I have spend about 30 minutes (i think), and read all the posts in this page! I have seen the same nasty comments, again and again, from people who hardly seem to have any serious computer/programming background.. To my humble opinion, Winamp3 is as much spyware as Winamp 2 was.. (ie. is hardly at all.. if u ask me, I like the minibrowser info feature coz brings bios of artists automatically, yes I know that it is really commercial -buy tickets, search on eBay, buy cds-, but its still good))If you don't like it deactivated. If you worry that it is slow, stick with 2, until you have a pc with more resources.
I believe that Nullsoft still recognises how "not-actually-so-final" this player is... Didnt you guys see the huge "miss winamp2???" thing on their page? Did you miss the fact that they still support Winamp2? Just give them time, or at least try to appreciate how complicated such a project may be (trying to make a new mp3 player which will take the place of the best one out there -according to my opinion-).

its like.. doh!.. "get a new computer" eh? on friday I upgraded a bit.. to a P4 2.5x Mhz.. with 1.5gb of 1066 rdram.. GF4 Ti4600 and you want me to wait till i get a FASTER computer to use winamp 3?.. its a MP3 PLAYER!! it should require a PC that can play the very hottest and latest in games just to friggin RUN!.. get a grip!

I'm suprised you can run anything on your "P4 2.5x Mhz"
After all, 2.5Mhz doesn't go far these days. It should be at least in the GHz range, especially if it's a P4!

LoL.. haha good point.. its called a TYPO.. and its 2.53Ghz.. heh but i still dont think a friggin MP3 or MEDIAPLAYER should require this bloody much power to run!

Congratulations for your new pc :P ... I think I have covered this pn my previous post. Too new, too advanced concepts, too buggy, and thus too slow. that's why previous versions exist and are still supported

and apart for this, you can't really say "hey it should be just an mp3 player". Life is dominated by the rule of evolution... since they have developed,enhanced etc winamp2 as much as they could and there's not anything more left to do, they just want to enter some new fields and experiment there as well.. if u dont like it, dont follow it. nobody forced u to do so (someone could have said when Windows 3.11 WfG was out: "hey.. we have an operating system which even supports some basic networking.. ok.. we halt the developement of windows.. it should be just a simple operating system')

Pangel what the hell is your problem. You know thats why they have user feedback sections. If we dont like stfu? People here are voicing their opinion, which of course cant all be in favour of something. You know you dont need to program to have one. Programs are designed for people who know how to program you moron. You should do well to understand what it means to have an opinion and the opportunity to voice it. I dont see a clause anywhere here saying if you dont know how to make software or have anything positive to say then sit down and keep quiet.

Let people make their own judgements and have their own views. Dont try to shove yours down everyones throats. Relax, even people from Nullsoft probably dont get worked up as much as you over their own software being beaten to a pulp.

Whats the point of wasing resources from your PC to play MP3s? Winamp 3 is a clunkey, jammed packed full of 90% useless features, and bulky program that derived from a decent predecessor, thats why people have a hard time moving towards it.

BTW, it doesnt say MISS WINAMP 2...its says LOOKING FOR WINAMP 2...learn to get your facts straight before your flame every living soul here...you tool.

Aight.. You guys are just stupid and starting to piss me off! If you hate winamp just cuz its a bigger footprint, go suck some d*ck. I don't give a crap. Computers are faster and generally have more memory. Hence Winamp can use a bigger footprint. In the ratio from amount of ram to winamps footprint, it has always been the same. Back in 1998, winamp was like what, A 1 meg foot print, and people had like 16megs ram. Now its around 15megs for me, but i have 256 megs ram and not even using it all. If you hate memory usage, go back to Windows 95 and see how much u like it! Its just crap. I love windows XP. It may use more ram than other OS's, but just look at it! Winamp ain't slowing me down, so I like it. Unless you have a slowass computer with no ram, don't b**** about it. And you shouldn't be even using this program anyway. Look how much cooler Winamp is now, so i'm willing to have the bigger memory footprint. Computers always progress, faster, bigger, better. So do programs. DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT BLOATING! IT HAPPENS! You guys complain that u want a new and better version. Then you get it and you just b**** about it and say the old is better just cause the footprint is smaller. Jesus Christ. If u don't like the new stuff, go right ahead and use the old crap, but don't come here complaining about it. Grow up and get a life people. "Oh, lets b**** about a program that people worked their asses off to make." I'd rather be out macking on women, you guys do the same! Damn. AMEN!

Wow, profound essay writing skills.

Looks like using AOL for so long has already prepped you for bloated software, so it's not a prob.

Since when are you obligated to tell people what they like or do not? First of all, it's only an opinion. You sound like you loved "UPGRADING" (or so you call it) from AOL 5.0, 6.0, ....etc...etc. Maybe you need to see a psychiatrist!

mm its NOT the footprint that pisses me off... but that NICE GOOD WELL WORKING FUNCTIONS HAVE BEEN REMOVED OR REPLACED WITH CRAP.. THE FACT THAT IT CRASHES 90% OF THE TIME AND THE SPYWARE FUNCTIONS.. AND ABOVE ALL.. THE FACT THAT THEY HAVE THE AUDACITY TO CALL THIS CRAP FOR FINAL!

a menuette..!

For all you people that don't like this "new" spyware I suggest you open up Winamp 2.8 then go into preferences under the setup section you will notice an option for "Allow Winamp to report basic, anonymous program usage information". That has been in winamp for some time now.

Also, by Final they do not mean they are done with the program they mean that the next version they release will not be 3.0 but something like 3.1 or 3.01. Remember when winamp 2.0 was first released it wasn't in much better state then 3.0 is right now. Many of the features people are requested will probably be added in a later version and if not they could easily be programmed by a 3rd party; witch would be no different from a native option because of the way the Winamp 3.0's API is setup.

Also, remember that Winamp 2.8+ is still supported by the Nullsoft team and will continue to see development. All in all if you don’t like 3.0 then don’t use it, no one if forcing you to use it.

LOL! I only used AOL once in my life, and that was for a 1 month trial. Definatly not worth what, $22 a month.

And by the way, when you said "wow, profound essay writing skills.", were you being sarcastic, or really complimenting, I'd like to know. And if you were sarcastic, what do I need to work on. Thanks

And on a side note, I'm sorry for blowing up on you guys. I must've had a bad day. hehe..

yes... but it also ASKS when u install it to enable or disable this.. W3 does not!

I do share your opinion, I really do but what kind of a damn ultra fast machine are you using, and how much memory. The truth is that Windows XP is a memory intensive OS, and it runs OK on machines that have processors above 1.2 GHz installed, and if you are using a PIII or older AMD processors like I am (and most of the people I know) Windows XP does not show its full potential. I have PIII, 866MHz machine with 512 SDRam memory installed and I use XP because I am a progressive fool I'd say, and I love the new interface (so easy to use). I know people who have XP installed on PII celeron processor machines, but I also know that that is far from good. I do agree with one more thing that I think you have not said, and that is: when Winanp 2.0 came it was also slugish like Winamp 3.0 now, so let's give the Nullsoft guys some time to figure some things out and let's expect the 3.0.1 version of Winamp that is sure to come, to have some improvements. Mind your thongue and...
P.S. Winamp is spyware by default + I do not believe that you have no problems with 3.0. No offence, I use Windows XP and I love winamp and have used it since its beginings but I deinstalled 3.0 because my ears and eyes do not seem to respond quite well to it yet. I got back to nice old 2.79. Wait and don't be hasty and take what ever is offered to u as Winamp. Good things take time to achieve their best.

It's getting some folks come to see that the true meaning of the word upgrade is much more than a higher version number. Some folks in here think that Winamp 3 is an upgrade to Winamp 2 because 3 > 2 and the higher memory usage. If you think healthy, you'll have to admit that this is, overall, a serious downgrade. End of Story.

ok, so why is the top advert in the icq window advertising RealONE the week Winamp3 comes out?! Bit silly one AOL product advertising a rivals competitor to another AOL product isnt it!?

Its called competeting against yourself. A win win situation. Your not a wiz to do with business are you...

They look like they're working too...how much has their stock fell in the past year? With any luck they'll be out of business soon....

Hahahahah. You are a funny guy. Yeah. AOL $38 Billion revenue AOL is going to go out of business. Man, I didn't expect to get a good laugh here today.

That sounds almost as silly and far fetched as saying a company like Enron could go out of business.

Enron didn't go out of business, they just filed for chapter 11. Just like WorldCom is still providing telephone service and the Internet is still functioning.

However, Enron also didn't file chapter 11 just because their stock dropped a lot. They filed because they broke the law and were caught on it. If AOL was in the same boat, I'm sure the SEC would not have let them buy Time Warner.

errrrrrr wasnt the whole point of their recent .... accounting issues... that have just been uncovered to kinda inflate themselves and make themselves look big enough to carry out the TimeWarner deal and its only now we find out they werent doing so well afterall.

Did you guys ever wonder (think) that 15% of that $38billion revenue (which is just online service(AOL)) (not counting TimeWarner, etc). is earned due to the "lamers" that actually use AOL?
Just a funny suggestion to this stupid genre.

Uh nate, in case you didn't notice AOL *IS* being investigated by the SEC for the exact same type of accouting fraud as Enron and Worldcom

From Friday's New York Times "AOL admitted late on Wednesday that questionable accounting practices continued well after the internet company merged with Time Warner in early 2001."

Questionable practices doesn't mean $7 billion in fraudulent accounting. So they fudged a few deals and will pay a few million in penalties to the SEC. If it was anything major and the SEC didn't catch it the first time around, then something is wrong with the SEC.

Im not american so dont totally understand SEC and how companies have to submit accounts etc, but hasnt worldcom alone proved there is something wrong with SEC? I think you are trying to say there is one rule for worldcom and another for AOL - why?

I tried out the First beta of Winamp 3 and everything made me sick. Then after seeing all of the negative comments about the final I had no desire to download it, but I gave it a shot. Surprisingly it was not that bad.

Barely took any system resources up, the skins were awesome. But there were a few bugs..nothing that made me cry over.

I don't like the setup of the playlist..I can't make it into this certian shape I used to with 2.X so it would look like a lil bar on teh bottom of my screen and I could maxamize it to see my list, not anymore. It doesn't load my skin when I open it each time. I had a problem withe my logitech keyboard buttons, but the forum helped me out and easy quick fix.

I know it runs ALOT different on other machines, but the only way you are going to find out if it works good on yours is to download it and try it your self.

I have been playing with Winamp3 for quite a while now, and though I'm happy to see that the media library finally works PROPERLY now in the final release and this release is much more polished and works better, I'm still severely disappointed and don't use it for ONE reason -- why the hell didn't they make it backwards compatible with Winamp2 plugins?

To me, this is the stupidest thing ever. I can understand them wanting to change how it's all done and introduce a new/better format, but why don't they encourage this new format while still allowing Winamp2 plugins to work? I mean there's thousands of Winamp2 plugins, from input to dsp to vis...I flat out won't use Winamp3 now because I can't get the Winamp2 mp3PRO plugin to work with it and my entire library is in mp3PRO.

