Just lost my old hdd a few months back and finally had to redownload winamp... its shi3t or rather, has many useless functions i'll never use that keep trying to do things i don't want... like crashing constantly and for some reason, it takes ages to load large playlists (15k+ songs) whereas the older version i had didn't do this.

I found a site called http://oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp which has alot of versions of winamp, but can't seem to work out which version works best.

Only function i want is reliablity and global hotkeys. What version do you use?

2.42, 2.74 if you're one of those die-hard 2.x people.

Personally I just use 5.x with a compatible 2.x skin.

people still use winamp?
get with the times people, apple is taking over the world so you might as well get on board before its too late zomG!@

Winamp v2.90 I think was the last v2.x version I used which was lightweight and sweet

Also I just mirrored foobar which a lot of people like as a lightweight, simple mp3 player.

itunes?

itunes sux

trog... link doesn't work.


"AusGamers Files
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You have probably been linked directly to it mistakenly.

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thanks guys, waiting for oldversion.com to start rsponding, keeps timing out, then will try 2.9 ;)

haha even I know itunes suxass, but thanks for the replies ;)

All I do is download the lite version without the extra crap and set it to the classic skin, looks and performs the same as it always did.

woops I think I meant 2.81: http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/5325

ahh thanks trog,

that shi3ts sweet. no global hotkeys, but i'll take stability over that anyday heh...well, cept maybe when i'm being lazy ;)

The only Apple products I use are iTunes and an iPod. Even without an iPod, iTunes would make life sooo much easier. It's extremely intuitive to use and can organise all the files on your PC into folders in the one directory. Searching is a piece of piss, playlists are a pleasure to create and play... argh everything is so dreamy in iTunes!

last edited by B.Hardball at 16:21:57 13/Jun/08

i'm using 5.531 without any problems, you guys are just pretentious f*****s. I have 13gb of songs in a playlist that I randomly play everyday at work and never have problems with it

yeah well (to the 'prentious fags' post) 've 80 or so GB's loaded in a single playlist and it just crashes randomly. its either a plugin/new feature or my nLited version of winXP doesn't have something in it that winamp relies on, either way, fuk the newer versions. so far, 2.9's working (or whatever that vresion was that trog linked me). thanks again.

sigh... iTunes will handle that easily...

yeh but then you have to use iTunes, which, while it maybe easy to use, is fat apple POS bloatware

see, Trog agrees, use iTunes.

I don't get the term "lite" or "fat" for that matter... is it in terms of CPU usage? Memory usage? Cause iTunes uses dick all... playing an 8gig playlist uses a max of 1% CPU and ~50meg memory (if I'm using those terms correctly). If lite means you just want to play, skip and volume control, then just switch to the mini iTunes thingo... or shrink it or whatever!!

NEVER!

lol took me ages goign around finding 'lightweight' software. installing itunes is like... cleaning all the windows of a house just before its about to be demolished... looks pretty but... f'sking pointless.

The point is it makes listening to music extremely convenient... I guess that's not what you're after:p

50meg memory usage is huge...

For comparison winamp 5.12 uses 18meg

The point is it makes listening to music extremely convenient... I guess that's not what you're after

Please explain to someone who has 10 mp3's on his computer.

last edited by sif greazy at 17:11:45 13/Jun/08

just a 'tad'. don't get me wrong, i'll use an app if its performing all the functions i want, regardless of the system resource usage.. but... if theres a light weight alternative... heh 'by iboys' *jumps boat*

if 50meg is hufe buy more ram tight ass

anyone who runs less then 2gb these days is an idiot.


also I use wiamp, don't like itunes.

No. 256meg represent.

thanks for the correction trog, i was gonna say something otherwise

2.xx hardcore represent

i have used winamp since 2.22 and have updated to every version, and when it got to 2.78 i stopped, cos i was completely satisfied in its operation. i believe it is the peak of winamp development, and since then has suffered from too many cooks spoil the broth.

that shi3ts sweet. no global hotkeys, but i'll take stability over that anyday heh...well, cept maybe when i'm being lazy ;)

Install this, it adds tray icon controls for play/pause/seek/etc and has global hot keys, both features can be enabled or disabled as you see fit.

hey whoop, what version of winamp and advanced controls are you using? Global hotkeys aren't there or is it in 'configuration' of the plugin (coz when i click that... it does nothing)?

i'm using 2.81 with advanced controls 5.2.2

(coz u can't use any later versions with previous releases of winamp prior to 5.3). but i must admit, i love the idea of controlling it from the sys tray. thanks ;)

Itunes sucks, I used to say that because I don't like apple and s***. Then I tried it and whoa it really does suck. Winamp is simple... press play, press stop, search button thats all I need.

