Winamp 3

Anyone played with Winamp 3 ??

YIKES !!!!!
It's is f*n amazing. I love the media library feature....
Definatly try it out.
http://www.winamp.com/

last time i messed with it was months ago when it was just a beta developers version. way buggy and a pain to use.

guess i should try again

I've been playing with it for a few days. I like it, and it seems to be at least as good as the previous version (read into that what you will), but I have found that the media library is a little temperamental when it comes to my collection.

I have pretty much everything that's on my Empeg on my harddisk, and the sheer volumes (5500 or so tracks) seem to cause it problems - when I do a search I rarely get everything back that matches, and also get some duplicates where I don't have any. These are searches that should only return a small set - for example, when searching for all my Lambchop tracks (I only have "Nixon"), I only got about half of them.

Maybe it just needs some time to adjust...

Bryan.

I also played with the beta version months ago, and it was really buggy, but you gotta expect that kinda thing.

I downloaded it yesterday onto a work computer (unknowingly), so I installed it and it was pretty much the same. I need to play with it more, but it seemed to be having problems running and doing simple tasks. For instance I had 4 songs in the playlist with repeat off. the songs played through and the last song ended. when I tried clicking on the first song again the thing froze. I closed it and opened it, and the same process repeated. It happened one more time before I uninstalled.

When I get back to school tomorrow I'm going to try it out more. I like the new way of doing skins that version 3 makes possible. how many plugins and visualizations are available for it yet?

what i hate about this winamp is the inability to edit id3v2 tags while the song is playing. i'd rather it hiccup than me having to stop it completely.

what i hate about this winamp is the inability to edit id3v2 tags while the song is playing. i'd rather it hiccup than me having to stop it completely.

Funny. The version of WinAmp that I'm running does precisely that: It hiccups the current song to add the V2 tag. It allows me to add the V2 tag while the song is playing, and hiccups just fine. Of course, I'm running an older version... are you referring to the new version 3 being discussed in this thread?

what i hate about this winamp is the inability to edit id3v2 tags while the song is playing. i'd rather it hiccup than me having to stop it completely.

I run Winamp 2.80 and it does the hiccup. I remeber previous versions acting the same way.

I just tried it last night. It's really nice. It does have some quirks still, but I think they really hit the mark. They could have gone totally bloatware, but it still seems to be pretty lean and mean, despite the fact that the skins are really really customizable. The AVS is now integrated, which is good, because AVS can pretty much do most anything traditional vis plugins can. The movie playing is really slick too, and I'm now using Winamp3 in place of Windows Media Player.

The coolest thing I've found is a thing called "explorer playlist" which lets you browse folders really easily from the playlist editor. Very slick, handles recursive directories, etc.

There aren't a lot of plugins available for it yet, but they'll be coming. And there's some kind of 2.x plugin manager that can use 2.x DSP and general purpose plugins.

All in all, pleasantly surprised. I skipped all the betas, and this release will need some follow-up bugfix releases, but I think they did a real good job. It's refreshing to see Winamp stay true to its homebrew roots while still innovating with new features.

I agree. They do have some kinks to work out, but I consider this the premeiere player out there. Real? Obviously not. Musicmatch? I couldn't stand it. WMP7? Bloated.

I still love WMP6.4 for video, but I'll give Winamp a try for it. The one thing I've always wanted was a playlist for videos in Windows Media Player 6. This is very likey the answer I've been looking for.

I can't try it for a while, so tell me, is Winamp 3 as fast as 6.4 in the video department? How does it perform?

I could be mistaken, but WA3 feels a lot like WMP7 with video, and I suspect maybe it's being used to control a WMP7 frame of some type. The seek bar seems snappier than WMP7's, but I'm not sure how to compare the video speed to 6.4. I still have 6.4 lying around on my PC but haven't used it in ages.

I guess YMMV... It works well for me.

when I do a search I rarely get everything back that matches

One thing I have noticed, and I only have about 1500 songs currently, is that loading a large batch of music into the Media Library causes it to miss files. I have those songs organized by artist and album. When I went album by album, one folder at a time, it loaded those in fine. I couldn't tell you if there's a point (# of tracks being loaded at one time) where it forgets some of the files, but it certainly seems that way to me.

