RSSLatest Winamp adds access to CBS Radio stations
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published July 17, 2008, 1:37 PM
Who still uses Winamp? There's at least one guy at BetaNews whose desktop clutter contains the venerable music player, and today there's actually a new reason for it to stay right where it is.
Though it's been BetaNews itself that sounded the death knell for Winamp as much as four years ago, the product itself lives on, albeit without the innovative spirit that characterized its Nullsoft developers at the turn of the decade. Today's release of version 5.54 might not merit mention were it not for the addition of at least one compelling new feature: the new and rebuilt AOL Radio, which now provides direct access to CBS owned and affiliated radio stations throughout the US.
CBS Radio (previously known as Infinity Broadcasting) has been streaming its owned and operated stations over the Web for several years, though up until recently, you've had to dial up each station through its Web page. Then CBS Radio launched its own online player, followed last March by an agreement to merge that player with the troubled AOL Radio -- at one time, the Internet's leading streaming music service.
There's been a multitude of services available through Winamp over the years that have gone by the name "AOL Radio" (earlier builds appeared to intentionally confuse AOL Radio with Shoutcast streams). Today, AOL Radio for all intents and purposes is CBS Radio, with all of its selections being stations from CBS' roster of 150 streaming broadcasters. But not every CBS stream is featured there yet, especially including several of the "HD2" channels that appear on new digital "HD" FM consoles.
Still, the mere fact that Winamp 5.54 provides direct and unimpeded access, without popup ads, to KRTH-101 Los Angeles could be the media player's raison d'etre, at least for this not-so-golden oldie. You'll also find access to KMOX 1120 St. Louis, KCBS News Radio 740 in San Francisco, KOOL 105 in Denver, and CBS College Sports radio from New York.
Sound quality is excellent at 64 Kbps, especially when compared to Shoutcast or Surfer Network stations (KOMA Oklahoma City comes to mind) that stream at 31 Kbps or less, which often sound like they're being sent to you from an orbital space station.
You'll also get access to quite a few advertisements, the sheer volume of which is often astounding. Thanks to the magic of synchronization, certain ads that are exclusive to AOL Radio will pre-empt local stations' broadcast ads, often for 60 or 90 seconds at a time. For now, many of these are public service ads. But when these spots have concluded, there may often be as much as 60 seconds more of local advertising, followed by 30 seconds of station promos. And there may be four of these breaks per hour.
With AOL Radio paying multiple tiers of royalties, including for categories that CBS' broadcast stations are currently exempt from paying, these ads won't be going away any time soon.
Winamp Rulz!!
has been, is now, and will be my default player f.ever
it has all the features of any other player . .
it is not bloated with crap . .
it is VERY lite . .
has TONS of plugins and skins (thousand more than the other players together) . .
winamp is just . . cool
Score: 0
|Death of Winamp? Are you nuts? After they got over the v3 trouble, v5 has been the best player. There are competitors but Winamp still works. The spirit of Frankel is still there.
Score: 0
|This is excellent news. I've been listening to Jack 104.1 on their player for ages, hit aol.radio and listened to several others as well.
This throws it all together in one nice package...that I already use.
(Use=it's installed and frequently used for it's auto-tagging feature)
Score: 0
|W H O U S E S W I N A M P ? THEN WHAT DO YOU USE BETANEWS? WMP? lol..QuickTime...lol..the command line Mplayer? RealPlayer? MPC? VLC?
Score: 0
|foorbar...
songbird...
sonique....
AIMP...
The list of valid and usable WinAMP replacements goes on...and on....
(You might want to try learning to type. This intarwebz thing requires quite a bit of it)
Score: 0
|I used to use Winamp but went away for awhile but recently came back to it. It really does everything I need in the free version except rip and so I use something else for that. I've never cared much for the streaming radio stuff.
I've tried Media Monkey, J River, WMP, Foobar, Jetaudio and a couple others and nothing works for me like Winamp.
I don't like AOL but Winamp is a fine product.
Score: 0
|"Who still uses Winamp?"
Pah! I still use Sonique v1.96 for listening to music on my PC!
Score: 0
|"Though it's been BetaNews itself that sounded the death knell for Winamp as much as four years ago"
Well, stick to reporting since your crystal ball isnt exactly working well.
Score: 0
|Winamp is the indisputed chiptune player of choice. Nuff said.
Anonymous BetaNews Guy, I salute you.
Score: 0
|Amen
Score: 0
|The killer add-on that I don't find for any other player is AjaxAmp. Connect any old box to your HiFi, install WinAmp plus AjaxAmp and you have a great juke box controllable with any standard web browser. Sure there's TVersity and gang but nothing beats this in simplicity. It just works...
Score: 0
|LOL, Earth to Betanews, the only people who use Media Player are office dwellers with no control over their machines, or those too stupid or lazy to download and configure Winamp. Skins for every taste, plugins out the yang and it keeps running when Explorer crashes! Yeah, its really dying guys (*snicker*)..
