Comments welcome.

Probably yes, cause I like it. Not sure though.

EDIT: Well no. Not yet. It still lacks too many features. :-/

I am waiting for a mpc plug-in before switching... or simply testing WA3.

I hate the way the new playlist operates in WA3.

I'll probably just stick with WA2 for awhile, unless I'm forced to use 3

I am waitng for Album List Never was a big fan of the Media Library.

I'll probably stick with Winamp 2 at first. Winamp3 is really nice and I'll definetly test it, but without Shoutcast/Icecast support it's completely useless to me...

dev0

Depends on what I'm doing.

When I just want to hear some music while sitting in front of my computer I'll stick to Winamp 2.x. But if i plan to make playlists and do dedicated listening, I'll be using Winamp3.

Winamp3 is just not as resource friendly as Winamp 2.x but playlist management is much better. Though i'd like to see some more playlist/media library in the future.

(So where's the option "I'll switch over but not completely?" )

http://www.blorp.com/~peter/wa3.htm

What should I vote? I already switched with RC1.

That plugin wont play files with Mid/Side Stereo disabled.

No, still alot that is missning for me.
What I want:
* Logarithmic Volume & Panning. (Not possible in WA3 yet)
* dB steps with Vol. & Pan. instead of % - enabled with e.g. out_ds (Not possible to fix with WA2)
* volume & pan bars that don't depend on stuff like resolution etc. - smooth stepless movement. (Not possible to fix with WA2)

yep.. that's about it...
oh
* Something similar to AlbumList but better and with more features.

KAMiKAZOW > thanks a lot !!! Hpe that a better one will come soon (i.e Comments tags)

Q! > That's a good protection

I will switch as soon as a good iTunes skin is available. The UI for Winamp3 is horrible and ugly.

for the task of the moment. For listening to streaming online radio, tiny footprint CoolPlayer rules! (Get ver 2.06 from BetaNews) At present, there's no particular advantage I can find in WA3 to offset the disadvantage of resource hogging. As a matter of fact, I think Sonique 2 (Brazil's new threat!) more appealing. That could change as plugin apps are developed...As a video player, WA3 is for the birds.

I've been using 2.x versions and they always
worked great on my Duron 1.2 and my "other babies" 100/233 mhz.
Since I use the oldest to play mp3's,mpc's and cda's connected to my
sound system I prefer not to upgrade by obvious reasons...
Time ago, tried 3.x beta, and didnt like it...kinda slow and
buggy. Maybe 3.0 final is ok, but 2.80 is being great in all tasks(in
the tree machines)...
BTW, Why did they remove shoutcast from 3.0?(Oops... I almost
forgot who owns Nullsoft!!).

Abracos para o grande Roberto.

LIF

i'm not using wa3, imo it's still too buggy (funny, i used beta1 - beta3 versions as my primary player), i still live with v2.x (though i dont have 488/3.0, can't download it, sitting on a really shitty 56k now).
to all of you who bitch about Winamp 2.x being too stupid (having limited features / retarded playback engine / whatever) & Winamp 3.x being too big/bloated - yes, i understand what you mean, i'd be probably with you if i wasn't one of Winamp devs. this is really hard, it doesn't make much sense to improve v2 (because any "major improvements" would break skins/plugins; any big changes i can think of would go in the direction of simething similar to v3 anyway).
about "missing features" in 3.0 - they will hopefully appear in 3.01 or something, some of things had to be removed so whole thing could be finished before the deadline.

Abracos para voce tambem, grande LIF.

