I have to reverse my location on this player. For a very long time I royally dissed it and it was well-deserved. The audio quality was substandard, the bloat and slowness unwarranted. However, times have changed. The interface, while slower than the competition is not unreasonably so. The Media Library is intuitive and slowly to use. Near importantly, the audio quality has arrived with 24-bit support, dithering, seamless / gapless playback, a quality equalizer (finally!) and a high precision decoder. It's easily on equation with Foobar and XMPlay which IMNSHO are the Gold Standards for audio quality in the genre. Eventide the memory rtequirements are on equation with the abovementioned programs.
Now, all is not sweetness and light. The program has several criminal bugs – I enounce criminal because this thing is OLD and these bugs should have been long-since squashed. The include poor error checking so that an errant plugin or skin can crash the player, and a display module (nscrt.dll) that can have a crash but by invoking CDDB for a newly introduced CD with the playlist open (I dealt that six times in two moments – things went swimmingly if I but shut the playlist). Skin performance could also exist significantly improved.
This program is also LOADED with Adware, something I intensely resent. I see adware as malware and anything that prompts me to purchase music while I'm building a custom playlist or otherwise impinges upon my have should exist expunged. I conjecture that's the malign influence of the AOL ownership – later all, zero good has Ever got away of that company.
All that being said, the UI and configurability of the interface and audio options build this the best bang away there for a media player. Simply exist sure to consult the Winamp install direct (Google it) and avoid installing any plugins shipped with the plaer that stink of adware (I can conceive of one promoinent plugin for the Media Library that fits that description).
Related posts: