yeah, i use winamp on the (getting rarer) occasions when i boot into windows, and it wins compared to winmedia player. i got WMP for the iMac at work, and guess what? it's much better than the windows version. I'm only using it for streaming media though. And it's still got a patronising interface, where you can't change a thing you want to.
In linux though i am using xmms, but it is not as good as winamp. Close, but no cigar. I think i'll try musicmatch next. It's the id3 tag issue that pisses me off. i use grip to rip my cds (it's a frontend for cdparanoia and whatever mp3 encoder you want to use, so you don't need to run one after the other,or type in the command strings) and i have it set to append id3v1 and id3v2 tags into the mp3 files, but xmms only lets me edit the id3v1 tags, while it actually gets its info from the id3v2 tag! which means that if something is "Unknown Artist - Unknown Track" you can go in and change the id3 tag and save it in the file, but xmms won't use yr new id3 info, because the older id3v2 info still has the wrong contents.
That is actually a tiny little niggle, unless you append a lot of id3 tags (which i do tend to) and windows media player certainly sucks to the nth power compared with that. It only encodes up to 64 kbps, or is it 56, and its erratic playlist situation is as bad as realplayer's...
why use m$ software though, when there's better stuff out there (especially with freeware like IExplore or WMP) when you can excercise yr own choice?
just as an aside btw, my install CD of windows millenium installs windows media player 6.2 and also windows media player 7.0 by default. there's nothing you can do about it, and no uninstaller. This pisses me off because i think WMP 6.2 is the best version i have used ever! (i would use it mainly for movie files though) And i would uninstall 7.0 if i could and keep 6.2. Also, here's the best bit:
The default installation of winmedia player 7.0 doesn't even work!
The first time i run it (and all subsequent times) i get an "illegal operation" message and the program exits before it even loaded the GUI!
to get it working properly, after every reinstall of windows, i must install WMP 7.1 over the top of it, from a free cover CD i got from Australian PC User magazine last year! useless! and the pisser is that that's how it is set up by default! so i can't just change my install cd to install the working version, i have to do it by hand! I know, one of these days, i will probably burn an image of a working (hah!) windows system, but now i have linux, the incentive dwindles...
[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
