It's going to be hard to go back to WinAMP after using MediaMonkey for so long, But hell, WinAMP was the first media player I stuck with for years. I'll give it a shot. It at least looks awesome.

shibathedog

I really love it. I've been using winamp since ever i think. I like it because it is simple. it does not comsume too much memory. I think it is the only player i use. This version rocks! i like the new skin.

ChambrasWeed

Media Monkey will do me.

mr_oshodi

@Johnny Pneumatic: Are you talking about Amarok? (which of course is still 'nix only but with KDE 4 it may shuffle things a bit...)

x40sw0n

@All those who wanted something that just plays music but plays it well while remaining small and fully configurable... I give you... Foobar2000! I don't use it, did for a while but love Winamp too much, but you guys should really take a look at it, with a bit of fiddling you can make it look however plain or complicated you want and add the features you like or hate :)

Bobly

@tommertron: I don't know about relying on donation for development but JOHNNY PNEUMATIC seems to describing Songbird. It shows a lot of promise, but not quite ready for primetime as of yet.

jabber

@dasugo: This should help:
[lifehacker.com]

Adam Pash, LH Senior Editor

Ok, what winamp skin is on the picture? I want it.

dasugo

I prefer coolplayer. It has the functionality I liked on pre-3.0 Winamp and is only 624kb. I added a skin for 316kb and it looks nice. It's the tic tac of mp3 players for Windows: [coolplayer.sourceforge.net]

buddyx6

Amen to the comments about how great Winamp was pre-3.0!

pdok

Did anyone else lose the ability to control Winamp with their keyboard play/pause, forward/next and stop buttons?

I'm using a Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, and could control Winamp until I upgraded :/

I do like the new look and functionality though.

haba

I've used Winamp for years too, but I avoid the bloat. I always stick to a "minimum" install and just use it as a raw mp3 player. Low footprint, minimize to tray, sweet UI. It's slicker than the average.

chrsmrrtt

"I'd love to hear what features keep the die-hard Winamp fans coming back for more, so let's hear your Winamp raves in the comments."

Truth be told, I liked that Winamp DIDN'T try to display album art, integrate with my browser, sort my songs automatically, etc. (especially album art, it's my personal red flag for bloated players that do way more than I want.) Maybe it's a bit reactionary, but I'm still running Winamp 2.80 at home. All the updates are making me consider moving to something else, but it's still a great program and hard to replace.

My dream media player is something cross-platform, open source, and focused on core features - support for plugins is about as far as I'd take it.

Evan_D

This version is pretty sweet. i agree there has been some bloat lately but I really think the auto tag is pretty sweet feature.

I just started messing with the different smart views u can create. What I really like is that fact that u can go all ITUNES huge on the screen on go small screen and open playlist or medialib whenever u choose.

All i want is simply the ability to burn Mp3 Cds. I have found a decent work around. Create a playlist and send it to WMP to burn for me.

dasugo

I like Winamp a lot. I come from a rather obscure user base: I still use Windows 2000 and I need something to sync with my iPod. Winamp is the only program that will do the job (not even foobar can do that).

Besides that it's quick, bug-free and gratis. My only gripe is the skinning - I'd prefer a simple, native Windows UI, rather than the complete reworking it comes with.

imsuden

@Johnny Pneumatic: I would have to agree about the so called "improvements" of WinAmp since I began using it almost 10 years ago. Back when Tom and Justin were just a couple of guys making a sweet UI with great functionality. When version 3.0 came out it was garbage so I switched to Sonique for awhile. Once version 5.0 came out I used it for quite some time, but recently have become fed up with the bloat. Just opening the program has become a chore for the system. I went back to version 2.95 and haven't looked back since. All of the great WinAmp functionality I remember without any of the crap I don't need.

cdoggwsu

@Johnny Pneumatic: So what is this music player you speak that still relies on donations? Sounds pretty good.

tommertron

I've been a fan of Winamp for years, and I still thing it's the most productive way to play music on your computer.

AL

I used Winamp for the first 6 years or so of its existence, and watched with reservation while a program that was really good at playing music constantly tried to be something else, like a visualizations hub or a movie player. I would dread that download page for updates, where I was forced to choose between Winamp Lite, lacking key features, or bloatware. I remember when the program used to be donation-ware, and I thought the program was much higher quality in those days, primarily because it understood its purpose.

There's another music player out there still relying only on donations to maintain its development. It integrates your music collection with the repository of human knowledge we call the internet: it pulls band info from wikipedia, lyrics and album art from other sites, data from last.fm to help you find new music. Features like these should be the template going forward, without them, other music players always seem to be wasting their time.

The Auto-Tagging in Winamp 5.5 seems like a useful step back towards a program that is primarily focused on helping me manage a collection of music. That's a good sign for Winamp, and a good sign for the future of all audio players. Maybe it's time to give WMP another shot, wherever I'm forced to use windows.

Johnny Pneumatic

I like the new look as well. I have a Pro version so I dont see the ads (well worth the 20 bucks). I've used Winamp since Justin Frankel was one of the main programmers with NullSoft, before AOL bought them out, all those years ago. Back then, there was only 1 version and it was free, and most importantly it worked 99.9% of the time. I dont know if its just habit of using it for so long that Ive stuck with it, or just that its easy to use and does what I want, which is play music.

10 years of it not sucking might have something to do with it too.

I haven't had a chance to try out the Remote function yet. But I did find the big Now Playing pop up from my task tray sort of annoying since I listen to a lot of net radio at work, as that got turned off right away.

Lazarus

How does this work so your Wii can play the music? Has anyone done this?

radink

my biggest concern when switching from pc to mac was losing winamp. I'm used to iTunes now, but part of me still really misses how sweet winamp was.

mw2006

If your looking for some excellent software to stream your home music collection I use Vibe Streamer. It's free, has a small foot print, configurable so you can have it use any port for streaming (I would use 80 to make sure you can get to it through your work proxy/firewall.), and has security settings so user have to login. You connect to the Vibe Streamer server using a web browser and the interface is clean and simple. Hope that helps.

[www.vibestreamer.com]

buddhapkt

Truth be told, I've always been more than content with WMP. With graphics turned off, it's a pretty slim running app that I can minimize to the toolbar and still get info on what songs are playing.

Then a friend of mine introduced me to a program called QCD (short for Quintessential CD player). Contrary to it's name, it's actually quite the versatile media player, able to play pretty much any media format you can throw at it. And the best part for me (because I'm a system resources nazi) is that it stays TINY on the memory consumption scale.

wstraynor

Winamp Remote is the same thing as Orb. So maybe try using the original Orb program instead. I had trouble with Winamp Remote a few months back, but Orb worked. So give it a try.

jackquack

I like the new Winamp a lot, but I can also empathize with people's critiques about ads and bloat.

I'd like to second Badger's anticipation of Songbird. Hopefully it'll be as extensible and popular as firefox (without the memory leakage).

Greg.Rowler

Personally I liked the new look, and some of the new functionality, but I was unable to get remote working (my work might be blocking it), and I was a bit put off by the Tampax advert on the "Now Playing" page, which didn't show any information about anything that was playing, but did show ads, and upsell to other AOL products.

Which put me off of it right away.

If there is a way to desuckify the thing by removing ad content, I might take another look because I've been looking for something a bit better at organizing my music than iTunes.

I'd love to see Songbird come to fruition, that's the media player I'm excited about most.

badger

Badger

@shibathedog: I also used to use MediaMonkey, but recently I haven't been able to rip MP3s from CDs with it. Something about the trial version running out? I thought it was completely free when I started using it.

imsuden

"Winamp can (and has been able to for a while) sync your music to iPods and almost any portable media device you can throw at it,"

How about the iPod touch or iPhone?

Dustforeyes

I've used Winamp since its humble 1.x days! I remember my friends and I spending hours watching the Geiss plugin (later Milkdrop), worshiping Ryan as a programming genius! How sad we were! :)
My current version (v5) follows me around on my U3 Drive, although it is missing some of the more advanced features. Never used anything else, apart from MediaMonkey for a short while - but that had a Winamp core anyway!
I thought that development on good ol' Winamp had come to a halt, so I'm quite pleased to hear that there's a new version. I intend to check it out to see if it still 'whips the llama's ass'!

I'll echo Badger's comment about Songbird though - looking forward to that!

Barkie

Okay, my bad, this is what I get for not scrolling down to the end of the pages I'm viewing. The official Winamp download page also has a link to the Lite version, it's just on the bottom of the page (which threw me off because they usually put all the download types in the same table at the top of the page). Sorry!

Space Cowboy

Winamp v5.5 Lite is also available here for those who like the v2.80 look/weight but want some of the newer features like the Global Hotkeys (v5.0) and gapless playback (v5.2).

Also an old Winamp user here; good thing they still fork the program for those of us who don't want all the bells and whistles and just want a light and efficient MP3 player.

Space Cowboy

By not proofreading my post, I apparently created a fun guesing game!

X40 was right, I was talking about Amarok, a KDE (linux) program. If it was reasonable to recommend switching OS's based solely on one app, this would be mine. Creepy, I know.

(Foobar's currently my app of choice for Windows, though for all my griping, Winamp lite served me fine while I used it.)

I'm crossing my fingers for Songbird like a lot of other commenters. I had a radio show called "Blogomatic for the People" for a while, and Songbird was my browser of choice while I was trolling the interwebs for new music for the show. Outside of reading music blogs, I'm not sure how useful Songbird will be, but for that purpose, it is already outstanding.

Sorry for the confusion!

Johnny Pneumatic

I've been using WinAmp since... '99 I think, and that's been the sole reason I kept using it. Granted, I can't find an extensible, skinnable media player that supports global hotkeys, all the formats I need, doesn't force me to use a damn library just to play my usual "every song, on shuffle." Also works wonders for my new Zen Sleek, as Creative thought it would be funny to give me a CD with naught but WMP10 on it.

genderbunny

I wish it wasn't so, but I recently adopted WMP and the only times I think about going back to WinAmp is when I try to open this mp3 file that for some reason will not play on WMP but works on WinAmp.

Pensador

Yeah, WinAmp... I love waiting ages for a search in the music library...

Christoph Wagner

Last one - I found a "classification" of the new skin (Bento) here for use with Lite versions of Winamp.

Space Cowboy

Bloat bloat bloat...

Ever since version 3 flopped, Winamp has become an iTunes wannabe. Don't they get how many people hate iTunes.

CascadeHush

Honestly, I have no idea what you people are talking about with the bloat...For one, people need to not be afraid of custom install. I cut my install down to like 17mb (dont install the visualizer!)...its running right now at 12k resources wise (less than wmp normally and its acutally less than last fm too) and I'm not seeing any ads... and this sure isnt pro.
Anyways, yeah I switched because itunes was taking up too much resource wise and I was sick of the updates and reintalls that kept tacking on quicktime and all that crap...now that is bloat...

leadster618

@radink: I tried the remote for the wii; it worked great once I switched the streaming method to Flash. the interface is basically a browsable and searchable version of your media library, and you can choose to play individual tracks, albums, playlists you've created in winamp on the pc, etc.
It even has the ability to stream video, although the video I tried was too choppy to be watchable.

gennessee

Beware of the auto tag feature. I've screwed up my entire collection before when a program's auto tagger found slightly inconsistent album tags on songs withing the same album.

For example I still have album tags on my "Return of the King" soundtrack ranging from "Howard Shore", "LOTR:ROTK", "Lord of the Rings", "Return of the King", and a few others. That makes your iPod pretty messy.

jambarama

I'm also a WinAmp 2.95 user. All I want is something that plays .mp3 files (I convert everything else) and has global hotkeys. Anything more than that is bloat. A nice small UI (to see what's playing) and playlist support would be nice, but optional. Anybody found anything better than WinAmp 2.95? I love VLC, but the lack of global hotkeys keeps it from being a champ.

Kafka

WinAmp has been my main media player since I started listening to mp3s back 10 years ago. (Yeesh, has it been that long?) Global hotkeys are the killer feature for me. Those key combos (Ctrl-Alt-PgDn --> Next Song!) are seered into my muscle memory. I still can't believe WMP is missing that feature.

ShaiBerger

@Adam Pash, LH Senior Editor:

Mucho grassyass..

dasugo

I'm one of those people who likes listening to the radio online, but who uses multiple computers throughout the week. Syncing my playlist was always challenging until I discovered a tutorial on hacking Winamp to make it portable. I now run it exclusively off my USB drive and have lost a bookmark or plugin since.

[www.portablefreeware.com]

thehumanupstairs

I too have been using Winamp since it was shareware. Am I the only one who still uses the 'Winamp Classic' skin? Modern skins tend to be useless resources hogs. While the new 'Bento' skin looks good, its playlist is glued together with the rest of the interface and I hated that.

