Anyone who asks "What happened to Winamp4?" can be forgiven well in advance. I asked exactly the same thing, and if you visit Nullsoft's site you can read all about why they skipped a version. You can also read about their outrageous claims for the new version such as "Snazzy new look!", "Groovy new features", and my personal favorite: "Most things actually work!".
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| Yay for scaled and opaque Winamp! |
Indeed a lot of people skipped Winamp 3. Yes you could play videos, but did you really want to? Some people upgraded for the Media Library features without realising that the later releases of 2.x actually contained some/most/all of these features anyway. Upon loading Winamp 5, you are presented with a bit of an information overload - anyone hoping to stick with something similar to the good old small and compact sight of 2.x versions might be scared off at this point, but persevere a little before uninstalling!
After closing the Media Library window, the video window, and switching off modern skins you'll be presented with something that looks pretty identical to the small and compact version that so many know and love. However, there are some cool options lurking within, so it's worth spending a bit of time playing about with everything and seeing what you like and don't like.
I'm going to start by talking a little about the Music Library feature. I could never work out the appeal with this, but after spending a bit of time this afternoon, I think I've got it. Features like the Music Library are designed mainly for computer illiterate people. People who have music scattered all over their hard drive, and really don't have a clue at all how to organise anything to save their lives. For people like these, the Media Library is going to make your cluttered and confused lives a lot easier. Finally now, you can scan your entire computer (which I suspect contains one factory created partition called C:) and locate everything, and present it in a readable form - the fact that you put half of that album in C:\My Documents\My Music\Johns Music\New Downloads\mp3s\new stuff\Eminem and the other half in C:\Stuff is no longer a problem! Winamp will find all the files and order them nicely for you. However, anyone with a half decent concept of file and directory organisation will get less benifit from the Media Library. I found some of the browsing functions quite cool, but for me it's still quicker to simply use the filesystem to locate and enqueue files.
One major flaw I noticed was that the Media Library does not handle compilation CD's very well at all. Some way to denote compilations and handle them differently would be nice - currently you end up having a whole load of artists listed containing 1 track each - granted, you can right click on that one track to get an option to play the entire compilation album, but I don't like the fact that it can't intelligently handle compilations, as it makes my lists quite untidy and difficult to navigate. I guess maybe an option to mirror the filesystem would be nice, however that omission really reinforces my theory that they're figuring people with decent file organisation skills won't be using this thing anyway.
The Media Library also has an info window, which will get updated track and album information about any track as you click on it. It's an interesting idea, but it makes the browsing experience slightly more laggy (as you'd expect). I also have no idea where this thing is pulling all its info from (FreeDB or something perhaps? One to research later I think!), but the whole concept was a bit worrying, and the delay pissed me off so I just disabled the thing.
One final comment on the Media Library before I move on - switch the default action to "enqueue" instead of "play" - it makes the whole thing a lot more usable.
Enough about the Media Library! The next thing I played with was skins. Winamp 5 supports all the old 2.x (aka "classic") skins, which is nice, however there are a couple of nice features offered via new modern skins that I love. As you can see in the screenshot, you can now set the opacity and scale of each window individually (or link them). This is something I've wanted for a while, and it works really well.
It does come at a price though - these options are very intensive on your graphics card. The PC I'm testing this on currently is a high specced hyperthreaded cpu, but it contains 2 video cards - one new, and one rather old PCI one. Everything runs nicely until I drag winamp onto the older card, and then things start to get pretty dicey. It won't be a problem for most, but its good to be aware that as always with graphical features, they do carry associated performance costs.
This release now has "global hotkeys". These allow you to control winamp using your keyboard from anywhere. For anyone who is a fan of ergonomics and avoiding switching to a mouse, these are a great thing. The default keys all follow a ctrl-alt combo, ie, ctrl-alt-home to pause, ctrl-alt-up arrow to raise volume, etc etc. These are a great idea, and once you get used to them save a lot of switching back and foward to do simple operations such as raise volume or skip track.
Anyone using a new style "internet" keyboard will probably have keys that provide these functions already, and if so, I'd recommend sticking with them - these keys are just handy for those who don't have one of those keyboards, or who have a bit of a problem installing a 5mb driver for a keyboard.
Someone asked me about extra EQ options, and quality of music. I don't really know if it's even worth mentioning. The very nature of compressed audio makes it hard to really judge these sorts of things without going through extensive comparision tests, and even then any "conclusion" would be nothing more than an opinion. I've tried other MP3 players, and not really noticed any difference in quality - you're going to get bigger variations in quality through things like compression quality (codec etc), and speaker quality. I think this version of Winamp sounds just like the others, which is a *good* thing imho.
The "Pro" version of this release also supports CD ripping, and compilation burning. I haven't reviewed these features as I don't have the pro version, however, this current trend of every application trying to do anything and everything is a bit worrying. I'm interested to know if it does what it does well, or if its just another excuse for bloatware..
So in summary. There's enough features in this release to make it worth considering upgrading from 2.x - although I think a lot of people would be content to stay with their old compact versions. At 11mb (sans ripping and burning features) it's not overly huge, and it loads quite quickly, but it definately has a larger install footprint than previous versions. The window options are nice, and the new modern skins look good, and if you're a complete moron in the area of file management then you're going to LOVE the media library, but at the end of the day it plays MP3's, and the previous version also did that pretty well.
I think I will stick with using 5 for now at least - simply because I'm a sucker for nice visual effects, and I've wanted to be able to resize the overall size of Winamp (besides that terrible "Doublesize" feature they've always offered). On top of that, I'm sold on Opaque windows, and I think Winamp is one of those applications where setting window opacity actually works really well - ie, it's not something you're constantly staring at (well unless you're viewing a video in it!), and only want to check back on it quickly as a point of reference - in that context being able to see other windows updating is a handy thing.
So in summary, new aesthetic features are cool, global hotkeys are cool for those without Internet style keyboards, it plays mp3s, and the media library is good for people who don't know a filing system from a roll of scotch tape, but for those who don't care about any of those things there's no real reason to stray from your old trusted 2.x version of Winamp.