WinAmp is probably the most downloaded and used audio program on the web. Earlier I used to have only WMP 7.0 and RJB 2.0 and I was not particularly interested in downloading this one.
I was introduced to WinAmp by my friend Saurabh known as saurabhvs on this site. Blessed with abundance in Hard disk space he has accumulated almost all the media players available on the Net. He has them all,
Windows Media Player, Real Jukebox, WinAmp, Jet Audio, Music Match Jukebox, Yahoo Player and many others. I saw the software at his place only and it was love at first byte.
First of all it is a very small downloadable installation file. Under 1 MB, probably between 700 or 800 KB to be precise. It is available at Download.com and at least one version of it is available on all Chip CDs and others. Most importantly it is very light on the system. WMP and RJ maybe fancy with all their graphics and sleek looks. But they are a bit heavy and occasionally your PC may hang up due to it. Though the quality of their music is amazing, WinAmp is as much better if not more. Also it has wonderful features like an amplifier, ten-band equalizer, many preset modes and the ability to store your equalizer settings. You can drag and drop your songs from anywhere and play them. It plays all formats of songs except those encoded by RJ. On it’s site, there are thousands of skins available. That’s not all, you can design a skin yourself and upload it to the site for everybody to download. There are thousands of plug-ins available too, each with different functions. There are thousands of visualizations too which can be downloaded individually to view while the song is playing.
It is a very stable software. It crashes very seldom and even if it does because it does not use up much RAM you can Ctrl+Alt+Del it and stop it. You will never have to restart. Also using this software, you can change the ID3v_1 and ID3v_2 tags which allow you to set the song name and artist name so that the next time you import it into one of your jukeboxes you never have to name it. Also people using Audio galaxy Satellite and Imesh to download songs may note that WinAmp also plays the songs that have been partially downloaded.
I would strongly recommend that you download it and as Saurabh has suggested make it your default player. Also please remember to download a plug-in called WinAmp Pacemaker. You will be easily able to find it on the WinAmp site by pressing Get More Plug-ins Button in the Software while connected to the Net.
This Pacemaker allows you to change the tempo, pitch and both at once by changing speed. Using this you can here all your boy songs in girl voices and vice versa. You don’t know how funny Like a virgin sounds in Bryan Adams’ voice and how You Sexy thing sounds in a Tina Turner voice. You can convert all your old slow songs into new fast ones by fastening the tempo or vice-versa by slackening it. It is great fun. Also the tempo change only causes the singer’s voice to become faster and does not dilute it’s pitch and the background music changes negligibly. Similar case with the pitch change. Only with speed changes do both change. So go ahead and download it.