Fuck you, Winamp.

The BBQ Pit
1

You’d think I’d be hip to your scheme by now but no. You’ve scorned me in the past, yet I always come back to you. You’ve brought my kickass home-built PC to its knees before, yet I give you another chance, time and time again. You’ve lured me in with the Raven skin designed by Lou Reed (complete with Lou telling me the time every hour, and random suggestions like “take the subway, take the subway, don’t get mugged…”) It’s like having my own little psychotic pet bird on my monitor.

You even used my love of animals to lure me, Winamp. How low will you stoop? Nevermore.

You woo me with your dulcet tones, playing my music smoothly and flawlessly, making my quality speakers live up to their potential. All is well in the world. I have music. I have a cool way to play my music–ok, so Lou interrupts every hour and I lose my playlist because he wants to tell me what to do every hour, but I can toggle that clock feature off. Not a big problem. The problem, Winamp, is YOU.

You, arbitrarily, determine that Now Is Not The Time to Play Music.

Do you decide this when I’m not doing anything of import? When I am simply using my computer as a stereo? Of course not. No, no that would be too kind for your black, cursed soul, Winamp.

You wait until I am in the middle of writing something that, to me, was Very Important, when I had been struck with a creative genius the likes of which this century will likely never see (if the century is lucky) which made the words and phrases tumble forth with such force and fortitude that it made it impossible for me to stem the torrent long enough… to hit Save.

That is when you decide it is Not Time To Listen to Music. How do you altert me as to this decision? You darken my display, forcing me to reboot. Which causes my words to disappear into the aether, never to be seen again. (Yeah I know. “Save early, save often”. Fuck you. I was busy whining about Winamp.)

They say Jesus saves, but only Buddha makes incremental backups. I hope you come back as a third rate Microsoft product, always to be scorned like that Other Media Player™ that no one uses.

Fuck you, Winamp. And your cool skins, too.

2

IT IS SO TOTALLY WINAMP’S FAULT THAT THIS IS IN MPSIMS AND NOT IN THE PIT.

(Pretend I said “darn” instead of “fuck”?)

3

Two compound words: Musicmatch Jukebox.

4

Off to The Pit.

Cajun Man ~ SDMB Moderator

5

Winamp 2 = Font Of Eternal Salvation, and All That Is Right With The World.

Winamp 3 = Pure Evil, Killer of Men and Kicker of Puppies, and That Which Makes the Righteous Tremble With Fear.

Although I must admit that Raven skin looks mighty cool. Must… resist… urgghhh… strength… failing…

6

Ya know, Winamp is one of the few things on my computer that works right.

It makes perfect sense. headshok notes that Winamp is pure evil and it works fine on my computer, which is possessed by the spawn of demonkind.

And now I must have that Raven skin…

7

Confirmed: Winamp 2 was nifty and kewl. Winamp 3 is Winamp 2, only with silly extra features that break, and an annoying desire to play all my video files. :stuck_out_tongue:

8

I’m telling you, Ctrl-S is the only way to go. Make it as automatic as the spacebar. End a sentence-- ., two spaces (yes, I know, but I’m told manuscript format calls for two spaces and a non-proportional font, so there), and Ctrl-S, simple as that. Get in the habit, make it automatic as breathing. You’ll never lose more than one sentence again.

9

Yea, WTF is up with that? Why did Winamp think it needed to take over all my video files ( which it did without asking, BTW )? If it wasn’t so good at music files, I would have ditched it right there, I was highly pissed and it took me 5-10 minutes to get them all changed back.

10

www.oldversion.com is your friend. For it has the programs that worked right, before ‘they’ broke them by adding features.

11

Thanks for the move, Cajun Man. God, I can’t remember the last thread I started, and when I finally do start one not only do I put it in the wrong forum I use naughty words in MPSIMS. Leave it to me to bring down the tone of the neighborhood… :wink:

Yeah, I just never bothered to try any other music apps, Windows Media Player (the redheaded stepchild of music apps) is the only other one I have installed and I hate it with a passion.

I never had that video problem, I think I remember it asking me if I wanted to make Winamp my default player for videos and I said “FUCK NO”. Okay, I really just clicked “No” but in my head I was saying “FUCK NO”. Trust me. I hate it when apps get uppity and want to take over the job of your trusty other apps.

I have heard nothing but good things about Musicmatch Jukebox, I’ll have to look into that. My computer isn’t exactly… um… “regulation” so… I really shouldn’t complain when shit don’t work right, but I had to share my geek ire and indignation at the gall of this app to crash MY computer. That I built. With my own sweat blood and tears. (Okay, I chose the components, paid for them, and bought my friend a 12 pack to assemble it for me. I don’t do hardware.)

The Raven is one fookin’ cool skin. I’m not big on skins because I think they make the app less intuituve most of the time, but this one’s a keeper. Even if it is very vaguely creepy.

Pardon me as I go tempt the Fates with some music… I’m not doing anything of import so if it crashes, So Be It.

12

I like the Raven skin, but it takes away the slider that allows one to seek within the file. Hearing Lou Reed tell me the time is cool but I need by slider.

13

I actually had to load the default skin to figure out what slider was missing. Never noticed that. Oops.

I grabbed the free version of MusicMatch and… I don’t like it. That whole MyLibrary feature? My mp3’s are horrendously tagged apparently, so it threw 90% of my 20 GB of music into a folder called “Miscellaneous”. It also did weird stuff to the rest of the “properly” tagged files.

Also, I fucked with the EQ settings and there is apparently no way to “go back”. I hit “Reset” and the sound is still fucked. Too much high end, no low end. The “Default” button sets what you just fucked up as the default, apparently; I thought it would reset to the preset default. Everything sounds muddy and washed out now!

So I went back to Winamp3. It’s not like I’m doing anything important on my machine at the moment. Thanks for the link there, E-Sabbath, I just might grab 2 if I think of it.

14

A couple years ago, musicmatch was infamously exposed as secretly putting spyware (with NO notice in the EULA) in their program. I wouldn’t touch software from that company with a ten foot ethernet cable.

15

I agree. I also will never use Musicmatch again, ever.

16

Funny, in researching ways to get songs onto my iPod, I found nothing but bad things about MusicMatch Jukebox.

The thing that bugs me about Winamp is that it won’t sort on the track # field in the ID3 tag. So if I want to play songs in album order I have to keep them in separate folders, have the track number in the filename, and sort by path and filename. Durrrr, it can already sort by song title and such, how hard would one more field have been!

17

Er. Playlist editor, sort by track.

(Of course, I encode my rips with the track number leading the filename, because the firmware on my Archos defaults to alphabetical.)

18

MusicMatch deleted, AdAware run, spyware gone. Good, I didn’t like that freaking app anyway!

See, I’m a lazy geek. I don’t tag, sort, nothing. So I just need something simple that lets me say “Here, play this!”

19

So would it be fair to say that Winamp 2 is the program of choice?

20

Curiously, I’ve never had a problem with Winamp 3–the only time it’s ever stopped working for me has been associated with a lyrics-lookup plugin I tried out. I was reluctant to load it on my system for quite awhile because previously I’d had absolutely nothing but headaches from Winamp 2.