Whenever I start winamp, or start playing an mp3 file that automatically launches winamp to play, it visually freezes for about 5-10 seconds; the song will start playing, but the on-screen window freezes in some sort of half-state - messed up and unresponsive. This really sucks, as often the song will start playing very loudly and I have no way to bring the volume down until the program “comes in” and stops being weird.
Why does this happen? The computer’s obviously strong enough to run winamp with no problems (WinXp, 1.8ghz P4, 768mb of RDRam), and I keep everything cleanly maintained and defragged. I also keep very few things running in the taskbar/background.
Have you tried uninstalling then reinstalling Winamp? Rebooting?
Perhaps it has a network file on its “most recently used” list. Windows is notorious for trying to “ping” files that are no longer accessible, causing applications to hang.
Yeah, I’ve definitely tried those, among other things. This is even a decently fresh install of Windows XP - 6 months or so,a nd it’s done it nearly from the beginning.
I’ve noticed it too. I suspect Winamp is just a single-threaded app, so while it’s busy loading the MP3 file and plugins, it’s unable to respond to user input or update its display. If that’s the case, the only way to solve it is to make those files load faster - defragment your hard drive, adjust your disk cache settings, add more RAM if necessary, etc.
