I've been tryng Winamp3 3 or 4 times since it was alpha, and it always crashed on me. The final version just won't let me set anything, it opens frozen.
Well, actually not frozen : in fact it takes about 1 minute to respond to any user event (mouse, keyboard).

Winamp2 is the best player for me. Works as it should, plays long playlists without problems. Nowadays it's used mainly for playing OGGs.

Winamp2 does still what it have to do nicely. No reason to switch to WA3. Nowadays it just plays OGGs and MP3s, WA3 just takes more resources.

I'm happy user of Winamp2. Plays .oggs and other types well and doesn't take too much resources on my old AMD K6-2 system.

Hrmm.... had a bit of weirdness going on in this thread a few minutes ago... posts weren't showing up. I had to go in and manually fix the thread via phpmyadmin, but unfortunately the poll data was lost. Sorry guys... but at least we got the posts working again.

The one thing that Winamp 3 has done is to point out how good Winamp 2 still is and also make people look for alternative players that got overlooked in anticipation of the all singing all dancing W3.

Winamp 2 is a wonderful player that plays media well. It lacks user friendly features but it gets the job done quickly and efficiently. W3 has lost the plot. There are some great skins for it but otherwise it is all bloat and sloth.

So to answer the original question - I will not be using Winamp 3. Actually I have rediscovered QCD and consider this to be the dogs' gnats of media players.

I haven't used WinAMP since 2.09

CoolPlayer is all good!

yeah we all know it. coolplayer uses less memory than winamp2 - it actually uses 6megs while winamp2 uses only 2, but it's opensource so it still uses less memory, blah blah, meow meow. go somewhere else.

Your title might disqualify your claim. I don't care if it uses 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 or 50 megabytes of RAM. I have 640 MB to do with, so that's not my concern, but the fact is, CoolPlayer loads faster and is more responsive than WinAMP.

... oh, and you're right - it's opensource

yeah, coolplayer users love to show off how their player is "better" than everything else (especially in winamp-related threads), eg. "it seeks faster" or "it loads faster". you see, winamp is intended to play music, not to be loaded 10 times a minute or to seek around files like crazy.
again, i don't care about "responsivity" or "memory usage" or "loading time", that's what coolplayer trolls always point, usually based on false claims (but again, who cares...).

I looked at the thread earlier today, and from what I can remember 74 % answered "No". But a lot of voting was made before the MPC codec was available, I guess.

FYI - you can use shoutcast with winamp 3 - you just need to install the 'winamp 2x plugin manger' and this will allow you to use the shoutcast plugin (along with several other wimamp 2 plugins).

Coolplayer definetly is a nice player. It is small and somehow fast, but its architecture too limited to be considered a serious player; both Winamp 2/3 have an architecture open for extensions, while Coolplayer is a very monotholitic software.
It has its place when you can not install software on your machine or want to burn a small player on a MP3 CD.

dev0

Nope.
Version 2.81 can handle all my needs and no complains about it.
WA3 is slower and buggy.
Since I mostly use older machines, upgrading will not bring any advantage or performance improvement.

So, lets keep 2.81.

LIF

well, i'm not flaming coolplayer itself, i respect the competition; i only get annoyed by smartass coolplayer users inserting their plugs everywhere.
about Winamp3 - calling it "final" is very wrong right now, even i don't actually use it (though i have to develop components for it). i'm sure that my not-so-recent machines handle Winamp3 fine though (eg. 700mhz/128meg laptop), and resource usage will go down with incoming versions (though it will probably never be as low as with Winamp v2.x).

Final or not, Winamp 3 always got "stopped because it has performed an illegal operation", or just freezes after a few clicks. So I won't change from 2 to 3.

tried 2.72 - took over all my file extensions without asking - a no no in my book. at least give the installer (installee) the option as to what file types to associate. i had to re-associated the file extensions so that the ati player would play them.

found coolplayer and liked it.
really like 1by1 from m pesch (sp) the same author of mp3directcut (use it allot). have stuck with it ever since. no associations - no registry entries. just goto the folder and play.
no visuals just good sound. what i wanted in a player. footprint - don' know. it didn't take over.
no flames - you asked.

well, the installer does ask about associating with files and CDA; if you can't read or just keep clicking "next", that's your problem, keep it to yourself. same about registry entries mostly (only recent plugins write to registry, to avoid problems with unicode in winamp.ini and winamp.ini max size limit). i'm really amazed by amount of false information about Winamp people (mostly coolplayer "fans") post.

zZzZzZz

pretty harsh - that will help with getting people to use your product. i never said i was perfect...and sometimes i do make mistakes. i guess doing this pole was another one of them. troll - no just trying to learn. sorry if i offended you. i meant no harm. i just came here to learn - not get pounded for making a mistake

i personally don't give rat's ass about which player you use. but please, if you came here to tell why some player is "better" for particular purpose than Winamp, at least come with valid info about it, thank you.

i use 2.81. its not that im opposed to using 3, its just that 2.81 does what when i want. its highly configurable and hardly touches my system resources.

I won't be switching to WA3 and will still continue to use WA2 even "if," or "when?" I upgrade to Win2K or WinXP.

WA3 is nice looking but the functionality is totally alien to me. The new way the playlist works alone was enough to turn me completely off, it just wasn't the friendly ugly duckling I've come to love over the past two years. It's too resource hungry on Win98, and loads just as slow as Micro$oft WMP on Win98 even though the site states it (officially) supports Win98.

I think anyone using Win98 who loads the player will quickly realize that their OS is just too old, and too M$-DOS'd down to effeciently run WA3, or any modern media player for that matter. Just my thoughts.