Abracadabra, sim salabim. :cool2:

On topic now: I'll stick to Winamp 2.x until 3.x has matured some more.

stupid question...
Can I install WA3 in its own directory and still have access to winamp 2.xx? Hell, I'm still using winamp 2.72 and am happy with that. I do like the skinning options for 3 though, corner amp etc.

yes

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). Currently I don't need any of these features and the lack of a good mpc plugin makes me stick to Winamp2 for the time being.
The most apparent change to me is the skinning system. I was very impressed by the skins I tried. Fancy animations etc. The variable layout got me confused though from time to time. You can tell me that the internals have changed alot and are much more flexible, that's cool, but as a user I don't see any benefits yet. The interface just feels slower. Let's see what the future brings.
Note: this is just my personal way of looking at the program. I respect those who have worked hard on the new version. I'm also not sure what to expect. v2.80 is allready a very cool, flexible, feature rich piece of software. Making major improvements is almost impossible.

Winamp3 is ok in my opinion but there are a lot of niggles I have with it. I'm sure everyone has heard the argument about Winamp 1/2 breaking the laws of GUI design but I think with this latest version its gone far too overboard.

The skins argument will no doubt kick in but I find that its far more than that. Its purely technical elegance throughout the whole user experience. I think Winamp's strength is in its mature back end .dll's, and input and output plugins which Peter works tirelessly on.

OK, lets look at the winamp3 user interface. Could you say that without even touching the application, you'd be able to guess what every control would do? I doubt it.

The Media Library / Playlist is a confusing setup of two methods of doing something which should essentially be done in one control. The components themselves are abysmal and rushed and should have really been thought out a whole lot better. Since when does clicking buttons make a menu pop up? (see playlist editor).

The contrasts on the default skin are too harsh and makes the application look ugly. It's like having a black fronted hi-fi with brushed silver buttons... quite oxymoronic!

Among other complaints, the top of the windows have their own controls which make no sense at all, like the + in the left corner of the windows... all metaphorically confusing and inconsistant!

I'm getting quite bored of complaining but I feel Winamp3 is basically great concept, abysmal execution. So, I'll end up using it anyway due to its versatility, but the learning curve is a highly unnecessary and could have been circumvented for newbies.

Oh, and dont get me started on the configuration dialogs!

Later

Ruairi

This might be a stupid question, but... what's driving development of WA3? The reason I ask is that it seems silly to me to compete directly with WMP (or anything by Microsoft, for that matter), and WA2 really is *good enough* I think in most respects, for the majority (maybe not... please, no flames).

Just a purely rhetorical question, but... is it possible to call a piece of software "done?" Just say "it's finished, that's the last version" and then offer services, skins, the chatroom and various other goodies (maybe even paid services) to accompany that finally finished, completed piece of software.

As a sometimes-programmer I know the conventional answer to this question, but in this day of upcoming so-called "web services" ... maybe it's possible to finish a software instead of the typical happening, where company/programmer interest gradually "poops out" and the project is dropped... or when a program just starts to bloat out of control eventually.

I am a tagging maniac, and have a big and growing mpc library : it's painful to navigate in it. MediaJukebox made a good job before I switched to APE2...

With Winamp3, I have a lot of pleasure : the Media Library is wonderful (but buggy : there are missing files). I can navigate easily, and in many directions, in my library.

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

If bugs are limited, I may use it frequently. Just hope that Case will develop soon a good plug-in for musepack.


P.S. mpc sound seems to have some problem... But I'm not not sure

>> what's driving development of WA3?
My guess AOLTW. I think they are looking for some return on their investment. i remember seeing early screen shots of a Winamp3 based AOL Media Player.

But when it comes right down to it there is either two ways you can go with a Media Player. The small and fast or the Jack of all trades thing. It looks like Nullsoft is trying to cover them both. Seeing since EVERYTHING in Winamp3 is a component you can have it as small or as large as you want. In fact I think it is kind of cool. Don't want the Media library? Delete it. Don't want the Minibrowser? Delete it. And so on.

But when you have corporate interests behind a product you have to try to appeal to the masses who LIKE WiMP and MMJB. Trying to do that without aniliating your loyal user base of fast and efficient users can be tough.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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

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.

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.

Not me, no sir!

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.

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!

> 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.

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?

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

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.

Oh yeah - that too! My bad

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Oops!

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

Winamp3 MPC Converter

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

Ok Sawg. We won't forget it!