blog.jimbo.org.uk

January 12, 2004

Why I stopped whipping the llama's ass

I used to really like Winamp. It was a media player for windows that didn't suck, it ran quite happily on quite piffling hardware, and new versions kept up with developments I cared about, such as including Ogg Vorbis support.

Then, there was the disaster that was Winamp 3. I don't think I've spoken to once person yet who liked it. Sure, there were some features that people wanted in there — apparently the multiple playlists were something people had been asking for for years — but all of a sudden winamp was this slow, bloated media player, and worst of all had a completely different interface. All my old finger macros, long since forgotten by my brain but remembered by my fingers, were completely broken.

Luckily, Nullsoft were canny, and realised that people would want to stick with Winamp2. They continued to develop it, releasing updates at classic.winamp.com, and everything was hunky dory.

Recently, Nullsoft released Winamp 5. This was supposed to be the Next Big Thing — all the whizzy new features of 3, with all the performance and the old interface from 2. Who could possibly not like it? Well, frankly, me. It sucks. Sure, it does all the things Winamp2 used to do, but it doesn't do anything extra that makes me want to stick with it. Throw in the fact that it runs like a pig in treacle on my (not that old) laptop, and I think it's clear why I didn't see a great need to stick with version 5.

Still, this wasn't going to be a problem. Classic.winamp.com would have versions 2 and 3 on it, right, for those of us who didn't want to switch to 5? Hell no. classic.winamp.com now also only offers winamp5 for download. Luckily, I still had the installer for 2.91 from last time; that said, maybe this is a good oppportunity to see what other media players are out there. I've not got on with the Creative PlayCenter that came with my soundcard, and couldn't stand the look of MusicMatch — iTunes is downloading as I write this, so I'll give that a go, perhaps. Failing that, I really don't have a clue what's out there. Suggestions welcome :-)

In other news, I've opted for blog redesign by gradual accretion of tweaks to templates/stylesheets, rather than any dramatic rewrites, so don't be surprised if things occasionally break in slightly odd ways.

Posted by James at 01:49
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Comments

Posted by: MP at January 12, 2004 09:14 AM

Posted by: kyle at January 12, 2004 09:21 AM

Posted by: James at January 12, 2004 11:41 PM

Posted by: FNRThomas at March 12, 2005 09:39 PM