It still whips the llama's ass

I've been searching for a windows alternative to Amarok - the linux only media player - for my windows-based media server. I wanted something with an ID3-based media library, so my first stop was the current standard - iTunes. There was just too many little things that made me hate it. I tried to like iTunes, but I just couldn't. I tried Mozilla's songbird, but uninstalled it minutes later. It may be good one day, but right now, version 0.4 is not ready for real use. I tried Media Monkey and a few others that I don't even remember what they're called.

Then it hit me. Winamp! My trusty little mp3 player that I've been using forever. I begrudgingly gave it up when I made the switch to Linux (XMMS is not the same) and hadn't thought to try out the latest version. (On my work laptop, I'm running a really old version of winamp.)

So I went to winamp.com and downloaded version 5.52. Let me tell you...it really does whip the llama's ass. For the most part, it does what every other media player does, but it has a few little extras that won me over.

At the bottom of the screen, there's a section that gives you news and links for whatever band/artist is playing. So you're sitting there listening to the Fratellis and you think, I wonder what's going on with this band. Then you look down at the bottom of your screen and see that they just finished their second album, they released a DVD, and they turned down recording a song that would serve as David Beckham's LA Galaxy anthem. (Good choice)

It plays everything. And if it doesn't, there's probably a plugin that you can download...and then it will play everything. FLAC? WMA? OGG? Yep, yep, yep. And all without having to take over and make new copies of your music a la iTunes.

Ok, ready for the best part? So you know when you load up some music in your media player and you find that you don't have ID3 tags? Oh no, all my songs are called unknown artist - track 02.mp3...crap (1). Winamp has a great feature called auto-tag. Auto-tag searches your song in the gracenote database and updates your ID3 tags accordingly. Now it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close. I would say that it was accurate about 97% of the time. It even correctly identified obscure songs that I never expected it to know (2) . Again, it's not perfect though. Occasionally some bizarre identification comes out of left-field, so if you're going to use it, don't blindly auto-tag your entire music collection.

The other great thing about it is that it actually writes the ID3 tag to the mp3 file itself. iTunes et al tend to only write to their own .xml library file. So if you take that song somewhere else, your updated tags won't go with them.

So yeah... I'm not expecting people to give up iTunes for winamp, but if you're currently sans media player or you're looking to tag a lot of music, check out winamp.

(1) I did try Version .00001 of EM ID3 Tool, but I didn't meet the specific use requirements.
(2) Here's an example: I have an mp3 of Hellmarch from the Command and Conquer computer game. I think I got this from Kazaa or something back in the day. Thanks to auto-tag, I now know that the Hellmarch song is by a guy named Frank Klepacki. (And that it's from 1998 and has 120 BPM)