I experience to reverse my location on this player. For a very long time I royally dissed it and it was well-deserved. The audio quality was substandard, the bloat and slowness unwarranted. However, times experience changed. The interface, while slower than the competition is not unreasonably so. The Media Library is intuitive and tardily to use. Most importantly, the audio quality has got with 24-bit support, dithering, seamless / gapless playback, a quality equalizer (finally!) and a high precision decoder. It's easily on par with Foobar and XMPlay which IMNSHO are the Golden Standards for audio quality in the genre. Even the remembering rtequirements are on par with the abovementioned programs.
Now, all is not sweetness and light. The plan has several criminal bugs – I enunciate criminal because this thing is OLD and these bugs should experience been long-since squashed. The include poor error checking hence that an errant plugin or skin can crash the player, and a display module (nscrt.dll) that can induce a crash just by invoking CDDB for a newly introduced CD with the playlist capable (I managed that six times in two seconds – things went swimmingly if I just closed the playlist). Skin performance could too be significantly improved.
This plan is too LOADED with Adware, something I intensely resent. I reckon adware as malware and anything that prompts me to buy music while I'm building a custom playlist or otherwise impinges upon my experience should be expunged. I hypothesis that's the malign influence of the AOL ownership – later all, zippo good has Ever arrived away of that company.
All that being said, the UI and configurability of the interface and audio options construct this the best bang away there for a media player. Only be surely to consult the Winamp install steer (Google it) and avoid installing any plugins shipped with the plaer that stink of adware (I can think of one promoinent plugin for the Media Library that fits that description).
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