Score: 0
|The new version of RealPlayer is really decent compared to previous versions, but still nothing comes close to Winamp, for music anyway.
Score: 0
|Pfft.
Death of Winamp.
It's the best and will be until VLC sorts out the skin and playlist functionalities.
"Today's release of version 5.54"
What? That was a week ago.
Score: 0
|Switched to AIMP a year ago, from winamp, about 10 trillion times better. Winamp is dead, sorry to say.
Score: 0
|I may check it out, but for me Winamp does everything I need it to. With every update it can play more and more filetypes and formats and that's just what I want.
It used to be terrible at video, but now it works with anything I ever need to throw at it (though of course not Quicktime or Real Media content).
Score: 0
|I checked it once (AIMP) but had a weird Russian language mix. It was a shame because I liked what I saw but learning a new language was beyond my scope. :P
I've downloaded it again because I was reminded by this news and I think I found the long overdue replacement of Winamp. :)
Score: 0
|Funny, when you install AIMP, you have the option to install various languages, including English.
I did not switch on to AIMP until the 2.5 betas started apparing, then I installed it with the Winamp skin, and quite frankly it looks identical to Winamp 5 but still sounds 10 times better and has more features. Give it another look, its here on fileforum.
Score: 0
|AIMP is boring cause it wont let you choose from thousand of plugins. .
i guess that makes it kinda like ie vs firefox
sorry but AIMP is lame . .
Score: 0
|"Sound quality is excellent at 64kbps"
What are you smoking....
Score: 0
|Ummm... it's radio. When was the last time you listened to an FM station? The quality doesn't need to be great. 64kbps is sufficient for most people.
Score: 0
|Most people who are half deaf? Not even, my hearing isn't that great and 128 kbps sounds like crap to me.
Score: 0
|Okay, no, it doesn't sound like a concert hall. But for a stream of a radio broadcast, it's quite listenable. Maybe my personal annoyment button is a little harder to reach than for other people, but I don't count that as a fault.
-SF3
Score: 0
|The definition of "crap" has an incredible margin of annoyance.
That said, i've been playing some and i have to say that the first that i found at 64kbps (which actually had the extension .flv..) was not great. Using .flv, the most probable format is mp3, so at 64kbps can't sound great. If it used LC-AAC (which i don't discard for this one) it sounds better, but not that much more (i.e. not better than FM after all).
There are streams with 128kbps mp3 too, which i would say are the ones that are listenable.
Edit: About the list navigation... it's great (compared to the shoutcast list), but one can only go *forward*!. The only way to go back is clicking "start".
(The AOL Video one isn't much greater either in that regard)
Score: 0
|It may...but it ain't much different than normal FM radio, ;)
Score: 0
|And just what should be replacing Winamp as player of choice - iTunes? I must admit I was pleasantly surprised to see AOL continue developing Winamp, and I hope they do for a long time to come and nothing has been able to replace Winamp for me yet. MediaMonkey comes close I suppose, but I really don't like its interface. *shrug*
Score: 0
|What to replace Winamp with? How about Spider? Try it. You'll like it!
Score: 0
|Ugh, definitely not iTunes. I've tried Foobar2000 recently, and that seems great...I've moved a lot of my activities like tagging lyrics and replaygain into mp3's to that. MP3tag is still the best for most tagging though. And Foobar2000 has so many addon components available, and the interface is so tweakable it's astounding...but also annoying, since you have to do so much work to get it a certain way or have certain features. Personally for just going through my mp3's to listen to them once they're tagged nicely, Winamp still seems best, I didn't realize it was considered outdated.
Score: 0
|I've tried Spider, Media Monkey, Itunes and Foobar and I still love Winamp more. I listen to the radio stations, it has the highest amount, the quality is good. Winamp is the one thing AOL hasn't screwed up so hopefully they'll keep it going.
Score: 0
|Streaming radio stations have addresses that you can plug into ANY decent modern media player. The only thing you get with winamp is a list, and you can get that list anywhere else too (I'm sure there's a place on the web with them all).
I've actually just switched fully to Foobar2000 and am not looking back. Completely free and open source FTW.
Netscape, ICQ, Winamp... AOL has a habit of buying out and ruining good apps. It's a good thing that anyone with any sense considers them a joke these days.
Score: 0
|You can get an online list but its so much easier to search and then listen to them with Winamp. I think AOL has had Winamp long enough that if they were going to ruin it they would have already. Their are radio players that I can get most of the stations I listen to but Winamp still does it better. I'll stick with Winamp thank you.
Score: 0
|OpenWhat???? Don't confuse an open SDK with open source. Winamp has also an open SDK for plugins.
His creator doesn't have the least intention to open source it.
I've been using foobar since the 0.6 days or so, and i still wouldn't recommend it as a main player. Sure, if you're someone interested in quality and formats. Not if you're just after playing music.
Score: 0
|Sorry, had no clue, I just saw the wiki on it.
Looks like I'll have to try Songbird or just use VLC then.
Score: 0
|My suggestion of iTunes was sarcastic btw. ;)
Score: 0
|