Winamp has officially released Winamp 5, a long-awaited update to its industry standard, free (!) audio and video player. I can highly recommend it after having experimented with its betas and release candidates for a couple of months now. As lotsofno of Metafilter points out:
After it’s admittedly disappointing and rushed effort with Version 3 of their popular media player, the Nullsoft team seeks to make amends with their newest release, combining the stability of 2.x with the extras of Winamp 3, adding several new features while they’re at it.
Besides improved stability, the Winamp team has added loads of features, although I’m on the fence about whether the Pro version is worth $14.95 to me. Here’s a paraphrasing of lotsofno’s list of features:
- built-in and plug-in support for dozens of formats (i.e. MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, AAC, etc.)
- compatible with thousands of Winamp 1 and 2 classics skins, and Winamp 3’s freeform skins
- compatible with thousands of Winamp 2 plug-ins
- thousands of streaming radio stations for nearly every genre imaginable
- included video player, as well as streaming video with up to 40+ channels
- media library provides easy, searchable access to playlists, bookmarks, local audio or video, internet radio or tv stations, recently played, never played, most played, etc.
- media library automatically scans defined folders every X minutes in the background, updating itself
- ratings settings for songs and albums
- advanced query editor
- notable AVS updates
- user definable global hot keys (control winamp while in any application)
- now playing window displays album cover and artist news/biography
- limited burning and ripping capabilities (the Pro version has no limitations, but runs $14.95; might be worth it, although there are plenty of great free ripping and encoding alternatives like CDex)
If you’re still running Winamp 3 for some reason, then you should definitely upgrade. If you’re running version 2.x, then you should consider upgrading as well. Although I was a hard sell at first to convert from version 2.91, I’m now completely won over and obviously a big fan of Winamp to write this kind of rave… 😉
