP4 while it is decoding it from .AAC.

Menno

Has anybody noticed that the difference in CPU utilization with the new modern skin vs the old skin is HUGE.

On A64 2.2 GHz the CPU % on Winamp goes between 20-50% with the modern skin and hovers at almost constant 0% with the old skin.

I can't believe the difference is this big, but my 5.03 with modern skin had huge utilisation compared with 5.04 with old skin (both using same file/input&output plugins for playback).

here's a quick guide on how to configure winamp to run like the wind

No. Try a clean install

Okay, according to the big cheese back at Nullsoft/AOL Music, the Coding Tech AACPlus decoder was added only in an attempt to get it to work "from an NSV container." But how much work it would be to get it used for HE-AAC MP4 files will be looked into.

Hehheh, how many times this needs to be explained to the Nullsoft people. There's been many threads about this here and in the Winamp forum but still the nullsoft guys are as clueless as ever about this. Unbelievable..
But since they don't follow what is said publicly, at least Coding Technologies could inform them about issues like this, and not only silently collect the decoder license money; they could offer some support and suggestions as well. It's boring that other people including the FAAD developer have to constantly post this information to correct their missinformed statements though seems it's not noticed by Nullsoft anyway.

My complaint with Nullsoft is solely that issues like this aren't tested and don't seem to ever get corrected either, and the same misinformation *keeps* being spread.

It's known for along time that the Dolby decoder they use is buggy. Why was it not completely replaced with the much better CodingTech one (or FAAD, which is known to work, for that matter!).

It's been pointed out several times that MP4 has no licensing fees. Yet the same disinformation *keeps* being spread.

It's just frustrating to see this kind of hard-headdeness.

Instead of having a working player which would do both MP4 and AAC including the newest HE-AAC with PS, they now have a player with broken MP4 support and inferior quality.

This kind of "progress" does not bode well for Winamps future.

Isnt the 3.96 LAME encoder buggy when using -fast presets?

If so why has it been included as an update?

I think you got something wrong...

There will always be bugs in software. I don't know any program which is 100% bug free. However, the Winamp developers don't do anything to fix the bug. They have been told that the Dolby decoder is buggy and that they should switch to FAAD or CodingTechnology, but they don't want to. They also don't seem to learn anything at all. There have been several discussions about the MP4 container and Nullsoft just keeps spreading the information that MP4 (as container) would require licensing fees, which is not true.

Also, I don't think that Gabriel or the other LAME developers knew about the problems with Fast presets before they released it. It is something which we have noticed after the release. The problems with Dolby however are known for a long time.

See also:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ndpost&p=230295

Winamp gets you inferior quality when playing MP4 files (but is ok for AAC).

People think its just about code, its not. It maybe just about the code to you guys, but there is a lot of inter-corporate politics going on which you don't know about.

Winamp does not support PsyTEL aac with the "-profile 2" parameter.

Some information shared by DJ Egg on the Winamp forums (http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=...40&pagenumber=3):



Sounds like there could possibly be a 5.04a version that adresses this problem

EDIT: Included links to my quotation.

Nor it's supposed to. It's a LC decoder, not a LTP decoder.