Plus without winamp how would've those "Post your mp3 list" threads worked?

haha 80gb playlist, stop pulling it

lol want me to post the playlist boba? oh, wait i get what u mean, no, the playlist isn't 80GB, but the music in it all adds up to 80GB. soz, poor choice of words.

last edited by Fixity at 20:14:29 13/Jun/08

im 134gig of beats

i only upgrade from 2.78 winamp coz i got sick of the hassling to upgrade due to the security flaw

last edited by Spook at 20:17:42 13/Jun/08

2.91 was the last of the 2.xx I think.

So Goot.

I am using winamp version 2.95

Haven't tried itunes, since I haven't had any reason to. But my curiosity got the better of me so I thought I'd take a look for myself.

Ok, first up, I had a quick look around to see if there was a way to install itunes without quicktime (that is one piece of software I have used before, and loathe). Came across this spot and the no quicktime installer and thought I'd give it a go. Pulled down the bin off that page and quicktime alternative 2.6 from another site. (the stripped down itunes is only 12.6 meg, in comparison to the itunes+quicktime with is about 57.6, and winamp which is about 9.)

Tried installing the original apple one as well as the autoscripted version. The stripped down version has been set up to install without interaction, is lightning fast, and doesn't install quicktime, but otherwise seems to be identical. The apple version asks a bunch of stuff and takes a minute or two to do things. The apple version also seemed to start searching my drives for mp3s without my direct prompting (the stripped version didn't, just started up.). Either version installs and autostarts some services, which I obviously promptly disabled. After installation (and the changes I've mentioned) both versions seem to be operating as normal. Just have to remember to install the quicktime alternative, if you go the first route, since itunes needs it (or quicktime) to run.

So, on to functionality. Firstly, the interface.

Default winamp gui (classic skin, picked it during winamp installation), a familiar sight I'm sure.
http://users4.nofeehost.com/icewyrm/Images/winamp.jpg


Itunes default gui (was there an option in installation? I don't believe so, though I wouldn't be surprised if you can change it in preferences or wherever.) Note that this is after I turned some of the bits and pieces off, to make it a little bit cleaner looking. I did check the mini interface, but it was a little bit spartan for my tastes. The player feels responsive enough in terms of switching between songs, pausing etc, although there seems to be just a touch more delay than I'm used to with winamp.

http://users4.nofeehost.com/icewyrm/Images/itunes.jpg


Itunes:
Works on the basis of libraries, so in order to play music you have to add it a library, which can then be added to playlists or played directly from the library. I assume this means that adding files to the library is slower and more resource consuming than the process of making playlists (since adding files to the library probably checks tag information and such in the files). I did a quick test. To add approx 9000 mp3s to a library in itunes, takes approximately 02 minutes and 54 seconds (the application itself takes around 4.5 seconds to launch). After the songs were added, itunes automatically began downloading cover art for all of the added files. I tried to find a way to stop this (I don't keep pictures and s*** in with my music, it bugs me to have all that extra garbage in there (desktop.ini? cover.jpg? thumbs.db? gtfo!) but ended up just quitting and reopening to stop it. Theres probably a better way, if so please let me know. I then did a quick search through my music folder and deleted the jpgs that'd been pulled down already.

Resources: Itunes is using between 5 and 10 percent of my CPU (Q6600@3.00 GHz) while playing an mp3, spread across all 4 cores. I set the processor affinity to only use the 4th core, interestingly cpu usage overall jumped to around 20% max and activity on that particular core rose drastically, so I'm not certain whats going on there. Anyways, its also using about 53 meg of ram.

Functionality: I didn't see an inbuilt global hotkeys function lurking in the menu (once again, maybe I just missed, would be happy to be corrected.) I pulled down a third party app called iLaunch which just adds ctrl-alt- p for pause/play, s for skip and b for back. There seems to be better global hotkeys programs for itunes around but it seems to work ok, so no probs there.

