Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself.

I haven't found any Media Players that aren't awful or annoying in some way.

I use Winamp, because it's the best (it has the least annoyances).

BrightBlessings said:

Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself | Ars Technica

Hi there.

Most of that article is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to winamp's users. I can't be bothered with any of "Itunes" Clones etc.

My music is mainly all Ripped from CD's

so what WINAMP does which is better than nearly every music player I've researched is

1) Obtain track etc information from GRACENOTE -- for my needs far more reliable than FREEDB - especially as much of my stuff is classical music that doesn't appear on Freedb anyway.

2) Rip directly to FLAC --with disk space being not a problem any more why shouldn't I have music available without ANY losses due to mp3 compression.

3) It will play music directly from FOLDERS --that means I don't have to tag everything into albums / artists etc etc -- very handy for example if you store audio books on your system too.

Saves you mucking about creating / deleting / maintaining Play lists etc.

The other problem with "Classical" tagging systems is that it gets very difficult to maintain via "Album" with 1000's of tracks - especially as some albums can have the same track that appears in another album - by the same or a different artist.

So I have say Music===>classical==>G.F Handel=CDNAME 1
TAGGED TRACKS FROM GRACENOTE
=======cdname2 ETC
very very easy maintainable system even for around 3 TB of music I've got

Can re-organise / split / move with NO problems whatsoever --unlike those systems that use their own database systems --and it's totally maintainable with WINDOWS EXPLORER. (Therefore also easy to backup and restore).

I NEVER buy stuff from Itunes etc --I do not PAY for compressed music --but that's another issue. Audio books in Mp3 though are fine -- single voice at 64 kbs is fine for listening on a train etc.

4) using Folders it's simplicity itself to have music spanning multiple volumes.

5) has a nice decent equalizer -- user settable --not like those "pre-canned" ones's that always assume you want a boom boom thump thump sound even for a Soprano voice !!.

Finally this app works really well on android as well -- I just copy the relevant FOLDERS from my computer to the micro sdhc card in the phone (32 GB removable so in theory just insert a 2nd one for more music !!).

No need for "Sync" or anything -- Simplicity itself.

The app works great on the samsung IIIs with a decent pair of Bose cans too -- FLAC music really sounds great --the DAC on the samsung is first class too.

I'm not going to stop using it -- most decent apps in any case don't need upgrades every five minutes either.

Before I get the rediculous replies --like try Foobar etc etc -- remember what I said --GRACENOTE DB, FLAC, and PLAY VIA FOLDERS. I haven't seen any alternatives that provide all 3 and work identically on the PC and the Phone.

Cheers
jimbo

Love winamp, still rocking it since the late 90s/early 00s

Tried foobar, but prefer winamps diverse amount of free plugins to play some very obscure audio codecs like adx files from video game CD rips...

Native FLAC support is a plus too!

OvenMaster said:

I loved WMP10 in WinXP. I was shocked to see what a clumsy piece of junk WMP12 is.

Agreed 100%.

WMP10 was good (I use it on my XP install).

WMP12 butchered ~25% of my mp3 tags (and file names).
It took me a couple of weeks to fix the damage.

jimbo45 said:

2) Rip directly to FLAC --with disk space being not a problem any more why shouldn't I have music available without ANY losses due to mp3 compression.

I agree with you on many points except the one above. Even FLAC compression is, in fact, compression, and cannot maintain the sound quality of the original audio CD.

It is true that the difference between the original CDA and FLAC are fairly marginal, but hell, considering that even the original audio CD cannot possibly maintain the sound quality of a studio mix&mastering, that can be considered a "finished product", FLAC doesn't look any better in my eyes than any other audio codec (yes, even WAV).


Then again, I'm just picky like that... Actually, I'm picky exactly like this:





Oh, and to actually answer to the topic at hand, right now I just use WMP11 on my Vista because I have the required (and necessary) tools for advanced ripping, editing and encoding which I use with all my CDs.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
Actually you should check your mathematics -- FLAC is LOSSLESS compression -- it can be re-converted to the exact WAV sound BTW.

As an example of LOSSLESS compression

say you have a sentence "The cat jumped over the lazy dog"'. We could have a coding algorithm that says English word THE is always equal to '~' for example and is always followed by one blank and 3 or more spaces are coded by say '¬n' where n is the number of spaces.

so in our very simple example the compressed sentence is '~cat jumped over ~lazy dog'.

We've saved 6 characters and the entire sentence can be reproduced 100% accurately again without ANY LOSS. In this case the compression isn't very efficient but you should get the drift.

Digital photography for example has RAW files which are another example of LOSSLESS compression or GIF files --also lossless.

JPEG's and MP3's invlove LOSSY compression. You cannot recover the 100% original from these files.

Agreed (png is another lossless image format).

If lossless audio formats didn't work, I would expect that there would be massive lawsuits over it (in the US) .

Here's an extract from a random article (from 2006) that I stumbled upon:

Evidence that conversions really are lossless

To make sure that the audio stored in each lossless format really is the same as the original audio source, I used an uncompressed Wave file of Canon in D major from The Essential Classics Collection. This Wave file was examined using the handy HashTab Shell Extension, and the MD5, SHA1 and CRC-32 hash values for the file were noted down, as was the size of the Wave file in bytes. This Wave file was converted using dBpowerAMP into a FLAC file (using the same compression settings as used in the big comparison above), and the original Wave file was deleted. The FLAC file was converted into a Monkey's Audio file, which was converted into an OptimFROG file, which was converted into a Shorten file, which was converted into a WavPack file. Finally, the WavPack file was converted into an uncompressed Wave file.

The resulting Wave file was exactly the same size as the original Wave file, and the MD5, SHA1 and CRC-32 hash values matched exactly with the original. This is very strong evidence that each of the lossless formats tested preserves the original audio perfectly.

Note that this process only succeeds because Wave does not support meta tags, it only stores the audio in the track. The conversion process above will change meta tags (that describe the track name, year the track was released, etc), so these are not necessarily preserved exactly between lossless formats. This is because not all audio file formats support the same meta tags. However, as far as audio is concerned, these formats really are lossless.

Lossless audio formats comparison
Lossless audio formats comparison

I was thinking more along the lines of the fact that most people rip their music to 16 bit 44100 Hz, which if I'm not mistaken, is the same with an original CDA. Studio mixing, however, can be done in greater bit depth and a higher frequency.

Then again, I always like to be proven wrong
That's how I learn stuff lol

EDIT: Not higher frequency, duh, I meant to say sample rate