An unbiased opinion of Winamp 5

[zektor]

As many of you good folks here may know, I am an avid fan of QCD. I come to these forums and I see so many people knock Winamp for this reason or that reason. Then, for the heck of it, I go to the Winamp forums and I see people knocking QCD...among other players. What is really up with this? What ever happened to the days when people weren't such fanboys (as it is called nowadays) when it comes to software? I just don't get why somebody just simply cannot like multiple *gasp!* programs. I use QCD on a daily basis. I love it. That isn't going to change. But, I happen to like Winamp 5 as well after giving it a try. It's back up to the speed of 2.x again (when I last really enjoyed it) and has a very cool TV feature that I'm really getting a kick out of at the moment. Ok, so now Winamp has a TV feature that QCD does not. And QCD has better encoding features than Winamp...and they are FREE to boot. Both programs are good!

[KR_Dragon]

Seems to me like loyal winamp users bash all of the other media players out there and all of the other media player users other than winamp bash winamp practically on an exclusive level... See a pattern?

The evil toaster will never prevail, im sorry.

[sld]

Hey zektor, good to see that we share the same mindset. You should see what I'd done on Fileforum in response to those mindless 3rd-party-player bashers. :D

[zektor]

Yeah, I just think it's rediculous. I guess my mindset comes from the good old Commodore 64 days...where all of us programmers admired each others workings...and everyone just pretty much enjoyed everything. Well, this is what I intend to do... even in this day and age! :)

[sld]

Unfortunately, audio is a very muddled field, and no one so far will know for sure to draw the line between fact and opinion. That has caused a lot of grief between proponents of different players, ESPECIALLY when it comes down to audio playback quality.

[deeswift]

I agree that bashing a certain product (unless it's crap) is pretty stupid. I have Winamp 5, QCD, QCD v1.27, 1by1 and Windows Media Player. I like them all except WMP, which is uninstallable on XP. What I reckon though, is QCD should avoid putting in features to burn / encode, etc. Anyone who know will use EAC and LAME or other great software. Similarly, Winamp does a lot of things I don't need. It's just bloating the product, in my opinion.

[zektor]

I agree that bashing a certain product (unless it's crap) is pretty stupid. I have Winamp 5, QCD, QCD v1.27, 1by1 and Windows Media Player. I like them all except WMP, which is uninstallable on XP. What I reckon though, is QCD should avoid putting in features to burn / encode, etc. Anyone who know will use EAC and LAME or other great software. Similarly, Winamp does a lot of things I don't need. It's just bloating the product, in my opinion.

True. Ripping in Winamp 5 doesn't even work for me, and QCD's ripping is not as full featured as some stand alone rippers I have used. I use Easy CDDA Extractor (which I believe is the best) but if I had to go with a free extractor I would definitely use CDex. I think a player should be just that. A media player. We do not need an integrated "everything" audio software IMHO. All I would like to see out of any media player is for it to excel in doing what itwas originally intended to do....PLAY MEDIA.

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

I think a player should be just that. A media player. We do not need an integrated "everything" audio software IMHO. All I would like to see out of any media player is for it to excel in doing what itwas originally intended to do....PLAY MEDIA.

Perhaps, but you forget that most people are not satisfied with that. Hell, almost every media player can rip cd's nowadays, even WMP. In addition, visualisations have become quite indispensible as well. And Nullsoft knows that if they are going to stick with winamp 2.9, they lose users. So they do what happens to most mediaplayers, which is to add more features to keep ahead of the competition. Similarly, QCD will have to evolve as well.

[sld]

Well, I don't consider Winamp 5 bloated, because I can choose not to install the stuff I don't need (yeah, like the ripping/encoding engine).

[J44xm]

Plus, in a sense, QCD is a player only: much of the extra functionality comes in the form of totally optional plug-ins. I see nothing wrong with leaving "slots" in the program in which developers can add little modules of extra capabilities. In fact, I love it. It's like a pick-and-choose type of player.

[sld]

Many of the mature players now (like QCD, Winamp and Foobar2000), though may be heavily extended with the use of plugins, are extremely light when used without any plugins.
The same cannot be said for players like Musicmatch, RealOne, WMP>6.4...

[Todd The Kiwi]

I use Easy CDDA Extractor (which I believe is the best)


me too :D

[JEdwardP]

I agree that bashing a certain product (unless it's crap) is pretty stupid...

Agreed. There's a maddening "player war" going on within the so-called reviews at beta news, in which fans of one player seem to feel obligated to "rate" the others 1-of-5 stars, adding learned comments such as "this player sucks and so do you."

I recently made a post there urging tolerence and common sense. I almost added a statement to the effect of "If you must bash another player, try one that can easily be attacked on OBJECTIVE grounds, such as WMP." But I didn't add that bit, because ultimately it seemed counterproductive to getting my point across.

I'm currently giving both foobar and 1by1 a heavy tryout, but I haven't abandoned QCD. I realized I might even end up keeping QCD around just as a tagger for Speex files. Foobar appears to have some curious issues reading the tags of various audio formats, and my main tagging app. only supports MP3 and Ogg.

Perhaps I'll keep three players. Anybody who keeps three web browsers installed should surely be able to justify the same for media players ;)

[Roj]

I bowed out of the mess on Betanews a while back for one simple reason:

If you can't see or hear the advantage for yourself, I can't help you anyway. :)

[Matt]

the fact that you can rate a product over and over on Betanews bugs me. They should really leave the ratings as ratings and have another method for people to discuss the software product. The ratings are so skewed on betanews because of the 'wars' I don't put any weight on the resulting rating number.

I really like betanews, but they just need to re-evaluate how their rating system works.

[Roj]

the fact that you can rate a product over and over on Betanews bugs me. They should really leave the ratings as ratings and have another method for people to discuss the software product. The ratings are so skewed on betanews because of the 'wars' I don't put any weight on the resulting rating number.

I really like betanews, but they just need to re-evaluate how their rating system works.
I don't bother with the ratings - they're junk. The other problem is that a lot of stuff that gets posted there is just plain garbage (the software itself). Take all those so-called "Windows memory managers" for example: under 2K and XP those are just plain con jobs to the customers. They have NO effect but the thieves who write them persist in flogging them.

One has to take the good with the bad I suppose...