Besides that, I haven't found anything I dislike. Did anyone see the Opacity option?

Edit: Also, I have noticed that large libraries take quite a while to load. If you look to the bottom of the Media Library you can spot a progress bar when you first open that window.

Opacity option?

I did notice that alpha blending isn't working for me in the AVS. It used to in 2.x. No idea why it isn't now.

Every window has a small "+" button top-left. There's a menu option for Opacity, and it ranges from 10-100%, basically changing how see-thru that window is.

Here is the main window set to 50%:

Ohh. Guess the skin I'm using (Act3Scene2 or something) doesn't have that option, or I couldn't find it. Hmm.

I tried all 3 beta's they had out, each one less buggy then the previous. I have downloaded and installed the release version and the small problems i've found:

It does in fact load noticably slower than the 2.x versions

With associations, I prefer to use winamp for all Audio file and wmp 6.4 for video. For some reason if I try to change the association for mpeg/mpg, it also changes it for mp2/mp3 and vice-versa .. so either wmp or winamp controls all of them
(well upon writing this I just doublechecked this and what I did was un/reinstall winamp3 and during setup, tell it NOT to associate video files with itself and unchecked it's feature to keep file associations even after othe programs "steal" them. All seems well with this then)

A minor feature not found in 3 that was in 2x was SHIFT-V (stop with fadeout) and I think most of the other keyboard shorcuts. Not a big deal, but something I kinda liked when turning off a song.

I do however like the skinning and media library and a something similar to the fadeout to stop is the new crossfader between tracks.

Well, for one thing, in 2.8 at least, the crossfading plugin was built in, which quickly faded the track whenever you stopped it or went to another track. 3 doesn't do this?

The thing I didn't like about the SHIFT+V was that it stop-faded the track in about 1 or 2 seconds. That's so quick you can barely notice the fade! It would have been a lot better if you could adjust it so that it took like 5 seconds or something.

Of course, maybe you could and now I'm gonna look like an even bigger idiot

Yeah it does load slower... But I guess this might be remedied by using the "winamp agent" to keep certain parts in memory? Haven't tried it yet.

It seemed like it was creating its library on-the-fly from the filesystem, rather than caching into a local database of some kind, which with 5500-odd files is always going to be a slow business. Irritatingly slow, I found.

However, I've downloaded the explorer-plugin thing that Tony (ynot) mentioned, which sounds like it may work better for me, especially since all my music is arranged in artist/album directories.

Bryan.

can someone tell me make the right side of the playlist window longer? On the left it shows the songs in the playlist, and on the right is all the playlists, well i can't for the life of me figure out how to make the right side longer. When you pull the window larger, it only makes the left side get longer.

I posted on the Winamp forums asking about this, and the author of the explorer playlists says there's currently no way to do this via the Winamp components engine. The WA3 software itself would have to change, there's nothing he can do.

Apparently in earlier betas it *was* resizable, but someone in their infinite wisdom changed that behavior.

well that just really blows cause its a real pain in the ass to look at.

I know this. He seemed to indicate he'd be pursuing that with the winamp developers, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you...

They appear to have removed one important feature from Winamp3 compared to Winamp2.

You can no longer drag a link from IE onto Winamp. It Winamp2 dragging the link would make Winamp go of and start streaming the MP3 from the link.

This is a pain, as I use this feature all the time.

I am deviating from the thread topic a little. Does anyone here play with some of the smaller players out there like ZINF (formerly Freeamp) and xmplay? Are they worth spending time with or are they just primarily of interest to those who are developing player software.

It depends on what you want to do. I'm not familiar with xmplay, but I've used Freeamp/ZINF off and on, and if you were happy with Winamp 2, then you should probably be happy with it as well. I know I'll probably go that route before Winamp 3, as I've been wholly disappointed with that ``upgrade''.

The release version is still buggy. V3 is definitely slower than V2.x. I have tried both on my Progear and the speed difference is very noticeable.

Sorry to bring this one to the top, but does anyone know how to get the Empeg to stream through Winamp 3 now that they've taken out the MiniBrowser and called it Winamp Browser ?

Sussed !

Save Target As ... m3u Playlist for All Tracks