Winamp is a very popular music player for windows. Chances are you’ve heard of it by now if you’re into using your computer to listen to music, so i’ll save the big introduction. I’m gonna share some (hopefully) useful tips from my experience of using it as my main music player.

Skins:
I’ve downloaded a lot of skins in the past in my neverending quest for the perfect skin.The novelty value soon wears off after a few minutes of use with most of these. So in the end i decided to settle on the default “modern” skin. I didn’t like the default color of it, but i found you can easily change this in options. This way you’re sure to have the most compatible skin (since it’s the default one as standard) but in a color more suited to your taste or desktop. If you’re on a slower computer, i recommend you stick with the “classic” skin as it uses a lot less resources.

Control:
If you use Firefox as your main browser, I recommend an extension called “Foxytunes”. It adds a handy, customizable control panel onto firefox so u can, stop, forward, skip etc your music easily and fast without having to minimise and maximise windows everytime.

Lyrics:
Anyone interested in lyrics should check out my review of the excellent Evillyrics plug in for winamp.

Ripping and burning:
Making mp3s from cd, or making a cd from mp3s, can easily be done from winamp without the need for a separate program. Open the media library and click “rip and burn” to get started.

Internet radio:
Also in the media library is a list of many internet radio stations,listed by genre. Of course theres hundreds more available if you google for them.

Eye candy:
There is a lot of visualisations available on the winamp site. When i tried some of these out, they weren’t that great compared to the ones that come with winamp.
I think winamp picked what has to be two of the very best, “milkdrop” and “nullsoft visualisation studio”. These come with it as standard and can be found in the visualisation options menu. So if you’re someone who’s idea of a good time is having swirly colors and patterns form right before your eyes, check it out (…or you could just go talk to that friend of the friend who knows a guy with the right connections…)

I’ve purposely left out mention of its ability to play video and that it has “TV stations” much like the radio stations, i haven’t really explored this side of it, i think with the popularity of sites such as youtube, theres not really a need for such a feature. I don’t use it for viewing video files,and see it as a little unneccessary bloat to an otherwise great program. As you can see, theres more to winamp than just something that plays songs.

It works great as an all in one solution for all your music listening,lyrics reading,visualisation watching, cd ripping and burning, needs!
I recommend Winamp if you prefer something different from Windows Media Player and a lot more customizable!

More info and a free download at http://www.winamp.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.