Any Winamp 2 users convert to 3?

[fracturedmind]

I was wondering if anyone has found a replacement for the old 'J' key in winamp 2? Thats the only feature holding me back from switching to 3 really, I dont care about skins, but I like to goto my list, hit 'J', type in any string and find a song, on Windamp 3 you goto this complicated (retarde) library and have to click here and there to do all the crap, it feels so Mac-like.

Any other big Winamp 3 features from any people who have converted? Or is it still a big joke?

[Antagony]

Winamp 3 eats up a ludicrous amount of RAM. It comes with bells and whistles that I doubt many people every make any use of. I've even had stability problems with it.

Winamp2 4 Life, wuuuutttttt

[fracturedmind]

I've got no beef with winamp2 but lately I've downloaded a lot of oggs and it seems to crash randomly playing them (latest build of 2) :/

[Antagony]

That probably has something to do with OGG being a horrible terrible audio format.

[clockworkgreen]

I can't deal with 3. 2.9 works especially well for me.

[Empty_One]

Ug, I tried 3 for a few weeks, and I can't stand it. It's a memory hog, and it just feels "wrong"

[kgb]

I have 3. I don't really like it all that well. It seems like it take a lot of resources and doesn't really add all that mcuh to my mp3 listening experience. It even takes a long time to lad compared to the old one. Plus I always liked to make the bar thingys that show the levels skinny and have trailers and I couldn't figure out how to do that.

[TaLoN]

2 for life

[fracturedmind]

Whats wrong with ogg? ><

[guthmund]

When I download an MP3 player I want just an MP3 player. Winamp 3 seemed to have multiple libraries; some sort of browser; and and another dozen features I just didn't care too much for.

Winamp 2 is the Winamp for me. Simple, clean and just plays MP3s.

[Nhanced1]

I switched to winamp3. It is a huge memory hog, like everyone has been saying. but it fits my needs. One of the reasons I switched was that I found a skin that I really liked the look of and I wanted to use that. I also like the feature to have mutliple playlists loaded at one time. You also have the search function built right into the playlist editor, so you can search through a huge playlist easily. I think that eventually they will shave off some of the memory use in newer versions. For now, my skin looks really cool alpha blended with my desktop. I'll post a screeny as soon as I get a chance.

[longjohns]

not liking winamp3

[Spungfoo]

Originally posted by Antagony
That probably has something to do with OGG being a horrible terrible audio format.

I've done tests where I ripped a song in both ogg and mp3 formats at the highest bitrate possible and I can tell that the ogg's are slightly better. Not really noticable in alot of the stuff I listen to, but if the song had a really clean and clear production I can definitely tell the difference.

[xanthar]

I can't stand winamp3

[MahlerIsGod]

With the one exception of foobar, winamp 2.81 is my favorite player. Winamp 3 lasted for about one hour. Maybe two?

[PHYcos]

I have Winamp 2 playing during Counter-Stirke and other games and it works fine. But when I got Winamp 3, FUCK!, games were slow, sound was shithouse and it took forever to load.

Winamp 2 will live on my pc for as long there is no better program. Better as being a simple mp3 player, no bullshit included.

[christophagust]

I hate winamp 3 as well; stuck with 2 and going to stay with it. And ogg is good, vbr is the best

[Antagony]

The OGG Debate

Okay. OGG works great for certain types of music. But only for certain types. OGG clips tons of highs.

I had a friend who was an OGG zealot. Ripped all his stuff into OGG. He was ripping a soundtrack to some movie (orchestral score stuff). He messaged me, "HOLY CRAP LISTEN TO THIS FILE". The OGG compression screwed up some of the violin work so badly that the song was just completely unlistenable. He went out and made sure he had the latest version and tried re-ripping it in different ways, etc etc, but several of the songs on that soundtrack were just plain unlistenable. It happens a lot with classical music as far as I can tell.

If you've compared tracks of the types of music you listen to in both MP3 and OGG, and you think OGG was better, well then good for you. My guess would be you didn't do a good job of encoding the MP3 file. Maybe you didn't try the newer VBR format. I say the "default" VBR ripping can probably be beat out by OGG, but if you set the parameters yourself (as I do), then OGG doesn't come close to matching quality.

If you look at the technology, it's quite plain and simple to know that OGG cuts out more audio than MP3. Is it very logical that a format that is lossier than another format would be higher quality?

I was being a bit harsh, as OGG isn't *that* bad. At the moment MP3 is much older and much more mature than OGG, and that may actually be the only thing keeping it ahead of OGG right now.

What OGG really needs before I can consider it a worthwhile audio format is some freaking encoding options. Sure, there are a few, but look how many options MP3 has. Some OGGers will argue that MP3 has too many, but I for one take advantage of most of the options, not to mention that the default of all the fancy options can usually be left alone anyway.

In a couple more years OGG might be a lot better, but for now, I'll stick with my MP3s.