Recoculous. I don't get it. HUGE mistake, I think, on their part. Good product, but the user base for Winamp2 is already so huge...I think that they're going to be losing a lot of users/customers if they keep it this way.

Just my 2¢

My understanding of the way WA3 has now been coded is that if someone so desperately wanted to use WA2.xx plugins with it, they could write a WA3 plugin to do all the translation, and allow the old functionality. This being possible because the new architecture in WA3 allows pretty much all the behaviour to be changed or extended from a plugin.

By all means, flame me if I interpret wrongly. However, if I'm right, then it may still be possible to use the old plugins.

On an unrelated note, I don't remember getting any AOL links anywhere on my desktop when I installed WA3. But then I don't really mind that too much. Fact of the matter is that WA is still free, and it doesn't throw ads in your face when it's running.

I still haven't had any problems with the EQ or buttons, or whatever. If using another player seems to be your only recourse, then that's your choice. For the record, I still have WA2.80 installed concurrently. I haven't found enough reason to uninstall it yet. (It only takes up a few megs on the HDD)

That's funny... The Media Library seems to be the single most unstable/buggy feature on my system (Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98SE, 512MB RAM).

The video playback seems to work fine(1), and I haven't had any problems with the EQ or the control buttons (play, pause, etc.). Crossfading works real nice.

"Playlist 001" just won't go away, though. Maybe it's not supposed to, but that kind of annoys me. :o/

The real turnoff for me is the little things from previous versions that Nullsoft apparently felt were unimportant in this new version. Just a reminder guys: it's the little things that matter!

(1) To be quite honest, video playback doesn't belong in Winamp3. For Christ's sake, they make a not-so-subtle reference to the pride of having "mp3" in the title, but... I got this creepy feeling that they're being a bit two-faced with Winamp3. I'd be much more impressed if Nullsoft removed video playback from Winamp3 and developed it into it's own, individual player.

Have you tried the WinAmp2 Plugin Manager Component for WinAmp3?

http://members.telocity....n/wa3/wa2mgr/index.html
It's written by Nick Schweitzer.

Whilst you won't have much luck with mp3PRO since that it an output plugin, that component supports quite a lot of the WinAmp 2.x general (gen*.dll), DSP (dsp*.dll) and external control plugins. It is by no means perfect but definetely worth giving a go if there's a must-have plugin out there.

Because of the nature of how WinAMP 3 operates, you can simply delete the .wac files associated with the video component, and it will go away. I don't think that Nullsoft decided "Hey, a movie player is exactly what our audio player needs!" Rather, the movie player was designed to push Wasabi and MAKI to their limits. Hell, if you don't like the audio component, and want to use video all the time, you could probibly delete the .wac associated with that.

The bottom line is don't belittle WinAMP3 as an audio player because you don't like the video player that comes with it. Just don't use it, and reset your associations to whatever program you do want to use.

Yeah, I had seen that, but the fact remains that backwards compatibility should have been included in the release. They shouldn't leave it up to some programmer with some spare time to make a plugin for them that adds this functionality. If they wanted to do it via a plugin, THEY (nullsoft) should have included the .wac with the Winamp3 distribution.

You wrote about the little things that matter... I made up my mind to uninstall winamp3 when I couldn't stop the damn song title autoscroll off. Why isn't it possible to stop the thing in winamp3???

Maybe they will in the future. If they simply repackaged that plugin and rebranded it Nullsoft, would that make it official enough for you? Honestly, if it works, use it. It really shouldn't matter what the source of it is.

After having installed and used Winamp 3, I just don't know what to say. It has tons of new features, (most of which I could care less about being in there). It just feels a lot more like corporate bloatware now I guess.

I'd gladly pay for a rock solid MP3 player program without tons of features that maybe 2 or 3 percent of people will ever use, (of all the new features in version 3, I've yet to see many people saying how they've been dying to use them).

I guess I'm of the opinion that WA3 got too big too fast and tried to be a lot of things it didn't need to be in order to be popular and widely used. Even in today's society, there is still something to be said for the Keep It Simple Stupid principle.

In my opinion, to make WA3 better like Steve says they will, they'd need to gut about half the stuff they added and put back in the ability to stop song names from scrolling back and forth all the time, unless it's buried in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find a way to make it stop.

Nate: "Besides, Winamp has been adding AOL icons on new installs for a while now, get used to it."

Me: Ok then, using your "logic", Microsoft has been a monoply for a while now, get used to it.

What are you talking about? Adding icons to a free product to keep it free is not illegal or harmful. Being a monopoly is.

A monopoly is not illegal, it is illegal what you do with your monopolistic powers.

Correct. Though in Microsoft's case, that is what they were found guilty of doing so I figured it did not need an explanation. And again I reiterate that adding icons to Winamp has no similarity with creating a monopoly though tactics that exclude others from the marketplace.

Actually unless you've been given special privlages (e.g. major leauge teams such as the NBA) a monopoly is in fact illegal. It is illegal to hold a monopoly, at least in the United States.

You're not seeing the forrest from the trees. My point was not to compare adding Icons to a Monopoly, it was two things that people are sick of, and your profound advice of "get used to it" just can't apply.

Actually, it's not illegal to hold a monopoly.

You're taking my advice for a small annoyance and placing at the completely opposite end of the spectrum where it makes no sense. I never said get used to a monopoly. Just like I would never say get used to terrorist attacks.

However, you should be willing to get used to deleting 3 icons from your system in return for a FREE constantly updated program which you use every single day. Just like I'm sure you are used to paying for gas that you put into your car.

It seems a bit disgusting to me that some people are so determined to like Winamp primarily because it was good in the past they shun those of us who clearly see W3 is not ready for 1.0 status.

Winamp was great when it was a hobby project. Now it has project managers and a medium sized development team. Now there are deadlines for releases and things of that nature that tend to ruin a lot of software.

Instead of saying how much people like to complain, or how they're just whiners when they have problems, try and see that obviously some problem exists otherwise they wouldn't take the time to come and post about it. If that many problems exists, obviously the software has NOT been testes thoroughly.

I suspect AOL shoved it out the door just like they do with their own crappy client software. In the mean time, I'll just use xmms on my linux laptop to listen to my tunes. Slick, lean, and free of ads.

*tested rather, heh

I think the problem was simply that winamp3 was such a huge project they kinda didnt know where to stop. I remember brennan having a .plan entry maybe even a year ago now saying that the project was going well and they might even get some of the features implemented that were intended for later versions - like the scripting. So why wasnt the scripting left for a later version?

Its almost like TOO much went into this version. They worked on too many features at once. Maybe if they had implemented fewer features for the initial release of wa3 then more of it would have worked flawlessly. Just looking at the SDK shows just how huge the project was.

If they are going to produce such complex software, then I think they need to look at their beta testing methods in the future.

I suspect part of the problem (especially from what steve says down the page) is that lots of people are complaining about bugs (err yeah I know im on of them!) but not many of those people are actually submitting useful bug reports.

I have tried to submit a few bug reports in the past, but I forgot the bugzilla password and it refuses to email me it for some reason, and to be honest, I really cant be bothered to re-register - its just easier to stick with winamp2.1 (since I re-descovered nitrane!)

I think thats a fair analysis and overloading a team with too many features to implement can definitely ruin a release.

Honestly speaking, I don't have time to beta test Winamp. It's 1.0 now, and I shouldn't need to. The thing is, why isn't AOL allocating beta testers? They want to be able to put all their adverts in the install, but they don't want to shell out some cash for hiring beta testers? Lame.

In any case, I found a copy of FreeAmp for Windows lying around the attics of the web :) It gets the job done and no "GET AOL TODAY!!" crap.

I guess I haven't fully joined the "cruise-control generation" here (and i'm 23 for God's sake), but if you consider three... small... effing... icons adverts, and think it's too much effort to delete them, go the hell home...

It's a shame you've gotten used to being used as a marketing vehicle for companies like AOL. Frankly I dont like people screwing with my desktop. It's like if AOL came and slapped bumper stickers on your car. Would you like it? Probably not. How about if they add ads to W3? It's just a small banner ad, right?

A pity.

Let's try and keep things in perspective... your scenario of putting stickers on your car is completely irrelevant! But we'll make it relevant for the sake of things:

Let's say AOL gives you a car for FREE. They own it but you basically rent it from them for free. After all when you download WinAmp you don't own the player, you just own the right to use it. Now AOL comes up to you and says, in exchange for giving you this car for free we want to put a bumper sticker on it. Would you like it? Probably not, but you have a choice... tell AOL where they can stick their bumper sticker or live with the bumper stick because you're getting the car for free.

Furthermore, in the WinAmp3 example you can go through and delete the icons - this is the same as you saying "sure, stick the bumper sticker on", driving around the corner and ripping it off.

Hmm, I think thats not quite right. If AOL let me rent a car from them, putting bumper stickers *on* the car which they own is one thing. It's another thing if after renting said car, they put stickers all over my garage.

Point is, they're not constraining their advertising to something they own - they don't own my desktop.

I totally removed W3 and previous version and reinstalled. Nowhere did it ask me if I wanted AOL icons installed. It asks if I want icons added which appears to mean Winamp icons, but thats it.

Fair point! When you pick up your car an AOL representative sticks a few stickers on your garage which you are free to remove at any time. It that a big price to pay given that you're renting a car from them for free? Obviously it would be ideal if you didn't get any stickers to start with.

Maybe a better analogy is that AOL offer you are free stereo for your car, a lot better than the one you already have.

But as part of the deal, they can put a few stickers on your car - though these are easily removed and you won't get in trouble for it.

Would you complain?? Not likely. And if you do, don't get the free stereo.

I'd certainly comment about it - especially if I wasnt asked about it first.

Couldnt justin accidentally leak the old nitrane source code out please? - so someone could make an winamp3 component from it. Yes I know why nitrane disappeared... but after downloading a few old versions of winamp yesterday, I have to say nitrane (to me at least) sounds a LOT better than the decoder currently in winamp2 or 3. Please someone somehow resurect nitrane!

Hmm...

http://privatewww.essex....ecoders_winamp2_62.html

"Version 2.62 uses the Nitrane mp3 decoder. It's fast. It handles MPEG-1 layer 2 as well as layer 3 (mp3). IT'S INNACURATE! It fails almost every test here..."

"The EQ in Winamp/Nitrane is terrible - it removes high frequencies, irrespective of the EQ settings!"

I repeat: "to me at least"

I'd rather see a more stable version of the MAD decoder used. MAD sounds AMAZING.

http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/

There's a plugin for Winamp (2 of course.. won't work with 3.. BAH!! Getting back to my previous post.. just plain stupid, I think, to not make Winamp3 backwards compatible).

Check it out -- it CAN be buggy (though it is very stable) and it sounds awesome. I recommend it. Check it out.

