"Winamp, it really whips the Llama's ass" (Winamp)

Member Name: I_Do

Product:	Winamp
Date:	15/08/03 (691 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Intuitive, Fast, Like a pair of old jeans

Disadvantages: Version 3 very slow

"Winamp, it really whips the Llama's ass," or so says Winamp when you load it for the 1st time.

Well I don't know anything about whipping, but I reckon Winamp is the best audio player around. It has a nice "look and feel" and excellent sound reproduction, which is what counts. It has an easy to use interface, similar to the controls on your hi-fi/video, meaning you will have your favourite tracks blasting out in seconds.

It handles MP3, as well as loads of other sound file formats and plays your standard audio Compact Disks. There's no excuse not to have some thumping tunes waking the neighbours. Don't come running to me though if they complain.

Winamp features different modules which you can add and remove easily including a Playlist, where you can add single tracks for a quick blast of your favourite track, or complete directories of songs to last hours. There's a graphic equaliser with plenty of built in levels, as well as letting you fiddle for hours to get that best sound before realising the defaults are fine. In recent versions the AVS, (Advanced Visualization Studio) was added which graphically displays what you are listening to and finally there's a mini browser which lets you receive up to the minute information about Winamp, auto-load SHOUTcast stream homepages and loads more. Personally I never use this feature.

SKINS
No offence to the nice ones, but when I was at school "skins" were something to run away from! :-) When it comes to Winamp however Skins are nothing to worry about, they are our friends. Skins change the graphical look of the program, one of my favourites is PacAmp, which harks back to the '80s maze game. For younger readers PacMan was the Tomb Raider of its day!
:-)

There are 1000's, (I lost count!) of skins available and you can store a selection in the program and chose which one you want depending on your mood. You are bo


u
nd to find a selection you like and if not you can even make your own given a little bit of time, creative talent and a pinch of technical know-how.

You can then upload them to the web for others to use. Details on this can be found at www.winamp.com as well as info on plug-ins that allow you to alter the sound, for example adding echo, reverb etc.

So that is Winamp, all in all an excellent MP3 and general audio player, in fact it's my player of choice at the moment and has been for a long time.

I give it a mighty 5 stars, (out of 5 of course!)

Since writing this review Winamp 3 has been released. On my computer, (Duron 1.3, 256MB Ram, ATi Radeon 7500) it was very sluggish so I removed it and went back to version 2.91. Winamp are continuing to update the 2.x version so I guess they see an issue there too.

*This review raised a few questions, well actually it raised two, which is nearly a few.

First: Can a piece of software actually whip a llama's ass?

Second: Were any llamas injured while beta testing?

I'm reluctant to accept that the former is possible but then surely that would be false advertising on Winamp's part? If not, then it must be true.

If true I am sure that the great guys at Winamp would never do a thing to harm an innocent llama.

Summary: