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Did iTunes kill WinAmp?

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief December 2, 2006 · 1 min read

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Just a thought. In the last year or so, I found myself using iTunes more often than before mainly because I also listen to podcasts along with my iPod Nano’s playlist.

WinAmp Ten years ago, when I first found out about WinAmp, it rocked. One of the top apps I would install on a new PC would be WinAmp. Now, I don’t even see it installed on my laptop. iTunes just ruled that area seconded by Windows Media Player 11.

The last time I remember using WinAmp was when I installed a plugin in it allowing me to download MP3s from my old iPod to my desktop PC.

I guess it goes with the fact that people who have iPods will heavuly rely on iTunes to manage their media files rather than sticking with their old WinAmp player.

Now, if WinAmp could do something to manage my iPod the same way as iTunes, I would gladly switch back.

Anybody else still using WinAmp?

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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46 Comments

TheGooch · 18 years ago

Most people I know run both. iTunes to managing and syncing, and Winamp for the actual playing of music.

jelly · 19 years ago

anyway if your ipode have prob please dont hesitate to contact me. im collecting diff bugs for mac.

jelly · 19 years ago

is not about good or what?
itunes has many features that doesnt’ have winamp.
convert,podcast,updates and not just only ipod u can use there. i phone?
u can also use media monkey for your ipod.

winamp is good u can create skins, :( hehehe

->psp
->ps3
->xbox
->iphone

Nick · 19 years ago

The program vance is referring to is yamipod. I use it to pull music from and iPod to any computer. iTunes doesn’t allow you to do this. It helps when you get a new computer.

Sandra · 19 years ago

You can download the plugin and use Winamp to manage your iPod music:
ml_ipod

harryE · 20 years ago

I am using Winamp since an eternity. From time to time I am trying some other players but only three other music player could make it to compete with WinAmp. 1) Windows Media Player, basically not very elegant but it is very efficient for low bandwith radio. And for video it is the standard. Simply works good for any kind of streaming video. 2) iTunes, Steven Jobs had the right instinct with the iPod and did what usually was a Microsoft characteristic, Apple used existing technology and perfected it and conquered the market in a few years. iTunes is ok today but the way was long and painful and it is still not elegant like an iPod. But for iPod users it is the safest way to feed your iPod. WinAmp has the tendency to kill my iPod partition. iTunes database is still crappy – even in December 2006. Radio is stolen from WinAmp/Shoutcast. 3) Mixmeister, if you are in Mixes – this mixing player is the best piece on software on the planet. But at the bottom line my mostly used player is still WinAmp. People who don’t like it don’t know it. If I read the comments here I am wondering how people can be so “religious”, judgemental and blind. Reading the comments shows that most people never gave WinAmp a real attention and looked to the details, but flaming it easier than to invest some time and energy… If you invest some time in WinAmp you can hardly become or remain happy with something else. WinAmp rocks. It is the mixture of everything. The space here is not sufficient to list what WinAmp is offering, features most other software players can only dream of. My recommendations for the future: drop video support, others can do it better, review the features and streamline the player, keep it lean and mean, integrate some features from the software ID3-tag, avoid to make it a marketing platform, it is too late to make money with it and this makes the software slow and convoluted, radio streaming could be better, dynamic bandwith reduction would be great to avoid stutter play if bandwith is not perfect. I hope that AOL is not so limited in its perception that they drop WinAmp one day, it would be a shame becuase most people still haven’t discoverd what great features and quality WinAmp is offering.

Miguel · 20 years ago

Digg likes Apple-related stories. Let’s digg this!

Fleeb · 20 years ago

I still use Winamp and the Geiss plugin which wowed me since its early version back in high school.

Edwin · 20 years ago

Winamp on my windows and xmms on my linux

tried itunes and it crashed my box. maybe because i made a mistake perhaps. but then again when i use itunes it bogs down my home network and my box so i stayed away from it.

itunes is cool but when it comes when you try to use you box while it is on is not advisable to those lowend boxes.

vance · 20 years ago

streaming files? i use vlan player no audio sync problems like wmp does.

vance · 20 years ago

i use winamp kasi lite sya and for my various artist mp3 (non full length album ones).

i like itunes more than wmp 11, kasi ok yung itsura nya and function. I don’t have an ipod yet but i doubt i’ll be using itunes when transferring my music to an ipod. I might try yummypod or yumipod (google it nalang can’t remember the name eh) which can transfer files to an ipod and it is lighter than itunes,

Shahzad Khan · 20 years ago

Hey Winamp user here too !
If you use iTunes mainly because of the iPod sync. there’s some plugin I found on the winamp website, maybe you can search it there again !

it’ll help you out I guess

good luck

peace
-mE

rain · 20 years ago

XMMS :)

AhmedF · 20 years ago

Use WinAmp just because its so nice and small. Very un-AOL like :)

Obet · 20 years ago

Songbird rocks. I hope they hurry up get all the standard features in soon. Plus, they have cute characters.

Max Limpag · 20 years ago

Abe,
I used to be a heavy Winamp user until I switched to iTunes largely because I first tried subscribing to podcasts during the time I tried iTunes and I never bothered checking how to do it in Winamp.

I’ve since switched to MediaMonkey + Juice. MediaMonkey supports a lot of MP3 players, including phones, out of the box. I wrote about my experience with it in managing songs and podcasts in my K750i here. I’m also trying out Songbird.

JP Loh · 20 years ago

Winamp user too. I only fire up iTunes to sync my iPod. I think that Winamp died when AOL bought them. It became even worse when Justin Frankel, the original author, left the project. Up to now, I still use the “classic” skin because Winamp uses a very small memory footprint. I love Winamp, it doesn’t crash and it “just works”.

WMP is okay, I use it for playing videos and streaming media. I only don’t like it because it edits files behind my back. iTunes, for me, is the worst (on Windows). It crashes a lot and eats a lot of CPU cycles just to download podcasts.

jhay · 20 years ago

Solid WinAmp user here as well. I have iTunes, Windows Media Player, even RealMedia Player installed but I’m a solid WinAmp fan.

It’s lightweight and allows me to customize the skins. ;) I don’t have an iPod, and so as 60% of Pinoys out there. So yeah, iTunes is used mainly by those who own an iPod.

One more thing, if you visit most Internet shops, they would either have WinAmp or Windows media player as their music player, very very rare would you see a shop using iTunes.

JC John SESE Cuneta · 20 years ago

Among our circle and colleagues, we all stopped using WinAmp after iTunes was updated and made available for Windows.

iTunes is by far better than today’s WinAmp. Even with plugin and community support, people support and develop third-party services and plugins for iTunes more and faster than they do with WinAmp.

Especially now that iTunes is way better than we first made the switched, and WinAmp is still the same when v5 was first made available. Add to that, WinAmp still eat lots of memory as well as crashes often, iTunes is stable and more “responsible” when it comes to memory usage.

Here’s more, iTunes vs WinAmp. As a techy myself, I want my mp3s to use the latest version of tagging – id3v4. WinAmp only gives a “very minimal” support while iTunes supports it almost a 100%.

Check -> http://id3.org

^_^

If you want to be more organized than before, iTunes is the way, not WinAmp.

I’m not an iPod user btw.
And oh, since I made the switch to Motorola (especially ROKR series), iTunes is even more useful to me than WinAmp. :)

ade · 20 years ago

I never really liked WinAmp. I was using Windows Media Player before I switched to iTunes.

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

I guess this mostly applies to iPod users only.

@ seav, I stand corrected. :)

Alex · 20 years ago

Winamp user here.

For one, I do not have an iPod but I do have iTunes installed since Apple has long bundled that with the QuickTime player.

Same as seav, I prefer it because of minimal resource usage. iTunes can consume a whole lot more, and as experienced a while back in our office, iTunes sort of *messes* with the network too.

Ever since then, most of us still use Winamp as primary MP3 player.

seav · 20 years ago

I still use Winamp 5 Lite as my primary MP3 player on the desktop/laptop because it’s very simple and consumes a helluva lot less resources than iTunes. And while I do have an iPod Nano, I don’t use iTunes as my jukebox software. I now use MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) as my primary music organizer (it rips CDs, does tagging, converts formats, is open source, and even syncs my iPod!). The only thing I ever use iTunes for is to randomize my iPod playlists (MediaMonkey still doesn’t natively do this) and to disable Apple’s buggy handling of the ReplayGain tag.

P.S. I think the title’s supposed to be “Did iTunes *kill* Winamp?”