Nullsoft's Winamp 5 Review
- Product:
- Winamp 5 (company site)
- What's Good:
- Stable, supports most media types, better interface than earlier versions.
- What's Bad:
- Interface is still skinned, AOL viral marketing.
Winamp3 undeniably sucked. Whereas version two was light and efficient, three was heavy, crash-prone, and confusing. Well, the Nullsoft team shrewdly analyzed their folly and released version five (2+3) that takes the simplicity everyone appreciated in two and folded the few good elements in three into a new and much-improved product. It sounds so simple, but so few companies can criticize their own products and benefit from it.
The improvements I most notice are in the interface changes and they're worth applauding. Although I have reservations about skinning interfaces as opposed to using OS controls, if you're going to go down the path of skinning Winamp does it very well. Gone are the flashy moving parts and radical shapes of version three. Also gone are the tiny ambiguous controls of both previous releases. Nice.
The first thing you notice is that everything is a little bit larger than in version two. This allows for a couple of things. First off, skin designers can fit everything in while properly labeling everything. Both previous versions of the program suffered from ambiguous buttons and tiny clickable areas. In Winamp5, most of the controls are clearly labeled. Just look at the bottom of the playlist window. You no longer have to determine what the plus, minus, and SEL buttons mean. They actually tell you what you need to know. Second, it means everything is more legible at high resolutions. My laptop runs at 1400x1050 at only 14" and now I can actually read almost everything in the interface.
The second thing that jumps right out at you is the adoption of a simple windows-style top menu. Although strangely it doesn't seem to use the standard ALT-F command etc. to open the menus, it looks and acts almost exactly like a Windows menu. It's intuitive and helpful for editing preferences, loading files, and doing what you need to do.
Also of note, most actions have intuitive and strong reactions. Elements that should have hover effects have them. All buttons have fairly subtle on-click effects that increase the feeling that you've done something.
The colour options is another interesting new skinning feature. A single skin can have many different colour choices. The default skin can be coloured anything from 'Amethyst' to 'Varsity'. It's a nice feature when you like the features of the skin, but not its original colour scheme.
Of course, there are a handful of negative things too. Some of the pixel fonts are still miniscule, the whole thing seems a little more clunky than two but way more solid than three, the tray menus for your equalizer and video is strange (what's wrong with separate windows), it's still doesn't use default OS controls, and AOL still tries to get you to install stuff. However, bravo to Nullsoft for a big improvement and sound judgment¹.
¹ I honestly didn't notice that pun until after this was posted.
Comments
David S - April 23, 2004 3:47 pm
Just got here through SVN and thought I'd chime in...
Winamp 5 has been a great program. Winamp 2 was good, but not until 2.9x (post-3 release, so it kinda went under the radar) did Winamp have support for a media library. Without the media library, there is no way I'd be using Winamp (surprised the review didnt' mention it!).
Thankfully, Winamp 5 has kept the library and, as noted, added the flexibility of skinning in Winamp 3 (you can make it look however you want, although I'm not convinced that that's a good thing). Overall, the default Winamp Modern skin is great, but a bit sluggish, and has a tendancy to get thrown into the paging file, resulting in slow response time every once in awhile.
I've found that using classic skins is the best way to go if you want to keep the small memory footprint and high responsiveness. I, too, run at a high resolution so I have begun using the Global Hotkeys plugin to map keyboard shortcuts to Winamp commands (all of them being WindowsKey + something, as not to interfere with other programs) instead of attempting to click the tiny buttons in the classic skins.
So, the bottom line is this: Winamp 5 is the best media player for constant music, since it has a small memory footprint and takes up little screen space; use and cherish the media library; and setup some global hotkeys.
One quick tip: if you never want your jukebox messed with, make Windows Media Player your default player for media. That way, you will never have to reload your playlist when you want to watch a video clip or listen to an audio clip.
Cheers.
Mark McQuaid - April 23, 2004 7:20 pm
Great review...I honestly prefer foobar2000 to winamp..Sure it doesnt have all the fancy stuff that winamp has but really when it boils down to it, its a media player nothing more then nothing less..foobar has great customizable(sp) features for geeks, and well its add free, bullshit free simple media player..
geek it up..
clicky clicky
JIMENA - September 5, 2005 2:47 pm
I wan´t this winamp.