I know, I just thought you might want to reconsider your stance. :)

nope, this is like the CD vs vinyl argument. Some people just like the sound from one over the other even if it is less accurate.

I guess so.

I'll admit up front that I still don't like the load time for WA3, but that didn't stop me from rating it a 4 star here. Something that I can't understand with some of the posters here, is that they complain about spyware, non-functioning buttons, different behaviour, bloat, etc... I will admit that WA3 has bloated up quite considerably (in terms of memory usage) from 2.xx, but the overall impression is that it is still a worthwhile upgrade. Granted, I haven't tried using it under Win9x/ME, nor tried it on a P100, or some similarly old hardware, but if the new version doesn't do what you want, nor what you expect, and you can't handle the changes, then DON'T upgrade. This seems to be a simpel principle that people don't seem to understand these days....

People complain about spyware cause it is nobodies damn business what my habits are, and they have no right using MY hard drive space to store data about ME through MY internet connection to bombard ME with advertising popups and spam that EVERYONE tries to avoid.

and i don't give a damn about the "they gotta make money somehow" schpiel...if they respect their customers, they will respect their right to privacy and the desire to not be harassed. There are always means to make money and selling personal information should NOT be one of them.

speaking of adds... is anyone else getting extremely peed off with the incredibly annoying noisey IBM adds on this page? One good way to stop people visiting this site is to use adds with sound on so that everyones boss looks and frowns in a "you arent doing any work are you" kinda way every time the add starts.

Cant you at least store a cookie so we only have to put up with the stupid music once please betanews?

I really dont understand how advertisers think annoying the users will make them click the adds!?

i remember there was another free player called kjofol which was as light as can be, it ran on even a 486 win95 machine without hiccups.

oh and if memory serves me right it was the first player to have free form skinning. it supported mp3, winamp type playlists, and VQF. i don't know about you people but i like it because it was a small clean, efficient and fast player which could play a file format half the size and equal in quality to mp3, the VQF standard.

but even for all its advantages, it faded away into the obscurity, if i am not mistaken it is no longer available, both kjofol.com and kjofol.org are down.

lesson from this is that we complain about everything good or bad, so hopefully developers aren't too dishearted from reading the other posts.

I believe it was developed mainly by one guy, who was convinced to go and work for nullsoft/aol instead.

if i am not mistaken there were 2 guys who programmed it and a few other freelancers who helped out now and then :)
granted the limited resources they had, the player was more than decent, it was good only problem was that it wasn't winamp, it was new tech, no tons of skins and plun-ins. the same problems plaguing winamp3 now.

seems funny that the same guys who did kjofol and winamp made such a resource hog media player. but to me the only thing which made it slow during startup is that it reads my cd, cdrw and dvd drive everytime if there is a cd/dvd in the drive.

At some beta winamp3 used mozilla's engine for it's own browser. Then they removed this feature. How can I reenable it?

Let's see.

Most of the version 3 skins do not work, it is slow, uses to much memory, and is unstable. Gee and it only took them 2.5 years to do this. Forget AOL I think these guys must be working for Microsoft.

Not to mention that when you try to rate a skin on their site (to mention that it does not work) you can't even login.

Thank God I still have 2.8.

Many of those skins are based on previous builds, and are not yet ready for prime time themselves. There are people working on them, and what a skin can do in WA3 is very impressive. Just give it some time.

WinAmp (a.k.a. studio in WinNT Task Manager) is too buggy still, and is missing several features from the product that it is supposed to replace. So it may be nice to have a few new features, but they are useless if nobody is going to use the product to begin with. Don't try to complete directly with WMP or the like. If that's what I wanted I'd have used WMP. After all, it only comes with every version of Windows (for free), so it's not like I have to do something to get it.

It's a shame, the features that made Winamp 2 the best player have been removed in Winamp3. As a result, Winamp 2 is still the best player. Perhaps Winamp3.1 or Winamp 4 ...

I used Winamp 3 for 5 minutes, and found 4 things that just don't work. Makes you wonder if they even tested it.

Things that don't work:
Equalizer doesn't work at all. Doesn't even remember its settings

Next song button only moves the playlist selector. Doesn't actually skip to the next song.

Play button skips to the next song?

Video is just crap. Sound doesn't work at all.

Countless betas and 5 Release Candidates... yeah, they tested it. They fixed a *lot* before Final, too, but... there's still stuff that doesn't work quite right.

I haven't had a problem with the next song or play buttons, and I haven't tried the video playback. most of my problems occur with the Media Library.

I guess I was just spoiled by the 2.x series... :)

You know what? I dont think you're actually making this up. We've spent about 2 months of QA testing on this product. We've been working with the community. Users have submitted comments and bugs.

I'm starting to think that some of the posts that are being placed here are actually somebody trying to spread some negative propaganda. I don't know why you're specifically trying to scare users away, but there are comments being made that simply don't make any sense. If infact what you claim is true, why don't you provide a detailed explanation as to what you're doing that's exposing your problems.

It's one thing to say a product sucks, it's another to explain why you think it sucks. Don't spend your time trying to ruin the reputation of a good product just cause you have some other hidden agenda.

Actually I´ve had the same problem with the PLAY button going to the next song on the playlists. The performance is also another problem, makes you feel like running Mozilla before version 1.0. The equalizer has also given me a problem and it does take a LOT of CPU time to load. I´ll stick to 2.8 for the time being.

Do you mind being more specific? What is the problem that you're having with the "play" button going from one track to the next? Is it clipping, do you hear a loud noise, nothing? what?

What about the player is slow? load time? redraw? what? you gotta give us specific answers, not just vague complaints...

Also, what's this about the EQ? What do you mean it takes a lot of CPU to load? to open the window? to actually make the audio effects? you people can't just b**** and moan and then expect s*** to get better without actually saying exactly what the problem is.

Steve, while you're here (and to save me having to remember my winamp.com password again!) can you tell me if the db for winamp3 is kept in memory? Iv seen a lot of people say that winamp3 uses around 20mb RAM on their systems, but on mine the lowest Iv seen it use is 30mb (highest around 40mb so far - which for a mp3 is getting a bit silly). 30Mb is ok (not wonderful though!), Im just wondering if thats why my mem usage seems higher than most peoples?

i agree with the equalizer to a dregree...it works, presets don't. Stability is also an issue as far as I'm concerned. As is the memory footprint.

Ditch the crap nobody really needs: browser, gfx, skins etc...make a basic frickin' player!! Make all the other stuff available as plugins. Don't make me install all the crap cause YOU want me to have it. Let ME decide what is good for ME and if I want more give me the option to install those features on my own. Maybe then you might be able to decide which little bit of crap cope causes problems for people if they can 1 by 1 add/remove.

Dude,

First off, the installer gives you the option to choose what you want to install and what you don't. Check out the "optional components" subtree in the second screen of the installer.

Second, within the installer there are configurations for Full, Lite, and Custom.

Third, we're going to offer a standard, full, and lite installer on the site just like we do with Winamp2.

All this ranting and raving about bloat is completely ridiculous. Seriously, why don't you just see what options we provide you in the installer before you b**** about not having any options? Seriously.

Not sure, I'll check up on this one...

The only problem I noticed with the EQ is that if you have the "Auto" button enabled, it goes back to the default setting once you play the next song in the playlist ... So if I load rock while a song is playing, and hit next, it goes back to all default levels when the "Auto" button is on. A workaround to this I found is to save "Rock" as the default eq (It doesn't work like that in 2.8)

And what happened to double-clicking the song title and opening up the id3 info window? :P That's honestly the only feature I miss, and used often.

Ok hows this for a bit strange. Every time I open and close the ml window the mem usage goes up by around 500k over last time it was open. (I got as high as 40mb in use by studio.exe this time!) Then I opened and close the playlist window and suddenly studio.exe usage dropped right down to 7mb (which is very respectable I think).

The problem with the play-button skipping to a next song, occurs only when you have the shuffle activated.
And then it isn't really a next button because it doesn't follow the "random" selection of shuffle.
It works more like the "J"-key in winamp 2.x except you have no choice in what it picks.
Perhaps this is just a glitch, which went unnoticed by the beta-testers, although I doubt that.
I have my copy of winamp 2.8 still here... so, if I really dislike wa3, i can always go back :)

There is just one thing that pisses me off i Winamp 3 at this time, (scince it's still pretty new) and that is its playback speed. The latency in sound that it displaid, when I tried it is unacceptable! Maybe guys who have soundcards like all the Creative Soundblaster and Audiogy series may not notice it, because they have analog cables connecting to the motherboard but I have an M-Audio card which has no such cables so I can only use Direct sound, which the new Winamp does support, but only in words. When a song is near the end and fade-in is enabled you will see what I am talking about. Try rewinding or fast forwarding a tune and you will see what I am talkig about. The new video support feature is poor, but scince the Nullsoft guys are new to this stuff it is OK. Abot AOL and other things I will not talk, because far too much has been said abot it in this forum that is both true and not. Winamp is just plain old mp3 player and that is all that it was and still is for me.Blah, blah, blah...
let's just wait and see how things evolve and not just bich about how Winamp is this, and Winamp is that. We all love it and let's have some faith.

The topic says it all...

I enjoyed WinAmp 1.xx series over the WinAmp 2.xx series. Then again, the dl links were gone with the 1.xx series.

No, I don't run a slow comp. since I have a P4 2.0A GHz. I just find it, that WinAmp has gotten, "fatter" over the years and it uses a little more resources than it needs to.

Just my two cents

I found this...

http://ftp.nhltc.edu.tw/cpatch/mp3/winamp/source/

the whole winamp family tree(well most of it anyway)!
enjoy!

It has definitely become more bloated. Compare ICQ and Winamp. Both were slick, lean, free of corporate bloat in the beginning and all was good.

Then AOL came..

I agree, but keep in mind that a lot of the old versions have known security holes (e.g. buffer overflow exploits).

Incase any of you would like it, I do have all previous release versions (but maybe 1 or 2), and some non released of Winamp. You can email me hostmaster@modacar.net if you would like to request a version or two ;).

BrandonJB
ModACar.net
OMeGa-Networks.net

Winamp 3 is slow, buggy and a resource hog. Those who disagree say: "Buy a new computer".

Winamp 3 has been years in the making and is dissapointing to some. Those who disagree say: "Code your own player".

The two main new features are freeform skinning and a "Thinger". If you consider this a quantum leap in the evolution of the MP3 player, then you will enjoy Winamp 3.

Corona (WMP 9) will be free to download on September 4. To suggest that WMP is not free is disingenuous. WMP 8 was coded for XP and is included with the operating system. WMP 7 was always free for download.

The things many of us have always liked about Winamp - that it was small, fast and had all the features we wanted in an MP3 player is gone with Winamp 3. If they are trying to make a product that competes against all-in-one media players (like RealOne, Corona and MusicMatch) all I can say is good luck.

"Winamp 3 has been years in the making and is dissapointing to some. Those who disagree say: "Code your own player"."
Those who disagree actually say, find out a bit more about WinAmp, let's not show ignorance all the time with comments like:

"The two main new features are freeform skinning and a "Thinger"."

