I have to reverse my locating 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 have changed. The interface, while slower than the competition is not unreasonably so. The Media Library is intuitive and tardily to use. Near 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 equality with Foobar and XMPlay which IMNSHO are the Golden Standards for audio quality in the genre. Evening the remembering rtequirements are on equality with the abovementioned programs.
Now, all is not sweetness and light. The programme has several criminal bugs – I say criminal because this thing is OLD and these bugs should have been long-since squashed. The include poor error checking thence that an errant plugin or skin can crash the player, and a display module (nscrt.dll) that can have a crash simply by invoking CDDB for a newly entered CD with the playlist open (I dealt that six times in two seconds – things became swimmingly if I simply closed the playlist). Skin performance could too be significantly improved.
This programme is too LOADED with Adware, something I intensely resent. I regard adware as malware and anything that prompts me to purchase music while I'm building a custom playlist or otherwise impinges upon my have should be expunged. I guess that's the malign influence of the AOL ownership – later all, null good has Always got out of that company.
All that being said, the UI and configurability of the interface and audio options construct this the best bang out there for a media player. Just be sure to consult the Winamp install steer (Google it) and avoid installing any plugins shipped with the plaer that stink of adware (I can consider of one promoinent plugin for the Media Library that fits that description).
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