With so many MP3 Players available on the Internet, how do decide which is the most suitable player and which one should be your default player? Well, I have used close to 14 or 16 mp3 players, media players and jukeboxes and I feel Winamp is the best.
Before proceeding I want to make one thing clear, I am in no way comparing Winamp with Media Players (like Windows Media Player) and Jukeboxes (like Real Jukebox). Media players and Jukeboxes have many other functions such as playing videos, encoding songs from CD’s into MP3’s etc. Winamp is just a MP3 player and not a Jukebox or a Media player.
First of all Winamp is a very light program. While downloading Winamp from its official site ( http://www.winamp.com) you have three options (depending on the features you want) - light, standard and complete. Features are more in the ’’complete’’ and least in ’’light’’. Of course the size also increases with increase in features.
Because of its lightness, I feel it is most suitable to be the default audio player.
The biggest drawback with a Media player or a Jukebox as the default player is that, these players take a long time to open. After opening, the song is played. This is not the case with Winamp, which opens very quickly. Your attention goes on this particular thing when you are previewing small wave sounds. If some media player or jukebox is your default you have to wait for 25 to 30 seconds for previewing some wave sound, which is probably just 1 to 3 second long.
About Winamp player:
Winamp can play close to 29 types of files like mp3, mp2, wma, rmi etc… etc and play lists saved in the form of m3u and pls. Probably the only files, which cannot be played by Winamp are the Real player files like rmx, rmj etc. So you cannot use Winamp to play songs that have been encoded using Real Jukebox.
The best feature of this mp3 player according to me is the ’’Equalizer’’. There are about 10 frequencies in the equalizer ranging from 60 Hz to 16 kHz and all are very effective. Variations in the intensity of these frequencies bring a lot of change in the output sound unlike the ’’Sonique Equalizer’’(Sonique is another mp3 player, probably the competitor of Winamp) where variations in the intensity don’t produce any effect on the output sound.
Another thing I like very much about Winamp are the skins. There are close to 3000 skins of Winamp that can be downloaded from the Winamp site. You can even make your own skins and upload them on the site for others to download. I think this facility is available only in Winamp. All other players have very few selected skins on their sites. I downloaded a few Sonique skins from the Sonique site however majority of the skins were corrupted. I tried downloading them again but to no use. I got the same message again -’’file is corrupt’’.
Winamp is a very simple player and it is very easy to use. It just isn’t flashy and complicated to use as Sonique.
While making the play lists in Winamp you have to choose songs directly from their locations on the hard drive. The is no library in Winamp which according to me is a plus point as you don’t have to make changes in the library every now and then whenever you change the location of songs.
You can also download various plugins and visualizations from the official Winamp site. Plugins are used to enhance the quality of music. You have these plugins in addition to the equalizer. There are a number of plugins such as 3D sound, DFX, pacemaker etc. However some of these plugins are demos and have to be bought.
Similarly, visualizations plugins like G Force and other avs can also be downloaded from the Winamp site.
Other features include CDDB, capability to rename songs, keyboard shortcuts etc.
Drawbacks:
According to me the only drawback with Winamp is that too many plugins make it unstable. After paying for a while it stops responding.
I have been using Winamp right from version 2.6 to version 2.74. The makers of Winamp keep upgrading their player with more and better features and keep fixing the bugs that arise. So finally aren’t you thinking of making Winamp your default player?