Actually, the MAJOR new thing, which took all this time to code was not freeform skinning, and it wasn't the thinger, nor the media library or the better playlist editor, it was the platform, WASABI, go read up on it at some stage.

I installe Winamp 3 and ran it for a couple days, but then I uninstalled it and kept using 2.80. For one, I love how songs fade in and out as you move the slider (they removed this for some reason in Winamp3. And I love Geiss, which is not yet supported (if it is, I haven't found how to install it). Plus, 2.80 runs faster and the sound is as good.

I installed Winamp 3 and ran it for a couple days, but then I uninstalled it and kept using 2.80. For one, I love how songs fade in and out as you move the slider (they removed this for some reason in Winamp3. And I love Geiss, which is not yet supported (if it is, I haven't found how to install it). Plus, 2.80 runs faster and the sound is as good.

Wasabi is a platform, not a feature. It allows for freeform skinning (which I mentioned), cross-platform fucntionality (Windows and Linux) and is modular. It mainly concerns software developers since most of us who would just like to play MP3's aren't programmers.

"it was the platform, WASABI"... like I said.

I think this is the right place to tell about some of the nicities of WMP9 since so many of you appear to be unhappy with WinAmp 3.

1) Playlists. WMP9 supports both .m3u and .wpl playlists.
2) Taskbar controls. You'll have to see a screenshot of this, but basically you get all the WMP controls on your taskbar when you minimize the program. It works very well.
3) Speed. I've noticed that even at beta this is definitely faster than WMP8.
4) Plugins. Currently the only plugins are a crossfading plugin and volume leveling. However there is certainly a possibility of seeing many WinAmp plugins ported over.

Those are just the most important improvments IMO.

Ok, enough with the WMP costs money and everything negative about WMP.

Since msot computers with Windows come with WMP, if not you can download it, why would anyone want to switch to Winamp when they have WMP?

WMP doesn't cost money.

Because WMP is slower, consumes much more RAM (at least when compared to Winamp 2), and does not offer nearly as much functionality and customizability.

no but WMP is spyware by default..

oh yea... did I mention its garbage?

No? Then paste a download link for WMP 8.0.

Considering it doesn't run on any OS other than XP, there is no reason for a download link. You can freely download WMP 7.0 for all other versions of Windows as well as MacOS, although the Mac version really bites.

WMP 9 will be freely available to all platforms, probably through Windows Update...

USS

Ok, all WINDOWS platforms...I know I'm going to get blasted for not specifying that....

There you go again, sneaking in the "8". :) The poster never said 8!

What justification do you have to prove that WMP is spyware?

WMP8 uses barely any RAM (usually less than 10mb), and can do EVERYTHING and more than WinAMP.

My God, man... I get this image of you sitting in a log cabin in the middle of the woods, grizzly beard, a shotgun by your chair, and 4 different firewall applications running, on top of IP spoofing and double proxy...

You are one paranoid mofo...

Right, so a year and a half old version of WMP is free but the current one is not.

Maybe so, but it's not out yet. At the moment, the current version of Windows Media Player is not free, and has not been so since October's release of XP. Once WMP9 is released in downloadable form for all Windows platforms, then WMP can be considered free.

Well I guess you could say it's either way. The price of Windows didn't go up for XP and it is a feature of XP so you could say it's free, or you could say that part of the price is WMP8.

Anyways, Corona is going to be downloadable for all Windows versions (except Win95 IIRC) for free.

On my system for reference WMP8 used between 8 and 16Meg of RAM, ~10 on average. WinAmp2 uses under 7.

You don't think that the budget for creating WMP is incorporated in the cost of WinXP? Just because the price as you say hasn't risen... even though plenty of sources show that it has, doesn't necessarily mean that WMP was included free. There are plenty of things that can minimise the development costs, code reuse for example.

As long as you decide to allow MS "spyware" to be installed on your system to "monitor DRM" and "connect to MS to keep your computer regurarly "up-to-date" with the latest M$/GOV spyware".

You make it sound like WMP 7.1 is obsolete. It's not. It's the current version for non-XP platforms. And MS is still producing updates for it.

Yes, an WinAMP2 doesn't have a decent media library, support for video, free-form skinning, etc...

Comments like this show your true ignorance....

The change to the EULA was for the automatic update feature, and that's IT. They aren't "spying" on you.... what exactly makes you think you are so important that Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world, wants to spy on you, and it's millions upon millions of other users?

The last update way May 2001!

...Things which are not important to the average user that just wants to play some MP3s...

It hasn't increased compared to the NT line of source code... in fact, the price of NT products have either gone down or remained the same. It may cost more than Windows 9x, but it is a completely different product. This is also why they released XP Home, to minimize the difference in consumer editions.

I have pr0n... ;)

So? It's still supported everywhere. I'm not aware of any web sites etc. that won't play media because you're not running Windows XP and its bundled version of WMP.

By the way: by "update" I was referring to fixes, not new features.

I think that MS is using WMP8 as a selling point for XP. I think they are entitled to do so -- there isn't that much of a difference between WMP7 and WMP8, so it almost doesn't justify a need for it. It is also true that WMP 8 takes advantage of new features of XP, and uses those when it can. Any of the differences I can think of between WMP 8 and WMP 7 are XP specific enhancements.

That said, it IS possible to run WMP 8 on windows 2000. I have seen hacks where people have made this work. Making it run on any of the 9x systems is not possible at this time, and I don't think it will ever work.

I don't know what I'm going to do... First Microsoft, now Logitech. They are all spying on you!!!

See that thing with the cord running to the back of your computer? Bump it. See that arrow, or maybe an I-beam on the screen move? Bump it again. Did you see it move again? I don't know how, or why, but Logitech, Microsoft, and who knows who else are watching you intently.

As you move that I-beam around the screen, Microsoft slowly builds a picture of what is on your screen, and they are selling this information to e-mail spammers and the government....

BTW, this guy in Nigeria asked me to contact you, and for you to give me your bank account information.

If you want to get technical and nit-picky Nate, then Winamp is not free either. Now that Winamp is owned by the AOL-Time Warner crap, the people who pay for their services also pay for the development costs of Winamp, I mean it has to come from somewhere. Just because WMP8.0 does not run on the 9x/2000 platforms, does not mean WMP is not free. You can download a version of WMP, despite the version, and use it at no cost. If you want to argue that I have to buy XP to use WMP 8, then I argue that you have to buy Windows in general to use WMP or Winamp or Realplayer, so therefore, none must be free? Tell me Betanews isn't selling out AOL?? PLEASE!

Those values that I posted were of me playing several different mp3's. Video support and a Media Library are irrelevant to the amount of RAM used when playing an MP3. However free-form skinning can be a performance hit hence why I didn't use any skins on WMP - infact I haven't seen any functional good-looking skins for WMP.

That's a fairly conclusive reason as to why they would want to spy on him!! =)

But on a slightly more serious note, I think the reason why certain people have reacted the way they have is due to the following line of thinking: "If Microsoft can install automatic updates on my pc, then what is stopping Cracker X pretending to be 'Microsoft' and doing the same?".

ICQ has an ad-free version that is fully supported by all ICQ users. By using your logic, that means ICQ does not have ads. So what is everyone complaining about?

Apples and oranges...

I don't know about you, but the Media Library is VERY important to me.

Signing... The digitally signed code that Microsoft uses would be close to impossible to break.

In order to tamper with the auto update, they would first have to install some modified auto update component on your system that doesn't verify keys. Plus you'd have to bypass the system file protection because that code would not be signed either. Then you might be able to exploit auto update to install some rogue update.

For the same reason that running homebrew software on the XBox is difficult, it would be very difficult for someone to exploit that feature and compromise a system.

While it may be a concern for someone that WinAmp can submit a GUID in a fashion similar to Spyware, you can certainly disable it, and I don't think your personal information is being compromised. Hell, anytime you connect to a website, your IP and MAC are being sent. I don't see how that information or the GUID that Nullsoft is sending can be used against you though.

Unfortunately "close to impossible" for these certain people is not good enough. Things are broken, things are cracked, people leak keys etc etc etc.

So let's think about things from their point of view and imagine a possible scenario, eveb if the possibility of this scenario is 1 in a billion billion billion, there is still that chance. Let's say Microsoft can freely install 'updates' on their customers computers. Firstly, not only should such a tactic be illegal but let's say that one day a disgruntled employee who happens to know the keys used to digitally sign all the updates releases it. Well a possibility is nothing may happen, another possibility is that anyone anywhere can install anything they like on your machine. I don't believe that it's worth risking that, even if the possibility of it happening is small and it's considered "close to impossible" to break.

Well, I used the phrase close to impossible because I'm realistic about things, but in all practical sense, it is impossible to circumvent right now. Again I'm qualifying my statement, but I fell very confident that it will stay that way.

To begin with, the key they use is not 40 bits, its not even 128 bits. IIRC it is 4096. Has distributed.net even cracked the 128 bit RSA yet?

I feel very confident that brute force attacks are out of the question.

If the keys were leaked, then Microsoft would work very quickly to invalidate them. This has already been done once with a different set of keys, and was largely unnoticed by the media and consumers. http://support.microsoft...id=KB;EN-US;q293818&;

You can take this opprotunity to make sure you have the latest Certificate Revocation list (CRL) too. If you are using auto update, you should already have the latest version of this though.

For someone to attack your computer, they would need to steal the key, develop an exploit, and push it to your computer before the anti-virus teams or Microsoft catches it and Verisign invalidates the key.

The only viable attack would be replacing key system files, and to do so would require an attack at that computer. However, if someone has access to your computer, then you have already lost the security war.

I don't think this is or should become an issue.

http://www.winamp.com/co...html?componentId=118184

That's not a media library, it's a hook into the file system, two very different things.

Hi. Now what are you crying at. the new Winamp 3 works like a dream and all this talk about spyware here and spyware there, learn to configure your computer first, then scream and shout, not the other way 'round. It shall be funny to see all the lame spyware-paranoids out there come creaping back to good old winamp over the next couple of months, when they find out that winamp works as good as it allways has done, there's just a couple of minor bugs to be corrected and then off we go waiting for the upcoming updates like we allways do with Winamp, so what are you crying at, when everything runs normal like allways. Or try to see it this way, Winamp 3 is only getting better and better from now on just like Winamp 2xx.

it doesnt matter that you can "turn it off".. it has it enabled by default.. and turning it off is no diffrent really from replacing a CyDoor.dll with a dummyfile (like KazaaLite does" to "turn off" the spyware..

So its.. definetly without, any doubt.. SPYWARE..

Hacking a DLL file specifically designed to report your system data and turning off a FEAUTRE that displays song information in the Winamp Browser is not even close to similar. It is enabled by default because a lot of people use that feature. Don't blame the company because you can't take the time to set your preferences.

maybe "It is enabled by default because a lot of people use that feature" is BECAUSE its enabled by default. I mean, I wonder how many people would go turn it back on if the next release had it turned OFF by default?