I tried foobar2000 for a few weeks but I couldn't get used to it, even after applying one of those shiny skins.

MemoK

You can set up MediaMonkey to use winamp as its mp3 player, and then you use MM to organize songs, etc. I use winamp 2.95 because its so light and plays right away, and you can easily set up simple playlists on winamp, by dropping and dragging. MM is nice, winamp is nice, put them together and you get SUPER nice

devinburn

No one has mentioned MediaMonkey ([www.mediamonkey.com])yet, which I find to be the best thing out there. Lifehacker has posted about them in the past ([lifehacker.com]). Offers all the features of Winamp except Remote and control from the browser. The free version is almost exactly the same as the pay version, and there are no ads in the free version. Plus, they're preparing to roll out a new version in the next month or so, which looks absolutely spectacular.

darthbith

@MemoK:

You're not the only classic fan! I think it was version 3 that was more like WMP than anything because it was all big and nasty and used system resources like no other, but they fixed it when they went to version 4 and it's been great ever since. I love being able to minimize to the system tray, assign gloabl hotkeys (media keyboards work no problem), just play my music without any hassle. All thanks to the classic view.

bigvince1981

@darthbith: Am I correct in understanding that mediamonkey does not automatically incorporate new additions to the library? Instead, you have to manually tell it to find new music--or is this only in the free version? I really want to try this player, but for me, no auto-updating of the library is a real show-stopper--can someone plz clarify?

jtoz

All I want in a music player is a lightweight interface, keyboard controls, and playlists. Winamp 2.78 fits the bill perfectly for me.

JHARBERT

As one who just wants a simple, light-weight mp3 player, I'm another that's been happy with WinAmp v2.x since its release -- Never felt a compelling reason to upgrade to more features/resource usage.

Knight_Owl

I only use Winamp to sync and manage my music. I use foobar2000 for playing music.

rerunx5

I use Winamp for playing my music and have since around 1997 or 98.

I don't use a music player for media management. I do that myself with playlists and more importantly, the file folder structure I have. I have also started tagging some files, but with 9,000+ MP3s, that might take a while.

I use iTunes to sync my iPod.

MiddleGeek

I'm Fine with Windows Media Player 10. Works perfectly (Apart from the odd burning problem), looks surprisingly good, and does my album covers automagically. I'm nerdy Like that, I need my album covers :) ! Anyway, yeah, I am REALLY looking forward to songbird. The second it can rip CD's consistently and find the names of my CD tracks without me having to type them, then I'm there.

Roriniho

Finally Winamp did the right thing and ripped off the iTunes look.

They're interface was horrible.

Purp

Description: Winamp
Size: 618kb
Created: Monday, June 04, 2001
File version 2.7.5.0
Nullsoft and Winamp are trademarks of Nullsoft, Inc.

Ah the good old days. I never ever delete an installer for a program that rocks. Never know when a Winamp v.3 is going to come out and poop the bed. Maybe I just never got into the new era of mp3 playing, but my crossfading plugin makes for gapless transitions, my own organizing makes for an awesome media library. What I want from a music player is a play button, forward, back, volume, playlist, and EQ. Everything else is just wasting my RAM.

Though the streaming to my 360 sounds very nice.

Sigterm

I'm an old-time winamp user as well. On my old computer, I stuck with the 2.9 (or so) version because it was the lightest option, until I switched to Kubuntu and Amarok. I agree with @AL: above that winamp is probably the best music player to use while getting things done - mine is shrunk and fades to 10% opacity when my mouse isn't on it. Sometimes I use the keyboard shortcuts, but what I like about it most is that I can pull up other things (playlist, media library) as a I need them, and it's not stealing screen-estate on my start menu or anywhere else.

Other things I like about winamp - the lyrics plugin and (sometimes) the music-mix plugin for creative playlists. And the album art is nice.

Still, winamp uses a fair amount of memory, does display ads if you ever go to the Now Playing page, and slows down when I'm running lots of programs. But although I've tried other options, I'm not happy with any of them. Songbird shrinks into a similar tiny box, but it takes up even more memory and crashes. MusikCube seems pretty decent but doesn't hide itself like winamp. And after spending an hour of my life on three different instances to get foobar to do what I wanted, I've given up on it.

CheGordito

jinzora, boys and girls, jinzora.

oo0cyst0oo