Why do a lot of people like Winamp, I find it to buggy and uses high resources, I do like the media library option but I use Apollo now, what do you guys think about Winamp. I know a lot of people here use foobar but it looks a bit complicated too me.

Resource usage : Depends on the plugins you use, and the skin (if Winamp 5 skins are being used). The core of winamp, which comes from the 2.x days, wasn't too hungry on resources.

Buggy : Sorry, i am not experiencing bugs so it would help to know which ones have you found.

Media library : As you say, it's good. I use mostly the streaming part of it, but when i use it to find my tracks, i find it good enough.

Apollo : I used it back in 2000 and 2001. I still think it was one of the best GUI designs for a player, and in fact, foobar2000 remembers me that a bit.


conclusion :

Apollo is a good player and since it supports many winamp plugins, the playback abilities are on par with other players.

Foobar is still maturing, from my point of view. Once version 0.9 stabilizes, and the dozens of plugins that exist for 0.8 are ported, it could probably be packed and preconfigured very nicely (but who knows if this will be the case).

Winamp: It seems to be coming back to life. Winamp 3 was quite a fiasco, (winamp 5 can use winamp 3 skins, but the code was rewritten. and most of the other parts weren't reused), and original Nullsoft team abandoning it didn't do a favour either.

Btw... IMO

I have a 2.xx version (I dont remember which one) and its not buggy, doesnt take too much resources. But I do believe I use still use it for "nostalgic" reasons.

i thought the same things about foobar, but then got into transcoding (wavpack > mp3).

so i forced myself to figure out foobar. once i started, i realized that it really wasn't that tough to get the hang of.

now i swear by it.

it's such a nice media player that give me a ton of control and i can use command line encoders, rip if i want to, it runs from its local directory, smal install...blah blah....

i recommend figuring foobar out- it's very much worth it.

hmm.. why do I use winamp.....

I use winamp 2.95, and there aren't any bugs that I can think of. It takes about 20k of memory when I start it up (i have a lot of plugins).
I started using it because... well... there are very few audio formats that it can't play (with a plugin).

I've been using it for so long, I doubt I will ever change to another player. I just can't do without some of the great plugins for it.
Jammix dsp
sqrsoft advanced crossfading
joystick control (works great as a remote for winamp )

and all the various diskwriters (ogg, mp3, aac, wma, vqf) are a plus too

I don't bother with the media library, as it is useless to me. I just enqueue all my music into winamp, leave it on shuffle, and use 'jump' if I want to hear a specific song.

*Tip for those new to winamp: in_mp3 doesn't show the spectrum for mp3 in the way that ALL other formats are shown, use in_mpg123 instead (or in_mad).

Thanks for all the replies, it seems buggy to me as it crashes whilst playing a song, a mp3 with a stble version of LAME. It also crashes sometimes when editing a tag.

I agree Winamp is buggy. I bought the latest program and keep getting an error that it can't open my cd drive. My CD's all work fine in Itunes and JRiver Media Center. My computer is only a year old. I"m surprised that they sell these programs on the internet with these bugs. This program isn't even close to right. I went to the message forums and all kinds of people have trouble with the program open their disk drives.

Try a clean install of Winamp (instructions). It's quite likely that a third party MP3 playback plugin (or maybe a bad DSP plugin) is causing your crashes.

Thanks I'll try that, it might work.

Which version are you using?

The latest 5.13, I have tried others but it still seems buggy.

I occasionally get crashes at work and have narrowed it down to the out_asio.dll plugin I use. But it's only on my work laptop this happens.

At home it's all fine and good, no crashes

No crashes here and ich have been using winamp 2/5 for about 8 years (WA 3 was another story though).

Please remember, that Winamp 5 = Winamp 2 + a lot of security fixes + additional plugins. If you disable all those plugins that you do not need (eg the resource hungry modern skin support plugin) you get a winamp that looks like winamp 2 und feels like winamp 2 because ist IS Winamp 2. Just untick all things that you do not need in the installer. The only major difference is the lack of known and exploitable security holes.

Yep still crashes but not as often, do you think I should use wave out instead of direct out, any help would be very nice.

The only "bug" or annoyances I was putting up with Winamp that immediately had me switch over to FB2K were:
* Crackling in some tracks started after WA 5.12 (yes they were ReplayGain'd).
* The playlist annoyed the hell out of me more than anything else. I put up with it for a long time until one day it just made me snap, and mad as hell as I shouted out some profanity - and then quickly uninstalled Winamp in favour of FB2K!
I shall explain; When clicking on a track to highlight it and to look at the file info upon exiting the file info it would cause the playlist to be un-scrollable ("stuck in place"). I would then have to click the player window, and then click the playlist window again to get it to scroll again.

Winamp is rock solid for me during years.
You should check your computer stability and the instalation of your audio drivers, if you are still having problems try to post at winamp forums so people can help you corner the bug if there is one.

[edit] typo

I definately recommend waveout over directsound, I have never had one problem with waveout. directsound likes to crash ocationally and I don't consider its 'features' to be of any real use, at least not for me.

Usually DirecSound is recommended for WinXP.
As for bugs, no, I haven't encountered any bugs except for one. Sometimes when I'm minimizing games Winamp becomes Always on top for some reason. All I have to do is pres CTRL+SHIFT+S (my global hotkey) to hide and then show it again and everything is fine. Resource hog? No. I don't think so. I have a bit more than 3300 songs (I know this is not a large collection), I have Enhancer active and Winamp takes up around 13MB of RAM. I don't think this is a lot.