Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
At the time of writing Winamp3 isn't quite finalized software, but available straight on Winamp's first page as a release candidate. And it sure feels nice and finished to me.
I don't think I've encountered any bugs whatsoever yet, but I seem to recall Martin mentioning some, so I guess that's why it's not considered finished yet. Works great for me so far anyway, and I've tried on pretty common setups (Windows 98 and XP).
The media library deserves mention, it's just what you need to keep track of your songs. Write something in the search box and Winamp will find the corresponding songs for you, you don't even have to hit enter or a search button to make it happen. Then just drag stuff over to the playlist. Perfect.
Other improvements are just plain cool. How about free resizing with automatic smoothing? And of course skins in any shape and feel you can imagine, not a single ad and a great interface allover (at least in the default skin, new skins can look anyway the designer likes (just look at the MAD skin included in this release and you'll see what I mean ...)).
The only thing resembling a backside that I can think of is the fact that skinning should be a lot more difficult with Winamp3 than version 2, so there will probably be a lot fewer skins around. On the other hand, the added difficulty might mean an increase in work spent on skins, and thus quality increase. We'll see. And after all, if you can't find any cool new skins you've always got the great working and nice looking (if conservative) default look to fall back on (and it comes in a selection of shades as well).
Addition on September 2nd 2002
Right now there are a few bugs and other strangeness around as well. No surprises of course, this is the first full release (they don't even have any other downloads than the full install available yet), so some features that were in the 2.x releases are still lacking. And I'm having odd behaviour when I want to enqueue tracks as well. One at a time works as usual, but more than one is just ignored ... Well, it's an improvement, the last beta I used let me enque but jumped to the enqueued track and started playing it right away ... I've got Winamp always on top though, so I can always expand the playlist and drag things, but it's not quite as convenient. Seems like I can't yet enqueue from the media library either, which is a bit annoying too. But there's always dragging, fortunately.
Aha, there it was. "Send to playlist" worked, not the "enqueue/dequeue" option. That one put a little mark in front of the song though, I wonder what it means ...
Oh yesch, it playsch your videosch very nischely too. Usesch Media Player schtuff to do scho apparently, scho you can't get rid of MP, but at leascht you don't have to schtart the schtupid thing ...