Winamp:
Has various library functionality and such, but by default just loads files into a temporary playlist. I don't bother preloading mp3 tags, so it takes about 4.5 seconds to spawn the same 9000 song playlist. Just loads and plays the songs based on the playlist or song I choose. I use autohotkey to bind keys to initially load winamp up and load in particular music directories at startup, meaning I don't have any use for a library as such in either app.

Resources: Winamp is using less than 1% of cpu (has been sitting on 00 so far in task manager, set to single or multicore affinity.) It uses around 13 meg of ram.

Functionality: Obviously, hotkeys are already built in, but with an addon app or such for itunes there aren't really any major differences between them.

So, the main points:
Itunes installs services and does some other things without asking for permission, and chews up some extra resources.
Itunes does the same job as winamp, with some fiddling either way.
On the plus side, itunes is probably alot better than some other similar apps - it seems a lot better than say, musicmatch jukebox.

I guess if you like playing with libraries and that sort of thing, it might be a decent app - I just organise my music in a simple manner and listen to it in a similar fashion, so theres no appeal in it for me.

Itunes sucks, I used to say that because I don't like apple and s***. Then I tried it and whoa it really does suck.

Same.

Am I the only one here who uses WMP? I mean it does absolutely everything you could want a music player to do including auto ripping new CD's you get and organising your folders. It's also easy to burn a playlist to CD for the car. I've got it running at the moment and it's only using 20mb.

great post icewyrm!

While it is interesting, that would still go under the category of "anecdotal evidence", with everything else in this thread:)

Use SongBird.. it's open source, has heaps of plugins, built on Mozilla framework and iPod compatible.

Whats a good global hotkey program i can install to use with itunes?

I got me one of those mice with the play/pause, back/forward and volume controls... makes listening to music AWESOME.

Deathwalker, try iTunesKeys?

Could also give iremote a go.

If you happen to use autohotkey (awesome little proggie) you could also give the autohotkey script a go.

Billy: If you happen to have a logitech mouse (or another mouse that allows you to rebind mouse buttons to keyboard maps with software), you can do the same things with a hotkey program (or plugin) + a keybind in the mouse software.

On my G9, I bind shift+ctrl+1 and 2 to my dpi decrease/increase buttons (since I never change it anyway, and the buttons are a little small for binds in FPS games), which are the hotkeys I use to jump songs forwards and backwards in winamp.

Billy: If you happen to have a logitech mouse (or another mouse that allows you to rebind mouse buttons to keyboard maps with software), you can do the same things with a hotkey program (or plugin) + a keybind in the mouse software.

Yes it is Logitech, but I don't quite understand what you're telling me I can do? I already have my mouse buttons controlling iTunes... they can also control WMP... and probably VLC or MPC if I could be bothered setting it up correctly. I use iTunes 90% of the time now, especially now that I can import my movies into iTunes too.

I just meant that you (as in someone who doesn't already have a mouse with multimedia specific buttons or whatnot) could set it up with standard mouse, as long as it had enough buttons and supports the right config software.

Though if the mouse buttons you're talking about work with different programs, I assume they wouldn't be global?

last edited by icewyrm at 22:39:19 14/Jun/08

windows media player 10?

hey whoop, what version of winamp and advanced controls are you using? Global hotkeys aren't there or is it in 'configuration' of the plugin (coz when i click that... it does nothing)?

i'm using 2.81 with advanced controls 5.2.2

(coz u can't use any later versions with previous releases of winamp prior to 5.3). but i must admit, i love the idea of controlling it from the sys tray. thanks ;)

Right click the systray icon(s), any of them will do play,pause,rw,ff it doesn't matter and select options. Global hotkey settings should be in there somewhere I think.

I can't say for sure since I use the multimedia keys on my keyboard now and mediaplayer classic.

last edited by whoop at 01:13:12 15/Jun/08

thanks for the help peeps, resolved problem buy downloading old old version of 'advanced controls' 1.x.x and has options in there, the newer versions don't have global hotkeys coz... its designed to work with winamp v 5.x+ which automatically offers global hotkeys