I agree. Winamp does NOT have spyware. The only thing it does it plop two icons for AOL on your computer. One on the desktop and the other at the top of the Start Menu. A full system scan with Ad-Aware with the latest reference file shows up as clean. I'm sticking with Winamp.

According to the "spyware" definition at http://grc.com/optout.htm, which I think is the most widely understood definition...

"Spyware is ANY SOFTWARE which employs a user's Internet connection in the background (the so-called "backchannel") without their knowledge or explicit permission."

Does Winamp inform users beforehand that it will be sending information on the songs they open to a remote server? No. Most users probably won't have any clue that Winamp does this until they open a song for the first time and see the minibrowser showing new content. By then it's too late. It has already sent something over the internet without the user's knowledge and without the user's consent, thus fitting the definition of spyware.

If an old virus checker told you today you didnt have a virus would you believe it? Just because current spyware scanners dont get excited about winamp3 doesnt mean that winamp3 isnt spying on you in some way.

Just because someone is ignorant and doesn't realise there is a preferences/options screen where you can select and deselect options doesn't mean it does have spyware in it.

And in actual fact, people here are using the term spyware to describe just about anything, from putting an AOL icon on the desktop to retriving the current artist/song info playing. Spyware is software that spies on you without you knowing about it. If there's an option to turn it off it is NOT spyware!!! Otherwise what are you going to call programs like format.exe? viruses?!?

So you run all your software without reading the manuals or other read me's about them and without looking at the options/preferences? Good stuff, I hope you're not in charge of any critical web servers or anything like that!

Take a look at the preferences screen, WinAmp doesn't hide anything from you!

"Take a look at the preferences screen, WinAmp doesn't hide anything from you!"

Oh really? Show me where it states that having the browser window open causes Winamp to send details of all your playing activities to a server called "info.winamp.com", along with a cookie containing a unique ID...

Let's see... The "option" you're referring to is called "Minibrowser".

Now exactly what connection is a new user of Winamp going to make between having an option called "Minibrowser" enabled and Winamp reporting details of every song opened to some server out on the internet?

A user won't have any clue that it does this until they open a song for the first time. Hence, they won't know that they should disable the "Minibrowser" option beforehand if they don't want it tracking their usage.

No, the option I'm talking about which you can find in the Preferences window is under the System -> Winamp Browser menu and goes something like this:

----------------------------------------------------------
Winamp Browser Settings
-----------------------
(checkbox) Enable music file lookups

This option displays information through the Winamp Browser about the music you are listening to.

You have anonymous access to artist biographies, discographies, recent news, fan sites, and more. To access open the Winamp Browser through the Thinger.
----------------------------------------------------------

"Now exactly what connection is a new user of Winamp going to make between having an option called "Minibrowser" enabled and Winamp reporting details of every song opened to some server out on the internet?"

Well as long as the user can read and understand English, I can't see them having too much difficulty with that option! Then again you did seem to have trouble with it... No comment.

"A user won't have any clue that it does this until they open a song for the first time. Hence, they won't know that they should disable the "Minibrowser" option beforehand if they don't want it tracking their usage."

Correct, but only if they are connected to the internet at the same time and never bother to look at the options/preferences. Then again, if you don't look at the options/documentation on format or fdisk and run them, guess what's going to happen.

Don't be ridiculous... Of course it doesn't tell you the IP that it connects to nor the port, then again it doesn't explain to you the TCP/IP protocol and the protocols underneath it either yet it somehow manages to connect to other computers on the internet.

If you go into the Preferences screen and look under the System -> Usage Reporting item you will find the following option:

----------------------------------------------------------
Usage Reporting Settings
------------------------
(checkbox) Allow Winamp to report anonymous usage statistics

This option allows Winamp to occassionally report anonymous usage statistics to Winamp.com.

Winamp tracks how long each component is open, visible, open and playing, and visible and playing. These statistics help us better understand how users interact with Winamp.
----------------------------------------------------------

Once again, with a fairly conservative grasp of the English language a user shouldn't have too much difficulty with this option.

That's NOT it. I had "Allow Winamp to report anonymous usage statistics" unchecked when I noticed it making connections to info.winamp.com.

"Enable music file lookups"

Okay, apparently that's a new option in Winamp3 that I missed.

"Correct, but only if they are connected to the internet at the same time and never bother to look at the options/preferences. Then again, if you don't look at the options/documentation on format or fdisk and run them, guess what's going to happen."

Please be realistic. Nobody is going to treat an MP3 player with the same care as the "format" or "fdisk" commands. I don't know about you, but when I download an MP3 player, the very first thing I do is open a file to see what the default behavior is like. I don't go in and start fiddling around with the options before I know they need to be changed.

Of course it's not. Anonymous usage statistics is Winamp usage, not what songs are being played. The option in question is called "Enable file lookups" under the Winamp browser.

info.winamp.com only returns CONTEXTUAL information about the music you're listening to. THIS FEATURE is only accessed when the Winamp Browser is opened. There is no hidden spyware in our player. We've worked very hard to be clear about what's collected and what's not. If you have a problem with Winamp3, PLEASE BY ALL MEANS, DON'T USE WINAMP3. USE WINAMP2 IF THAT MAKES YOU HAPPY. This is not that complicated.

"We've worked very hard to be clear about what's collected"

Oh, please. When Winamp is installed there is NO warning whatsoever that the names of the songs one opens are collected. Pretty much the only way to find out about this is to peer deep inside the Preferences dialog. I don't believe this is an inadvertent omission either; you know that if you did clearly state this and/or ask for the user's consent, then many/most users would immediately opt out, and you'd lose a great deal of the stats you're collecting.

Anyway, if you really want to put a stop to the "spyware" accusions once and for all, there is only ONE solution: stop employing spyware tactics. Before sending ANY song information over the internet for the first time, it must CLEARLY STATE what it is about to do, and BEFORE proceeding give the user an option to OPT OUT.

I hate to tell you this, but we don't track any information about the song you play.

There are two things that we do to try to identify a song. There's the check on CDDB's servers to see if they can identify it to provide music data right away, and then if that fails, there's an attempt to do a text match against the id3 info that's valid. None of this information is tracable back to any user. This data is used simply to deliver to YOU the user, contextual information about the music listen to. If you've got a problem with this feature, don't use the Winamp Browser, just go a head and turn it off. Simple as that. If that's not enough, go ahead and choose to not install it with the player when you're installing it on your machine. the damn thing is an option for a reason.

I'm not saying that a "contextual information" feature is a bad thing. The problem that it's sending song parameters over the internet by default, without the knowledge or explicit permission of the user. This behavior fits the definition of spyware at http://grc.com/optout.htm almost word for word.

"Okay, apparently that's a new option in Winamp3 that I missed."

New? Which version of WinAmp3 DID you use to base your opinions on?

Yeah because Steve Gibson is an extremely reliable source. We should follow everything he writes.

LOL. I just *knew* one of you two would try to discredit him in a last-ditch attempt to redefine the accepted meaning of spyware so that it suits your own purposes.

But hey, that's fine, you don't have to take his word for it. Try searching for "spyware" on Google and you will find that the other definitions read very similarly.

errr Steve Gibson is quite well known in the industry as being a waste of space/oxygen/etc.

As FunkyFreddy3k said below.... you don't have to look very far to find someone to discredit Steve Gibson. Just have a read of half the crap he waffles on about and the way he goes about saying it.

Even if Steve is somewhat of a nut at times, that doesn't mean his definition of spyware is incorrect or inconsistent with other definitions. Or that he knows any less about the subject than we do here.

First off, I'm commenting on this supposed "final" version of Winamp3 1.0. I recognize and hope that it will get better with later releases, but my enjoyment of *this* version has nothing to do with future versions.

The biggest, recurring problem I've come across, besides the long load time is: Selecting more than one file to add to the Media Library with the "Add files..." command causes Winamp3 to chase it's tail, accepting input only every 5 seconds as it *tries* to load the file info. No impact on the rest of my system.

My system:
1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird
512MB RAM
ATI Radeon 7500
Windows 98SE

One-time (so far) problems I've had:
1) Studio.exe crashed while I was adding directories to the Media Library, possibly too fast.
2) Winamp3 took down my entire system, not too long after starting up. I'm not talking "Illegal operation" here. I mean old-school, white box, 16-bit error. I forget what I was doing with it when it happened, but the result wasn't good.

Things that are annoyingly lacking, but not too big a deal:
1) Can't change the refresh rate on the in-window visualization.
2) What happened to the Shoutcast listing??
3) Can't change the systray icon.
4) Can't configure the decoders anymore. :(

To address the spyware accusations:
1) There's an option called "Usage Reporting". Read up on it. Turn it off if you're overly paranoid.
2) There's also an option called "Music file lookups" under "Winamp Browser" in the preferences. Read up on that, too.

the fact that u cant configure the input/output encoders/decoders alone is enuff to to ditch Winamp3 like a bad smell... !!!

ph3wt likes his bad smell.

yap.. winamp3 has now effectively joined the RealMedia/JukeBox/WindowsMediaPlayer crew.... stuff thats bloated..slow.. spies on ur and generally nasty..

I hope nullsoft gives AOL the boot and gets a player out thats an actual improvement instead of deprovement..

hope they learn ;(

Let's just say that everything posted before is true. It *does* eat up all your memory, it *is* buggy as hell, it *feels* lame and cheap.... The reason ? There is no more work being made to optimize Winamp, there is only work done to hide the spyware, and to make it take as much as possible from your system, yet to keep in belief that you're still running a sound-playing tool. Congratulations Winamp, now get off my system and never come back.

I've noticed that as long as you leave the Winamp Browser window open, each and every file you open is reported to a server called "info.winamp.com". Information reported includes the album/artist/track name of the file you are playing, your Winamp version, and a unique identifier that remains constant between sessions.

Or you could try learning how to configure your software. Some people like loading up information about the song they are playing, and this will be a new feature in Microsoft's upcoming WMP9 (called InfoCenter or similar). There is a checkbox you can uncheck in preferences that will turn this feature off in Winamp3 and stop it from looking up information each time a song is played.

Sigh. No need to resort to personal attacks, Nate.

My point still stands. Winamp is sending out details of a user's activies to a foreign server without their consent, and in many/most cases without their knowledge. It doesn't really matter if there's a method to stop it. It "phones home" by default, and that fits the definition of "spyware."

"You" was meant to be general, not a personal attack. Sorry for the confusion.

However your point is still moot. It's not spyware if it's a feature that's designed to display additional information about the song you are playing. It sends the song data only to pull up album and artist information, not because AOL wants to know what songs you are listening to. You are making assumptions which are borderline ridiculous on a feature which you can turn off with one click if desired.

its the "and a unique identifier that remains constant between sessions" bit from a few messages above that makes it spyware in my opinion. Plus it wouldnt surprise me if they were storing the clients IP address - and yes I know that isnt a whole lot of use to them, but it does seem they are trying to keep an eye on us.

