Winamp

See also: AV Software

Home Page: http://www.winamp.com

A Windows music and video player. It has a wide variety of skins and has a great many plugins and audio codecs. Generally speaking, the best media player available for Windows. For a *NIX clone, see XMMS (version 1.x).

Features:

  • Simple, clean, fast, pretty.
  • Not as intrusive and annoying as Windows Media Player (http://windowsmedia.microsoft.com) or RealPlayer (http://www.real.com) and utilizes playlists better than Quicktime (http://www.quicktime.com).
  • Wide variety of plugins. If it doesn’t have a feature that another program has, you can probably download a plugin to do the same thing.
  • Very popular – one of your friends no doubt uses this program. UNIX-clones of an MP3 player invariably look like Winamp.
  • Winamp plays a wide variety of different audio codecs (not just MP3). It plays Ogg Vorbis files by default and was one of the first audio players to include this codec in their downloads. This shows a commitment to keeping up with audio trends and not simply playing proprietary formats such as AAC, MP3Pro, and others. Winamp 2 can optionally play Windows Media Audio WMA files in the “full” version of its install. “Lite,” or smaller versions, are available.

There are two relevant versions of Winamp – Version 2 has a variety of free and easy use plugins and seems to start up faster. Version 5 has a number more options, and a beautiful user interface but is newer and more of the plugins cost money to use. There is purportedly a plugin to port version 2 plugins but I haven’t found it yet.

Winamp was originally authored by Justin Frankel. Winamp’s company Nullsoft was purchased some years ago by AOL, now AOL/TimeWarner.

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Winamp 2 (classic) (http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2139-10199518.html?tag=lst-0-3)

Although an older version of Winamp, version 2 still has some appeal for low end computers with its developed plugin base, low footprint, and minimal system memory usage.

Plugins: http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/

Some excellent plugins include:
DSP
    • Enhancer (http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml?componentId=81361)
    • Dee (http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml?componentId=38489)
    • DFX (http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml?componentId=50756) (commercial)
Here’s a way to stack DSP plugins (http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml?componentId=128742).
Visualization
    • Geiss (http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml?componentId=3089)

Winamp official FAQ (http://classic.winamp.com/download/faq/index.jhtml?filenumber=0&language=english&layout=normal&prevlayout=normal)

TakeDown.NET -> “Winamp”

Categories: Software