[fracturedmind]

What do you rip VBR with? And what all options do you mean? Im not a real audiophile, I love music, but I dont notice a diff between a bitrate change and all that, not that a big a deal to me as long as I hear it

[MahlerIsGod]

Can someone please post a step by step primer on how to rip the best mp3's! (By "step by step" I mean: Step 1 make sure the computer is on, step 2 remove the chocolate pudding from the DVD-ROM drive..........) I would be much appreciated. Thanks

[SiN]

winamp 2 0wnz, imo.

perfect, so why change it?

[fuelmyfire]

tried winamp 3 and hated it....for some reason.
i like a nice, small simple MP3 program.
the J key is also very important to me.

[zztzed]

I tried WA3 once after I had reinstalled Windows. It was slow and bloated, and crashed every time I tried to change the skin.

On top of that, I couldn't find any way to change the song title display format in the MP3 input plugin (in WA2 I have it set to "artist - album - title"), which really irritated me. So it was back to WA2.x for me.

Incidentally, I really like the 2.9 series. It's like 3 minus the bloat. I was kind of iffy about the video player, but as it turns out I like it a lot better than WMP.

[Quadraton]

I tried Winamp3 for all of 1 day before I got rid of it, and dug out Winamp 2.

The thing I didn't like the most about Winamp 3 was all the useless tools. My computer might be a year and a half old, but it's no wimp, and sometimes Winamp 3 took forever to load.

And some of those graphical interfaces just don't feel right. There's nowhere to dock your controls, leaving a floating window, and the buttons are never where you expect them to be.

It goes with the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I think I'll stick with Winamp 2.

[taog]

I don't use winamp or any mp3 player. I think they all suck, and i can't stand any of them. They always fuck up and do weird shit.

They aren't as bad as AOL or BonziBuddy however, but they still suck ass.

I just go out and buy the CD's i want to listen to, or burn my mp3's to a cd and listen to them that way.

I also found that my portable diskman/mp3 player lacks in the mp3 department also. mp3's are just horrible in my opinion.

[i3inary]

I don't use ram. I tried adding that stuff once and ripped it right out....

[cheese]

I run WA2.8 i love it, i tried WA3 it sucks. mem hogging inst good when you run a AMD 750 w/ 128 of pc100 ram.

[Gatecrasher]

winamp 2!!! woot!!!

and the J (or F3) is one of the most important features for me because my playlist is simply all my thousands of mp3s in shuffle mode.

[GreasyP]

I use 2. It's less memory, less processor, less crap, sure. The main reason, though, is that I wrote a little program to control winamp for me and it doesn't work right with 3.

[activitie]

Winamp3 tries to take over my system (aka File Associations).
I don't want Winamp for video, dammit!
Winamp2 is pure audio files....just the way I like it.

[Shadowman]

I hate winamp3! Wheres my J Key!!!! Im reinstalling 2 as i speak!

[DonnChadh]

I use v2 still as well, considered upgrading, but then saw what it was like on a m8s new pc.

Plus I like my v2 skin

[KillerYoda]

WinAmp 3 is pissing me off alot lately, so I'm thinking about going back to 2, or even 1.

[GremlinDelirium]

I tried winamp3 for a total of 1 hour and then got so pissed with it i deleted it and haven't touched it since... It is a big piece of crap compaired to winamp2

I'll keep my winamp2 thank you...

[Dire Baka]

I use winamp two. I tried winamp 3 for about a day and found out that I could not put my skin that I use for v2 on it. So it went into the trash and back came version 2.

[striderkevin]

Skins I wanted to use didn't go so well when I tried to use Winamp 3. Had some trouble even playing the damn music, so I went back to our old friend Winamp 2.

[Speed_Gibson]

Originally posted by MahlerIsGod
Can someone please post a step by step primer on how to rip the best mp3's! (By "step by step" I mean: Step 1 make sure the computer is on, step 2 remove the chocolate pudding from the DVD-ROM drive..........) I would be much appreciated. Thanks

take a look at HA.org, and use the search function before posting questions.

I generally despise the MP3 format and am loathe to touch it, even using the official 3.90.3 LAME release - I prefer Musepack or Ogg-Vorbis for the lossy format stuff. I always prefer lossless like flac or ape for anything important or for archiving. Any good player - like foobar - will have solid support for all of those formats

<rant mode>
And in my opinion WA 3 is a bloated pig with worthless eye candy. But I also view WA 2.x (my last and latest version installed is 2.77 - just for testing purposes now) as far too dependent on the eyecandy. I much prefer the sheer configurability of almost everything in foobar.
</rant mode>

[CaptainFluffer]

I did not enjoy winamp 3 at all.

I will stick with winamp 2 until something better comes out (prolly wont though)

[Peetster]

I've got 2.64. It's worked well for me, and I see no reason to change.

Especially based on what I've read here. Thanks.

[Sion]

had winamp 2.8 for a long time. tried 3 and detested it with all my heart and soul. went back to 2.8. then I found out about coolplayer and havent used wa since. on a system such as mine (ie low ram: 256mb) i need programs that use as little resources as possible. coolplayer has a tiny ram footprint. so its way cool in my book. plus it has a couple of nice features that I like.

skins? who cares. form follows function, in my book. I dont look at an mp3 player, I listen to it. so all those fancy skins mean diddly squat to me.