Open the Winamp Browser in Winamp 2.x and load up a song. It does the *same* exact thing.

not exactly, winamp3 sends the version number as well. Not a big deal, but its enough to prove that they are doing more with the data than just looking up the song details.

I really don't mind this. So they are using the minibrowser to keep track of how many people are using the new version vs. an older version. I think that they have a legitimate interest in how many installations have adopted the new version vs. those that have not upgraded, especially if they are looking to launch a streaming content service at some point in the future that will need the new version.

Like Freddy said, if it really is merely a feature "that's designed to display additional information about the song you are playing", then what business does it have setting a cookie on your computer containing a unique ID, and sending that cookie along with each request? I doubt they do this for no reason. Likely, they're keeping track of every song each Winamp client has played.

Nullsoft, the makers of WinAmp, are owned by AOL. AOL "recently" bought Time Warner. AOL is now one of the largest music labels in the world. Now imagine of Sony sent usage statistics from every CD player they manufactured about the songs being played. Don't you think that that information would find it's way over to the marketing department of their music label? I'm sure AOL just loves knowing how many of their songs are being played and how many of the other labels are being played. Of course...how many of us actually own the MP3's we listen on a regular basis? You think it will be safe to send usage statistics to the company you "borrowed" the music from? If they store the end user's IP address, unique ID and song habits. They will be capable of nailing down at least the person who pays for the internet access. ISP's keep track of user sessions and their IPs. So when AOL starts handing out lawsuits (which they're famous for) we'll know how they got the info.

i'm not sure it works/helps but i always check "stop bugging me" during installation when they ask if winamp can keep track of mny stats.

lite player which can give me some background music not an entertainment center resource hog, i don't mind the info but seriously i never have the minibrowser on it uses bandwidth.

imagine wasting bandwidth on such nonsense when you're online to download and in chat rooms plus listening to mp3 in the background, it lags, hey if i got 100 songs on myn playlist it will login 100 times and slow my connections, not everyone has DSL.

i already have all the streaming content I need...unfortunately the RIAA and whiney a** wh***s are forcing them to shut their doors. If only the labels would get their heads out of their asses, the fresh air might help them see clearly and help them realize on the capital potential they are missing out on by being self-serving a******s.

Throw enough people in jail for something that EVERYONE is doing instead of analyzing a means and implementing a way to profit from it, and you might just be putting a nail in your own coffin by amplifying public sympathy for the "guilty" parties.

This version of Winamp has the potenial to be the best media player ever and I do not for a moment believe that the winamp team views this as final product. Instead, it appears that they built this version to be a stable platform/foundation to take over the media player market.

If this guess is true, look for the winamp team to start releasing spinoff's, addins that revolutionize the media player world. Of course, you will need to have winamp...

yea .. at 30---50..100,,,,400$ per addin.. and ofcourse the addince will be CRUCIAL to its useabillity forcing u to A: live on the streets with winamp.. B: convert to diffrent player or C: warez it..

I just find Winamp3 to be total and complete utter crap and I'm SO dissapointed ;((..

You cant set options on the input/output filters nomore? heck wats up with that?.. Cant change my icons either?.. You cant doubleclick the title and get the ID3 tag box anymore and the new ID3 box is NOT an improvement.. Its superbly slow (not to mention the ugly spashscreen).. and its superbly buggy, after starting it once or twice it will nolonger start.. resulting in a debug error until i reboot meaning i have to reboot a LOT...

I like the idea of the wasabi system.. its really smart.. but its WAY to slow.. and the software in general is a major dissapointment.. sticking to winamp2 until Nullsoft realizes that they should stick winamp3 back to betastage. This version has no business being a "final"..

I tend to agree. Running this even on both a Pentium III 500 Laptop and a Pentium III 850 Desktop, I find the program to be more sluggish not very user friendly. I'm sticking with version 2 myself until Winamp cleans itself up.

there is a lot to like in this new version and I like a lot of it, unfortunately though there are problems too.

I've not encountered any bugs so far though.

On the plus side:

Sound quality is vastly improved, it sounds brilliant without any plugins or dsp enhancements.
Free form skinning - finally

On the downside though:
It's very very slow at moving from track to track - especially with crossfading turned on.
It uses way way too much memory: on my machine it uses 7Mb of Ram and 20Mb of virtual Ram on starting, that's without a playlist open, any visuals turned on or any extra windows, just the main player. - That is way too much.

Xmplay (www.un4seen.com) uses 1.6Mb/3.6Mb
QCD (www.quinnware.com) uses 3Mb/6Mb

Winamp 3 is nice and for people who use winamp they will like it (i think) but for me I'm going to stick with QCD or XMplay

Qcd looks great and can use winamp(2).dsp modules, and is very very usable.
Xmplay doesn't look as nice but the sounds quality is amazing.

and I think either of them are good alternatives for winamp 3

I use Winamp 2 all day long while at work. I installed 3 the other day and have had nothing but problems out of it. Almost always when I close it, the mp3 keeps playing. I have to ctrl+alt+del and close the process. It rarely saves any preferences the first time around. It's a bit slower loading up, but its not a huge deal. I've also had a few UI glitches with it. Also, I hate how by default it adds all those lame a** AOL icons. I know how to type in aol.com if I want it, I dont need them all over my desktop, startmenu, and IE link bar.

Certainly not final release quality, more like late beta.

Have you filed any bugs on that? I haven't had it not stop playing on any of the machines I run Winamp3 on, could be some issue with your system. There are a few UI glitches, but for the most part everything works as intended, even if it is not polished yet.

Bashing a product because it automatically adds a couple icons to your system is extremely unfair, especially when the product is free. Nullsoft doesn't even require you to give an e-mail to download Winamp - I think you can deal with spending 5 seconds to delete three icons if it keeps development of Winamp going. Besides, Winamp has been adding AOL icons on new installs for a while now, get used to it.

oh and the winamp adding aol icons thing, yep they have been included in many versions of 2.x as well. Difference was you were actually ASKED about it I believe in 2.x?

You were only asked on upgrades, not new installs. Since this is the first release of Winamp3, Nullsoft could not ask. Please get your facts straight.

hmmm. ok i'll let you have that one. BUT, how does it check for previous installs? I installed windows XP then winamp on a totally new disk recently and it still had the "AOL icon(upgrades)" option (unchecked by default) in the installer? Infact I must have installed winamp 2.8 clean on several PC's recently and not once has an AOL icon appeared from it.

I never had any AOL icons added when I installed WinAmp.. all but not checking the "Add icons to my desktop" etc checkboxes. I was asked, I said no, and it listened.

"Besides, Winamp has been adding AOL icons on new installs for a while now, get used to it."

No thanks, lots of other alternatives out there and I suspect others will be prospecting for those soon as well. I used winamp over WMP simply because I don't like the 'corporate bloat' (and also it was more stable). Now there's no difference between the two except that WMP is now more mature.

Man, you're all a bunch of whiners. I don't mind the loading time, the skinning is a lot nicer (waiting till they actually add some decent skins). Stability, I have not encountered any problems yet (maybe in the future). There will be other builds coming out, which will fix a lot of the problems you're whining about. I suggest you give them time, if not, why don't you try coding your own media player? let's see how many people will criticize your coding.

"give them time".... err well they have had 3 years! just how much time do we have to give them to get it to work!?!?!

How many systems have you used WinAmp3 on? Only yours? perhaps a friend of 2? I bet you have not seen/used it on mor than 10 machines have you? Just because YOUR machine works ok doesnt mean everyone elses does also. Different setups (Software and hardware) will totally change how the software responds. NullSoft are good there is no questioning that however they have not developed this so that all the bugs on different setups are gone. It is a brad new technology and it is bound to have problems but this has been released too early.

It is not WE who said/called it a "FINAL" version is it?

And I can say one thing about coding...In BeOS (R.I.P)
there was atleast 2 players who did what Winamp does and better....

I happen to know both of them programmers. They did their players ALONE. I had "cross fading" in CL-Amp 1999. Cl-Amp is a one mans work.....

Of course I am happy that Winamp is free, but I am NOT happy when they say it's a FINAL build, because it's not.

/Vecc

PS! I guess not to much of you will see this msg, because all my posts are deleted by forum admins...

Winamp has had a cross-fading plug-in written by Nullsoft since around 1997. Just because CL-Amp included one natively doesn't mean they are better programmers by any mean. And from the two years I ran BeOS as my primary operating system, I know CL-Amp didn't even compare in quality and features to Winamp 2.x. It was a good attempt at a Winamp clone, but far from great.

Have you looked at/used "Boom" by Adil and Will Fisher (http://www.maroc.net/adil/boom/) ? If not, I recommend you take a look at it, it's a great skin. Still has a few little things to be sorted out but overall it's a great skin.

They copied/cloned WinAmp... wonder why? maybe it was because WinAmp is the best mp3 player and Nullsoft didn't have a BeOS version! Same as all the linux clones of WinAmp!

As nate said, WinAmp has had cross-fading for a number of years now, it just always came a plug-in.

If you don't like WinAmp 3.0 (for whatever reason), you are still most welcome to use 2.8 like a lot of people have choosen to do. http://classic.winamp.com

You know, people such as yourself are always saying "Why don't you code a product X and see how good your's is.", it's getting very old.

How about, I DON'T code a media player because I know I can't (or really, don't want to, to be honest). The fact is, Nullsoft releases this as a final product, yet the majority of people I've talked with about it have had MAJOR issues with it, so in reality, Nullsoft is tarnishing their own reputation.

I personally think that coming out with every negative thing in sight and whinging on and on is getting old. Anytime some product comes out with a 'new' version, you can hear people whinging till the cows come home about it, and I'll guesstimate that 99% of them wouldn't have a clue about what it takes to write an application let alone a media player, let alone a media player that includes a whole platform. And to prove that, you have people saying that someone else wrote a similar looking product all by themselves.

Given that so many people have had honest problems with this release I can understand that people are upset about this build being called final. I know that video playback in this build can be best described an hopelessly choppy on my machine, whilst I didn't have any problems with the previous build. I also noticed a few other issues but these were due to the 1.0 release of the Boom skin I was using not Winamp 3, and those went away once I installed v1.01 of that skin.

I think the problem some people have with the 'whingers' is not that they are whinging, it's that they are doing nothing BUT whinging. You will usually battle to try and find any form of positive comments made by them about WinAmp 3. Is that to say there is nothing good whatsoever about WinAmp 3 or, as I think is more the case, there are a lot of great things about WinAmp 3 we just want the last few bugs fixed and we thought they would be before releasing the .0 final?.

Look at it this way. Now that they have finally released a .0 release, they can get started on the .1 etc releases to fix up the problems that people are having.

Well stated. There are some honest complaints to be made about Winamp3 and those people should be busy submitted bug reports and helping to build a better free media player. I know I have a few qualms with it, and have reported almost all of them to Nullsoft.

"[insert application here] SUCKS!" comments are just useless and will only make people question your brain power.

How about you get people like "you" to stop whining about whining? Nullsoft came out with a completely new product, loaded with new features for whiners like "you". I'm sure it doesnt work on every machine out there; even though it works fine here. You'll have to give them a little more time, Mozilla has been built for many years. It may not be fair to compare it to Mozilla, but Winamp is also being built from scratch. Not every product that comes out "final" works perfectly. Heck, even XP does not work on every machine out there, but these bugs are being built in upcoming Service Packs (of course you'd expect this from Microsoft). You're free to use Winamp 2.x for the time being, no one is making you use Winamp 3.
From your statement, I take it you're a hardcore coder? If so, you already know that coding takes a lot of work, and anger at some points. tata

Mozilla was just recently released as a 1.0, and it works pretty well.

WinAMP 3 is a memory hog, has a horrid interface (as every other version of WinAMP does), buggy, and overall, very unprofessional, with an opening mp3 of "WinAMP kicks the Llama's ass."

did he say they were better programmers?!?!

Why yes, if you read his post he did infer that.

I'm waiting for spider, but those that have been released so far are spectacular... I'm really impressed with what Wasabi and MAKI allow for. I wish other people on this board would take the time to really learn about what WA3 does, and more specifically HOW it does it. That is what makes it incredible in my opinion.

As much time as they need. Eventually (like any first releases before) Winamp3 will get stable. Until then, try getting a decent computer.

"Mozilla was just recently released as a 1.0, and it works pretty well."

I'm sorry... Did you happen to not read the hundreds if not thousands of comments by users saying how much RAM it used, how slow it was in loading up and especially how sluggish the UI was/is!

nuffin wrong with my computers. It hasnt gone un-noticed by me that most of the people praising winamp3 are also the ones who like at every opportunity to quote the specs of their computers like some school ground status argument. Oh and btw, my dads earns more money than your dad so nuh! (that statement is about as relavent as the "get a decent computer" statements are to winamp3 in my opinion).

Not I! I'm still stuck on a P3-500, hardly anything to be bragging about! Yet WinAmp3 runs fine.

Well yes, it does use a lot of RAM, and can be slow (as they decided to use a completely portable UI, which in my opinion is stupid, but who am I?), although, it's not THAT slow, and not nearly as slow as WinAMP 3.

But other than that, there isn't much wrong with it.

Spider may never make it, as Neko who was doing the graphics has announced he is leaving the skinning scene.

Personally, I think he is being selfish. Since he was working on his skins publically, deleteing all his .PSD files is just childish. I can understand how other people in that community have angered him, but the way he is acting now is unjustifiable.

I have been thinking and even though WinAmp3 isnt (in my opinion) as good as WinAmp 2 for performance you do have to look at the fact (and be very, very happy about it!) that there are no ads in the program! Look at what AOL/Time Warner did to ICQ within a month of buying them! WinAmp3 might not be perfect but at least it is only (a little) bloated with new features and no ads!

Indeed, it is nice that Winamp has remained ad free, but that's not surprising. AOL had little to do with putting ads in ICQ. ICQ by its nature requires a vast network of servers to support hundreds of millions of users message each other. Unfortunately money doesn't grow on trees and someone must pay for this network and servers. Once ICQ reached such a high level of users there wasn't much option but to use advertising to help pay for the service (or charge users, which would have made you complain even more). Not trying to defend ICQ (which I rarely use these days), but assuming AOL tries to ruin everything is a bit over the top.

Luckily there isn't much to Winamp besides development costs. And AOL still sees value in the player itself enough to continue to fund its development (unlike Lycos and Sonique).

err apart from development costs? winamp.com probably has a lot more hits than betanews.com has, so thats another cost.

Of course running winamp.com costs money. But I assure you that a few Web servers are nothing compared to ICQ's instant messaging network. And ICQ also has the icq.com Web site as well.

And if you notice there are multiple ads on every single Winamp.com page. Advertising pays the bills and keeps free services free - at least for the moment.

i wasnt talkin about icq costs, I was just pointing out that development costs arent the only ones for winamp.

as for the adverts, well thats a weird one, because as with ICQ most of the adverts are actually for other AOL services, so its more about informing people about other AOL services rather than direct paid for advertising space.

It's not totally ad-free. It adds all those nice little GET AOL OR DIE icons on the start menu and IE link bar.

Using advertising to make money is weird? Interesting deduction.

Most of the ads are ICQ-related services, but not all. Even an infintesimal paid ad percentage would help keep ICQ afloat. And the rest of the ads redirect back to ICQ.com, which also serves ads. As with AIM, many ads are related to special promotions going on, or services in which AOL has partnered with other companies. They use the advertising space as a powerful business proposition, not because they find it amusing to make your messaging experience less enjoyable.

they use to have those (other than nixamp). did they just give up on those markets? hell, with the usage stats I get off my web site I know I would hahaha. dern monopolies. :\

The Winamp3 SDK is extremely portable (as close to open sourcing Winamp as AOL will allow). It didn't take Nulloft long to pump out that Alpha for Linux and now that the release was made, I'm sure we will soon see some updates for Linux.

Good question about Macamp. Tom Pepper was working on it for a while, but it hasn't been updated for over a year.

"Winamp3 SDK is extremely portable".... as long as you're a C++ developer. ah well who cares about those dedicated delphi and vb programmers that helped produce all those plugins for winamp2 eh?

They can always continue to develop plug-ins for Winamp 2, which isn't going anywhere. In fact 2.81 is right around the corner.

If developers don't want to learn the SDK and develop for Winamp3, that is their own choice - not Nullsoft's fault. I guess we should attack Microsoft for making everyone learn C#?

What language did you expect them to use? VB?!? HA! That's a really portable language! As for Delphi, I'm not sure if there is a Delphi for the Mac but they do have Kylix on the Linux side of things - even still it's hardly a portable language. So they either make the SDK in C/C++ or Java!

errr strange I wasnt aware microsoft was forcing anyone to learn C# to continue windows development? Did they stop supporting VB + C++ when I wasnt looking?! Even stranger, but I thought the whole point of the CLR was that it allowed any language to be used.

If they want to take advantage of the new features offered by .NET, then yes, it would make sense to start programming C#. Exactly how Winamp programmers should learn to use the new SDK if they want to take advantage of Winamp3.

I think I will personally stay with Winamp 2.x. I can see another AOL "inspired" release here. Oooh.. let's chuck an AOL icon here, and one there, oooh and let's make it slow. So much for the good product, its big business now, its AOL marketing time... YAY!

NO! I will rather use Micro$oft products and the good old Winamp 2.80 release. Much cleaner and far less crap under the hood!

AOL has owned Nullsoft for over two years. Winamp 2.8 came out a few months ago. Do you have any idea what you are talking about?

Why use this when Windows Media Player 8 exists? The shoddy interface of this player is far no match for WMP.

The two reasons that I use winamp over wmp are that 1) I don't like how wmp organizes "my media", and 2) it's not a micro$oft product

a couple more. shoutcast, more skins, better visualization plugins, better audio quality, its free (with mafiasoft everything comes at a cost), i have no reason to leave winamp, its not spending its time trying to rewrite all my music to wma formats, etc. etc.

Uhm, Windows Media Player is free.

Not everything MS costs money.

Like AOL is better than M$... tsss!

WMP is not free, you need to buy Windows to be able to use WMP.

Then, by conjecture, is WinAmp also not free? If you have to buy Windows for WMP to work, then you have to buy Windows for WinAMP to work.

No, you can run Winamp on Linux (although it's still in its alpha phase) and *any* version of Windows. Winamp is available as a separate download.

Anyone not running Windows XP cannot use Windows Media Player 8, which means you are forced to buy Windows if you want to use it.

Interesting how you sneaked the "8" in there.

Whats your argument gonna be if WMP9 comes out as a downloadable for 2k/XP? I dont really know the details, but I assume that WMP8 has never come out as a download because bits of it just dont work in anything other than XP. Which is fair enough in my opinion.

Sneaked? You can download 7.1, can't download 8. No sneaking needed.

It is sneaking, there was no "8" in the original thread. All versions of WMP are free (with the exception of 8). Version 8 was made for WIndows XP, just as Windows Messenger was made for Windows XP, that doesn't mean there are not other versions available for other versions of windows.

WMP is free.

A year and a half old version of WMP is free, yes. The current version of WMP is not. If Winamp3 went to shareware but 2.80 was still available for download would you be saying Winamp is free? I don't think so.

I would because in my opinion winamp2 IS winamp. Winamp3 is just something else entirely at the moment. It doesnt deserve to be called winamp yet. Oh and regarding charging for winamp3 (ah back to that old story eh!?), I cant see how they could dare anytime soon. The majority of people seem to still want to stick with 2.8 anyway, making winamp3 shareware would just make 2.8 even more attractive.

That's a bit of a silly point. If the current version of Product X isn't 'free' then you can't argue that we should call it free on the off chance that the next version of Product X will be free. Is Windows free *IF* Windows 2010 comes out for free?

Nate,

Have you bought WMP8? Didn't think so since they don't sell it.

It was made for and included with Windows XP, they do not charge you for WM8.

WM8 was made for Windows XP, won't work with other versions of windows, would it make any sense to make it available if it won't work? I didn't think so.

Now, all version 8 is, is a number. It's the same exact version as 7, just with features exclusively to Windows XP, so in fact, version 8 is available for download, it's called Version 7.

Maybe, instead of WMP8, they shoulda called it "WMP XP".

WMP is still free for download.

"Have you bought WMP8? Didn't think so since they don't sell it."

If nate bought a copy of WinXP, then he definitely paid for WMP8! And he paid for Notepad, the Calculator, Solitare and everything else included. After all, you cannot purchase WinXP without WMP8 in it, can you?

In my opinion it is far too buggy to be called a final release. Apparently AOL had had enough and set a deadline that it had to be released and so they were forced to release it as it was. Some of the bug reports are incredible - Iv seen many people saying "it doesnt even play my mp3s!". Personnally it usually plays everything Iv asked it to, but it doesnt handle .wal files correctly (they just disappear after downloading), the send to playlist option in ML has a habbit of opening new playlist windows which for some reason list all the play lists on the right, but on clicking those play lists nothing happens even though in other playlist windows they list the songs they should. Oh and it crashes. a lot. oh and its kinda random if videos play or not, sometimes opening a video file it will just sit there and do nothing yet after closing winamp3 and double clicking the file again winamp3 will open and play it.

Winamp3s biggest problem though is the fact that people who know what winamp2 plugins are know that with a little looking around, or a few hours work in any windows programming language they can get winamp2 to do whatever they want. Including getting winamp2 to do most of the major selling points of winamp3. Worse still for winamp3 is the fact that those plugins dont work in it. So no better decoders. No support for absolutely any audio or video file type you can think of. EVEN WORSE is the fact that developers are limited to using C++, so dont expect half the winamp2 plugins out there to appear as winamp3 components anytime soon because if the developers were using delphi or even vb you can forget about it.

The other problem for winamp3 is that it just doesnt seem good enough to convince people to stop using WMP6 for their video playback. There are a lot of people in forums saying that they WANT to keep using WMP6 for video playback simply because its better and there for may as well stick with winamp2 for music playback.

hehe winamp2 is gonna be around in many years time with quite a cult following i think.

.wal files should save in the Skins directory. WA3 should then reload with that new skin. Works fine on both systems I've tried it on.

I know what it SHOULD do! It just doesnt on this PC now for some reason. I dont know if its due to some messed up file association from a beta or what (even though I have always uninstalled before installing new builds). The file is downloaded fine into the temporary internet files folder, but once the download is finished instead of the file being moved to the skins folder, it just disappears totally.

Is it saving it as .wal.zip perhaps? I know I've seen IE try to save it as a zip before, and then that didn't load properly. Very odd.

For those doubting any good from Winamp3, I must remind you that even the early releases of Winamp2.xx were not perfect. Justin Frankel is an amazing coder, and his team at Nullsoft WILL pull through and produce better and better versions of Winamp3. It's right here in our face. How many of you remember downloading the alpha winamp3 builds? The other alpha builds? Then the beta builds? What I saw in all of them was growing improvment. Each release got better and better. While it may not pass YOUR personal standards for an alpha version, or beta version or even final version, you can NOT deny the fact there is improvement. Like I've said again and again, it's only going to get better.

cheers to that. just keep in mind that while features are great selling points, if they're not layed out well and are clumsy they may as well be detractors because people hate things that arent easy, as they should.

From an FAQ posted by a developer: http://forums.winamp.com...p?s=&threadid=67254

Winamp3 Media Player
Will Winamp3 no longer be free?
You may have heard some rumors that Winamp3 will no longer be freeware, and those are just not true. So sites that lack journalistic integrity (like Beta News) have been spreading rumors with put all the information. There will be a free and pay version of winamp3 available on final release. This does NOT mean that Winamp3 Standard/Free will be a stripped down version in anyway, it would be the same version if Nullsoft didn't go with a pay version....

Umm, a little slow are we? What you pasted there is EXACTLY what the story said. (http://www.betanews.com/...cle.php3?sid=1017496196)

BetaNews reported that there may be an advanced version of Winamp that would cost money because it would contain extra functionality such as CD burning or MP3 encoding. The story also said that Winamp in its current form would always remain free. According to your Forum link, that article is 100% right (although the pay-for version is not out yet).

Next time try reading the story before rushing to judgement. It'll save you from sticking your foot in your mouth down the road.

lol

It looks like AOL succeeded in infecting what was a very respectable program.
First off it wouldn’t play anything. It would just cycle through my play list and nothing more. Then I was surprised to find that it went and placed an AOL link in the start menu without my permission and knowledge.
This is all I know that it installed there could be more but I’m willing to give the guys over at nullsoft the benefit of the doubt and say that, that was as far as they went. Many other programs do much worse but the fact that I couldn’t get it to actually PLAY and mp3 doesn’t leave much else to rant about.

I had no problems re the sypware i think your a little paranoid buddy...

So one icon constitutes spyware? I think not. Also, if you actually bothered to read through the installer, one of the components to be installed is an AOL icon. Read the installer next time so that you don't look like an idiot when posting silly comments like the one above.

If your read what was actually put there you will see that I did say that it doesnt exactly constitute spyware. Technically that IS a spyware tactic which is what I was getting at. such as What else could have been installed.
at any rate you sound as if you condone the AOL ads. now whos the idiot. or maybe im talking to a youngun who doesnt remember when Winamp was haild for its simplicity and low overhead.

So keep running Winamp 1.x before it was purchased by AOL and stop complaining about the ads.

If not for AOL, Winamp would have been dead right now. AOL bailed Nullsoft out of a major lawsuit that would have destoryed the company (yes, PlayMedia did own a good portion of code Nullsoft was distributing in Nitrane).

Life isn't a free ride unfortunately and sacrificing a couple icons for continued development of Winamp is a VERY small price to pay. If you want to reminisce about how great everything was in 1998 and 1999, then don't upgrade.

jeez

have all you supposedly skilled people forgot that one can delete desktop/start menu items at will ? so please use your delete key or however you go about deleting stuff and shut it please .. whining is unbecoming

Ohhhh yeah, I almost forgot about that!

Nitrane was a sweet decoder, too ... I always liked that more than the Fruauanahenafofahfhafer decoder.

Winamp 3 IS spyware, no doubts on that.
1) When you open it, it tries to read more than 17000 registry entries (guess why?)
2) It reports every file you play to AOL, without your knowledge...
3) It opens other processes than the player itself and God knows what else they does, but that's enough for me... I'll never use winamp again...
It has better audio quality than winamp 2, but it really doesn't justify spying you like they do... AOL really suxx
I recomend QCD, small great quality player, without nasty customs

That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. This is how bad rumors start.

"Absurd" or not, all three of his claims are entirely true.

It does *not* open any other processes except Winamp agent, which you can turn off and is not active by default. Winamp 2.x also had Winamp agent.

It does *not* connect to winamp.com to read song information unless you tell it to in the preferences tab (yes, it is a good idea to configure your software before you use it). Winamp 2.x also did this as well - this is nothing new.

Winamp does *not* read in 17,000 registry entires. It searches the registry to make sure your file extensions are configured correctly for Winamp *if* you have it set to do that on load - which is also another configuration option. Winamp 2.x did this as well, this is again nothing new.

So which part of it is true? Turning an inability to configure software into "Winamp is spyware" is indeed absurd.

17000...? I think not. Try just over 4000, and have you actually taken a look at what keys it accesses? Apparently not.

It queries for the Windows version/subversion, media resources (e.g. DirectSound), Winsock, audio compression, DirectDraw, display settings, mime-types, and whole bunch of Winamp3-related entries.

Hardly spyware, if you ask me...

Re: opening other processes
I think you, me, and the original poster are in agreement here.

Re: winamp.com
You are mistaken. The *default* behavior is to "phone home". You have to explicitly turn *off* the browser in order to get it to stop doing that.

Re: 17,000 registry entries
Try using a tool like REGMON and see for yourself. I counted anywhere from 12,000 to 25,000 registry accesses depending on how I configured the filters. So, 17,000 seems like a reasonable figure to me.

So you agree it does not open another process now? Why claim it in the first place then?

Connecting for album and artist information via info.winamp.com to be loaded in the Winamp browser is hardly "phoning home".

You spent all that time counting what Winamp was looking up, yet failed to actually take note of what information it was gathering? Winamp must look up information on a number of different things in your system (audio drivers and setup, file types, etc.). If you're so distrustful of software maybe you should just write your own, then you'd know exactly what it was doing.

1) Huh? It DOES open another process. You mentioned the Winamp Agent yourself in your last post.

2) It's not JUST looking up song information. It also transmits a unique ID with each request, which allows them to track which Winamp client plays which songs.

3) All I was pointing out was that the 17,000 figure was pretty accurate. You tried to claim it wasn't.

Nate said....

"It does *not* open any other processes except Winamp agent, which you can turn off and is not active by default. Winamp 2.x also had Winamp agent."

While it is true that it can be disabled in the options, claiming that it is not active by defualt is absurd.

Once you install winamp, run it the first time, look in your system tray, OH MY, WHAT IS THAT... WHY, it's WINAMP AGENT!!!

I should know, I turn it off every fricken time I install winamp, it is no different in version 3. Perhaps you somehow got a different version that has it turned off by default, but it wasn't on mine and it was a clean install as I had no prior versions installed.

Respect the keys that winamp reads on load, they include majority (if not all) AOL programs, like Netscrap (formerly Netscape), Icq and all kind of "unnecessary" keys, apart from the obviously associated extensions, codecs, bla, bla.
Respect the "Winamp Agent", is not only one of the most useless programs I've seen, but, ok (that's just my opinion), so I can turn it off, is now disabled in preferences.. Guess what winamp does next time, when it loads? It just run their "agent" again, when I explicitly told that I don't want to use it.. Why is this so important to winamp?
I've no probes on the following (as I'm not going to use winamp 3 again to test it), but I bet that the agent does the "communications" behind winamp to report "anonymous" usage, and unimportant IDs, that perfectly identify you, but anonymously. Ah, I forgot, and without your knowledge.
Some homework for a winamp 3 fan: Please sniff its communications and tell me if I'm wrong with the "agent". Or maybe they mistyped and should be named CIA agent, or worse, RIAA agent? hehe, I hope not

I'm using it trying to ween myself off the older 2.x builds but there are certain things that are bugging me. When ever it starts up I get a ton of errors about "common.dll" linking and I think if you're going to mix video and music together with this player they need to have seperate play lists for each automatically. I don't like it when videos mix with my music or my playlist gets jousted because i double clicked an AVI which was formerly only associated with mediaplayer. I would like to use winamp as my video and mp3 player but for that to happen it needs to be a little more understanding when considering where the average joe's migrating in from. Where is my shoutcast button? when I double click on the top left corner in the floating windows they need to close no just prompt me with a choice. i never ever change the other options. i just want it to CLOSE! the fade in fade out in this version works very poorly compaired to the 2.8 version. other than that they did a great job. keep up the good work, and lets see some plugins!

I get those same errors when I go to start it up. I've tried uninstalling it since i had previous betas installed, but I still get them.

any of those common.dll errors that you're getting at launch are associated with the fact that you have components installed that were built for the betas, and thus, cause errors in common.dll. Uninstall Winamp3, remove the wacs folder from your Winamp3 dir, and then reinstall Winamp3. those errors should be wiped out.

wfm, thx

i still cant believe the guy hired to do the gardenning and a bit of artwork is winamp product manager now! grr! lucky guy!!!

Indeed. It is quite amazing that coming in at the ground floor and working your butt off non-stop does in fact benefit you in the long run. Crazy stuff I say. What ever happened to communism and the silver platter?

Well, i Think People Should Whine, when there are a great deals of bugs, and the player IS slow, try loading an avi/divx file, it takes much longer than any other player out there, why does it use so long to start? some mention the register, They er well know at this, nullsoft, i think theyd now better, people whant a God FAst, that dont take all that much resources.....sorry not gonna use winamp no more, its QCD, ok i know it doesnt play movie files, but its GOD

Try CoolPlayer, it's skinnable, tiny and fast (around 300KB) and it supports WinAMP 2.x plug-ins. It's also based on MAD, you know, the plugin that WinAMP makes sound better.

http://coolplayer.sf.net

One of the many things I noticed with winamp3 is it is lacking a context menu 'play in winamp' or 'enqueue in winamp' for folders. While I'm sure it's easy to add these why on earth would they not include this as an option?

I really wanted to like winamp3 but sadly I just can't. I am sticking with 2.8.

Strange, I have these menus and they work just fine. Did you make sure to uninstall any Winamp3 betas before installing the final version?

i have them, but they work only for winamp2 and im not ready to part with it just yet for just such conveniences. heres an interesting plugin

http://www.winamp.com/co...html?componentId=118184