I have used and loved WA2, but lost the love when WA3 came out. I was going to go back to WA2 when I came across a suggestion for QCD in the Nullsoft Forums. I am very happy with this prog! It rocks!

QCD Homepage

It is fully skinnable. In fact, I am using the Quinnamp skin that makes it look almost identical to Winamp.

The only thing that prevents me from using wa3 more frequently is the way the playlist editor works. I find it pretty annoying that dblclicked track automatically creates new playlist. Besides if loading multiple m3u's, they're not being displayed after Winamp restart (if they've never been played).

What would be really nice to have is a more customizable playlist loading (automatic name generation, scan and update features... albumlist-like in other words ). It's not that optimal after loading a bunch of m3u's to rename every single playlist manually.

Media library could be an option for organizing, though I don't need all those sorting and searching capabilities, just handling of already (externally) created playlists.

I feel like I'm the only one here liking wA3 , when I did my last fresh install I decided to not install WA2 and give 3 a try.
Well I haven't regretted it. Ok it loads a bit longer but hey you only start a program once don't you?
Mysteriously enough I happen to find my way around WA3 with quite ease.
The only bad thing it has is that the mpcplugin cannot edit tags , this is a fault of WA3 if I understood correctly. Let's hope they fix it soon so this little trouble is also gone.
WA3 also runs even stabler over here! Sometimes when I played mpcfiles with WA2 the playback would stop for no reason at all only to begin again after I hit stop and play again, I haven't had this behavior at all with WA3.

It plays music? I thought it was just intended to install AOL icons...

Maybe I'm missing something but I liked in winamp2 how one could see the total time of the playlist @ the bottom of the playlist editor. Can we still do this- I can't figure out for the life of me how to do this in winamp3. Any suggestions ?

-Jeff

from winamp3 faq:

1. is there a reason to use wa3 soundquality wise?
2. is there a tool to make skining easier? (i dont feel like coding)

layer3maniac: 3.0b actually doesn't install that AOL on Desktop crap anymore. Still not bad that AOL is only making them do that.


frozenspeed: Next release. (Or try 491 if you are daring).


smok3:
1) Same decoders, same outputs, same EQ backend. it *should* be exactly the same. Any variation could be due to different output settings (waveOut vs DirectSound and Sound Card driver crap)

2) There have been a few, but nothing really that developed. There are some stuff in the stickies in the Winamp3 Skinning and Scripting forum

I have the new 2.81, and I love it.
I tried Winamp 3, but quite simply hated it. Too many options, too many things it doesn't need to do.
I had 2.78 before this, but it didn't like XP... so I went from that to one of the 1.X Winamps for a bit. An antique, but interesting to say the lest! Geez we are pampered with all these other versions! lol

Still using 2.81 Winamp, it's fast and it's all you need
I tried Wa3 and it is really slow, buggy, and this new skining arch doesn't impress me 2 much.
Winamp 2.x for life!

I may try out WA3 again when they add ID3v2 tag editing to it...until then, i'm going to use WA2.

Another reason for using Winamp 2.81
one word : "Milkdrop"

Milkdrop does rock Did some serious impressing of my friends at my last party ("what is that?" "where can I get that" "that is even cooler than the 3d0 colour game!")

2.81 all the way.
Winamp 3 may need another year to become bug free

Winamp is shit, my Creative MediaSource is much better

No, thanks.
I'm a Winamp 2.X skinner and I like the way it works.
Other limitations for me:
Fat, heavy, unstable, no golabal hotkey plugin I like, hard to skin (well, I'm sure I could learn skinning it, but what for?).
Many famous Winamp 2.x skinners won't turn to WA3 too, so don't expect lots of nice interfaces.
I'm sure, Nullsoft won' be able to make a stable and fast release for at least one year (Winamp 2.X is still buggy a bit, some previous versions were almost impossible to use, as there were too many bugs)..
So, don't use this stuff... At least now

Probably not.

WA 2.xx works good enough for me since I'm just using it to listen to mp3's.

no, but as soon as fb2k plays SHNs, I will likely abandon wa2.xx for good...

No Way

Winamp 2.81 for me still. I don't always like saying it, but in this case, the old saying "If it ain't broken, don't try to fix it." is definitely true.

After I last reformatted and reinstalled WinMe, I've not bothered with WinAmp 3. I still like CoolPlayer for the most common types of listening I do. Honestly, foobar2000 seems one of the best reasons I've yet encountered for moving from the 98 kernel to Win2k (WinXP? -- NOT!).

I'm still sticking to Winamp 2.xx, Winamp 3 is too slow on my old computer, and using Win98 doesn't help much. Foobar2k is incredible, I use it, but there's something I use, like a firewall that causes it to malfunction. Winamp 2.xx is the most stable, and best sounding player ive come in contact with!

never in an eternity!
Foobar does all I'd ever like and is better in most aspects aswell.

No. using WinAmp2 60% / fb2k 40% right now. I'll completely switch to fb2k very soon.

Winamp3 - NO WAY... foobar2000 and Winamp2, soon I will switch to foobar2000 only soon (still need WA2 for some things). I just hope that zZzZzZz is working on new version, and that's why he hasn't updated anything for such a long time, and that he hasn't abandoned it for public and started developing for himself.

How often do you want releases???!
Do you know another program that is updated as often?
And yes: Peter is working on foobar as he always is.

Well, I am completely OK with anything, but I got kind of used to the frequent updates I am glad that he still works on it.
And, no, I don't know anyone who updates it so frequent.

I've switched to foobar2000 because org winamp SSRC's author, Peter, is now building foobar2000.