Review
Listening music is one of the most popular activities when sitting at the computer. We can be working, playing a game, studying, sending an email, visiting a web page, at home, at work, at our friend's home, doesn't matter: today, in most situations, we have an audio player at a side with our favorite songs.
From the very beginning of the multimedia age, when the first versions of the Pentium processor were spreading on the market, the user had the need of listening music.
I met Winamp at that time, and now, after 10 years, I am STILL using it (in fact, I'm using it right now while writing this review...). I'm not afraid at all to say that Winamp is one of the software programs most used ever. As well as their Scriptable Installer System (NSIS), Winamp is one of the most successful products from Nullsoft.
But...why Winamp? Well, from the very beginning, it was simple, clear and stylish, and ran smoothly on slow machines.
With Winamp, you can play music files in a lot of audio formats (MP3, WAV, OGG, CD...), manage a music library with playlists, adjust the equalizer, play with the visualization presets, you can even watch videos and movies with the appropriate codecs installed! With support for DirectSound, you have the best quality of sound, and you gain the ability to use other sound manipulation features, like crossfades, and the use of reverberation, echo and ambient effects (available via plugins).
Winamp got an integrated "mini-browser " capable to make connections to online media sources, for listening and watching radios and other streaming media.
Since version 5, you can download and use different skins, that change the appearance and functionality of Winamp drastically (like the skins for Windows Media Player). |
