Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Winamp is important stuff. It's one of those required installs on any Windows installation you plan to use seriously. Updating whenever a new version is released is of course mandatory as well, useful additions or not!
Okay, deep breath. In case you don't know, Winamp is a music player for Windows (pick your flavour), and it plays pretty much everything you might care to throw in its way. Back in the days of old playing a sound could mean hunting around and doing random searches in hopes of finding a music player for some obscure format. Not so anymore! Winamp does them all, and in the rare cases when this isn't true there almost certainly is a plugin that does. There are, in fact, about 2,5 gazillions of plugins for Winamp, providing all sorts of crazy features, visualizations and sound format support. Unreal Tournament music files? No problem! Commodore 64 SID music? We've got you covered! Control Winamp through a Gravis Gamepad? You can do that too. Plugins are your friends, in short.
Oh, and if you thought there were a lot of plugins, wait until you get to the skins area. A skin is a different look for a program, providing a different face but changing nothing below the surface. There are many plugins, but of skins there are lots!
I've messed about a bit with skin creation for Winamp, coming up with a grand total of 2 (two) finished skins, one that I like and one that is kind of sucky. The sucky one isn't interesting, but GreenAmp I'm kind of fond of. It's previewable as well as downloadable, on the sub page cleverly titled "downloads".