Winamp is awesome!
I’ve known this for a long time. It’s a great and straight forward music player from way back. And when I say way back I mean early 2000’s and even into the late 90’s. Yeah that far back.
It started getting a little too commercially for my taste a while back but I’ve always loved the features it brought to the table. Something many of the other music players don’t even try to do.
MusicMatch was really good with renaming files and looking up the information based on a file name but MM was a total and utter piece of electronic goo. It was bloat ware at its worse and consumed so many resources it basically prevented other applications from running. (Short story. You can skip this if you want. Incidentally I told them this many many times and eventually they gave up and were bought out then canceled. Coincidence? I think not. I mean really, there’s a check box that says “DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET” inside the program. You check it expecting that you won’t need the internet to play music right. At the time I was on dial-up, so I knew if I was online or not. Well fired up MM and it tried to go to the internet. What?! I called, and wrote them and they assured me that MM does not connect to the internet. I wrote back with my undeniable proof that when I fire up MM it tries to get online. What is it doing? They wouldn’t say and insisted I was infected with a virus. Oh and while MM was waiting to go online, which I wouldn’t let it do, I couldn’t use my computer. It locked up all other windows and wouldn’t unfocus on the MM screen. I always had to End Task to get out. I go online before hand, fire up MM and all worked fine. Took about 30 seconds. Anywho… I’m way off track with this little tale so back to my recent conversion.)
I recently converted all my .WAV files to .MP3 so I could stream them to a pc in my living room. But I wasn’t sharing my iTunes library with the other computer, and I had previously spent a long time getting all the music ripped into iTunes. iTunes does not convert backward to MP3 once it’s a wav file so I used this program called cdex convertor to convert all the .wav files to MP3. Unfornuately even though all the .wav files are named Album_Track#_TrackTitle_Artist and in a folder with the artist name I couldn’t get that information into the mp3 files.
So I went to Windows Media Player. I was looking for an option to import using the convention above. Nothing. When it imported them they were all unknown artists. Stupid.
So I tried Winamp. Bam! Done! It’s pulling all the music into the library, querying an onlie db based on a logical understanding of the file name and inserting the ID3 tags into the MP3 file. All free. And simple. And easy. And totally what everyone else should be able to do but don’t. How hard is a db look-up for a company like Microsoft, or Apple?
I think I might throw Winamp some money when I get a job again just as a way of thanks. Speaking of which, I have an interview on Wednesday with the Sheriff’s office. Did I already mention that?
Anywhoo…. Winamp is awesome. It has a slew of features and useful functions built into the program and best of all it’s under 10 megs in size. How many gigs is Windows Media Player or iTunes?
At least 12038.3 gigs. Minimum. Seriously. Check out Winamp. Well worth it.