I've learned a tremendous amount about encoding MP3s in the past week thanks to this forum and others. I started out by religiously reading the r3mix forum and after two full days of encoding at --r3mix, I was sad to find out that I would need to start all over again. But, I'm glad I did, and I'm quite confident my use of --alt-preset extreme will keep me satisfied for a while.

Anyhow, I just downloaded WinAmp as the recommended player and would like to ask you experts what plugins I "need" to get to make it the best player that everyone says it is... or it is just perfect as a clean fresh install?

And what was I reading about making some files read only after "tweaking" to prevent it from morphing into some settings I don't want?

Any light shed on this for me will be much appreciated!!!

Thanks again, and I look forward to becoming an active member on this forum!

- Neb

I think it is fine just out of the box. Though some people my recommend the MAD plug-in, I can't notice a difference. Out of the box works fine for me (Using DirectSound).

The plugins of winamp are reccomended but not required for winamp to be the best audio player. You just need some plugins if you want to be able to listen to some other audio formats like mpc or monkeysaudio. Or if you want to to make your mp3's sounds different that they are. For me the best DSP plugin is Izotope Vinyl. Its is a plugin that makes mp3's sounds like vinyl records:) If you want to control winamp with a gamepad try Joy Remote, http://www3.sympatico.ca/warpawn/.

Check the plugins page in winamp's page and dowload whatever you like

If you have a sblive or audigy card, check out the ssrc resampling output plugin. not sure where to get it, do a search of the forum. Its resamples mp3s to 48000 hz, to avoid the sblive doing it automatically, with lower quality (sblives upsample everything to 48000 hz). It gives me a noticeably higher level (volume), and its not noisy so I'm lead to believe its increased the signal-to-noise by some %.. Of course, it could be psychological Good luck.

Peter's Winamp plug-in page is here.

http://www.blorp.com/%7Epeter/misc_wa.htm

Thanks for the tip... but since I've researched that exact "problem" of upsampling, I've purchased a Stereo-Link 1200 USB external sound card that does not upsample to hookup my computer to my home stereo. I figure my crappy Altec ATP3 computer speakers sound so bad it doesn't matter for computer listening anyways. But I should have my Stereo-Link (www.stereo-link.com) soon and will post my thoughts.

Thanks for the input.

Hi. This is also a most useful plug-in. Its an improved equalizer plug-in coded by Naoki Shibata.

Case recently modified it so it would fit lower desktop resolutions. This link is leeched from another thread.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/superequ-0.03.zip

Apologies to Case if I should not have done this.

Go straight to the source:
http://www.blorp.com/~peter/zips/wa2update.exe
To check for updates:
http://www.blorp.com/~peter/zips/?M=D

Heheheh... that's the most interesting thing i've read all day. Why make MP3's sound like vinyl records, just get a beat-up 'table on Ebay for 20 bux (or from a friend, yard sale, whatever) & spin some real records...

Then you need a vinyl recorder to write your mp3's on vinyl records.
This is the machine that you need http://www.vestax.com/products/vrx2000.htm