What Else Do You Need? (Winamp)

Member Name: tybalt

Product:	Winamp
Date:	22/10/01 (192 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Best around

Disadvantages: None

I have certainly tried a far amount of digital music players, and the one, which I have chosen to stick with, is Winamp. In fact I?m listening to it right now. It produces a very crisp sound when compared to some other players on the same set up.

I think winamp has the nearly perfect balance between features, ease of use, and little system resources used up. I shall now explain what I mean about each of those. To start with, Winamp is feature packed nearly. You can customise it in a lot of ways. In just looks you can skin it and make it smaller or bigger. You can make it sit on top of all your other programs. There is even an output plug-in, which makes a little pink guy dance about your screen in tune to the music you?re playing. These are all the little aesthetically pleasing features.

If you search the web, there are lots and lots of sites dedicated to winamp skins. Generally if I am looking for a new winamp skin, I just go to winamp?s site and browse through their categories. I found a really good Doritos one in the Brand Name category. Have a look and see what suits you.

One of the other more over-looked features of winamp is the Equaliser. It comes with presets for you to choose between. The default is ok for most types of music, but to get the most out of some songs it can take a bit of changing. For most of the music that I have been listening to, the preset Club has worked very well. This has been with groups like Steoreophics and artists like Faith Hill and Bryan Adams.

If you are willing to delve a little deeper into the setting of the player, you can change what output plug-in is used to play your music. You can choose between Wave Out, DirectSound, WMA Output and even a Disk Writer output. I personally just stick to the Wave Out, it doesn?t make a lot of difference between each of them, but either Wave Out or DirectSound are the two that I generally stick to.

There are so many plug-ins that you can download
off the internet for winamp, they are limitless, so I won?t go into all of them. The only other ones that I have used in the past have been DSP/Effect plug-in, it can add or take away from the richness of your sound depending on the settings you choose.

Now, onto the other reasons why I choose this player. It is very simple to use. You don?t need any knowledge to be able to use it. Even my dad has been able to create a playlist for his favourite songs. Believe me this means it must be simple. He has even been able to change the skin on winamp.

Winamp is also a very small player and uses up very little system resources, which can be very important when choosing a player. It does take up more than small players like CoolPlayer, but when compared with Windows Media Player and Sonique it seems tiny.

One thing to note about using any digital music player on your PC though, it does also require that you have some decent hardware to support it. Nothing special but the better the hardware and speakers, the better the sound will be of course.

Overall if you looking for an all purpose music player on your PC, then I would advise this one to anyone. Unless you want to able to stream videos (although you can stream music) over the internet then this will probably also suit you like it does me. When you compare it to the more graphically pleasing Sonique, I would still choose Winamp, because I produces a far nicer sound. Also winamp is completely FREE.

I have also tried some other players, but few of them came close. Stick with Winamp.

David

Summary: