ath3na's talking points

So I've been a big fan of Winamp for year's, which is kind of surprising since its put out by AOL. Regardless, I've always been a fan and have used it for... erm, going on 8 year's now. I've tried other media players, or music players rather, since that's all I use it for, but I've always gone back to Winamp. Now, I'll be the first to admit that it's indexing capabilities could be better, but it does index the media library quite well (considering I have over 10,000 tracks for it to index).

Winamps newest installment, version 5.5 (it's 10th Anniversary Edition) comes with a great new skin which allows all the individual parts of the player to be clearly visible at once. There's a free version (which is of course what we're all about here) available here.

It typically wants to install the Winamp agent, which runs in the task tray and makes sure all of your files are indexed and by default, opened in Winamp. I don't particularly care for this feature (which is probably why it takes it a second to update the index of my files). I don't because I don't like programs running in the tray if I can help it. As a matter of fact, right now only 5 programs are running in my system tray (and I wish there weren't that many, but that includes Antivirus and Firewall). With that being said, I usually do not allow it to install this agent and I have it set to play, index, and be the default player for audio files only.

This is a great app that I suggest you download if you play any audio files on your computer at all. It automatically looks up the data from the CDDB on CD's you play with Winamp, and if you buy the paid version (which is only $20, and includes some amount of updates) then it will even rip CD's with the proper data as ID2 & ID3 tags. Again, download it. There are other media players that are nice, but I dare say you'll be hard pressed to find one as efficient as Winamp.