I have to reverse my location on this player. For a selfsame long time I royally dissed it and it was well-deserved. The audio quality was substandard, the bloat and slowness unwarranted. However, times have changed. The interface, while slower than the competition is not unreasonably so. The Media Library is intuitive and tardily to use. Most importantly, the audio quality has came with 24-bit support, dithering, seamless / gapless playback, a quality equalizer (finally!) and a high precision decoder. It's easily on par with Foobar and XMPlay which IMNSHO are the Golden Standards for audio quality in the genre. Eventide the memory rtequirements are on par with the abovementioned programs.
Now, totally is not sweetness and light. The programme has several criminal bugs – I pronounce criminal because this thing is OLD and these bugs should have been long-since squashed. The include poor error checking so that an errant plugin or skin may crash the player, and a display module (nscrt.dll) that may make a crash simply by invoking CDDB for a newly entered CD with the playlist capable (I coped that six times in two instants – things became swimmingly if I simply shut the playlist). Skin performance could too exist significantly improved.
This programme is too LOADED with Adware, something I intensely resent. I consider adware equally malware and anything that prompts me to purchase music while I'm building a custom playlist or otherwise impinges upon my have should exist expunged. I speculation that's the malign influence of the AOL ownership – after all, nothing good has Always got away of that company.
All that being said, the UI and configurability of the interface and audio options make this the best bang away there for a media player. But exist surely to consult the Winamp install channelize (Google it) and avoid installing any plugins shipped with the plaer that stink of adware (I may think of one promoinent plugin for the Media Library that fits that description).
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