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Why did they release Winamp3 in such a state?


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Let's face it Winamp3 is, from and end user perspective, inferior to Winamp2.

I love Winamp and have used it since the early version 1 alpha's. There was always progress in those days but what happened from WA2-> WA3?

Isn't the whole idea of a sequel, in any form, to include the great bits of the parent and add extra goodies?

Winamp3 suffers from:

instability,

poor load times,

poor customisation of playlist display, (no in_mp3 tweaks)

forgetting equilizer settings over time,

hangs with multiple playlists,

hangs on skin changes,

No builtin legacy plugin support,

Very slow UI (akin to Mozilla's current XUL badness)

The whole app feels very sluggish and unfinished

I'm sure they will all be fixed in time but why release a player that is inferior to the previous incarnation?

Was it an AOL marketing decision or did the new WMP9 force their unready hand?

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yeah, for exactly these reasons i've switched from winamp3 to qcd (winamp2 is cool, but it's not kinda state-of-art in some way).

i think they just got fed up with people asking "when will winamp3 be released?" so they just gave us something that they call "final".

i hope they will fix all these things you mentioned, and i'm really looking forward to the next builds :)

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well how many releases has wa2 had to get where it is? eventually wa3 will get to that point. that's how a lot of software is these days, more concerned with getting something out than getting something out that is quality. the mentality now is to just fix it as you go along.

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Originally posted by Evil2000

yeah, for exactly these reasons i've switched from winamp3 to qcd (winamp2 is cool, but it's not kinda state-of-art in some way)

same here

i like WA3 but it's not even comparable to 2 in efficiency

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The only thing good about Winamp 3 is freeform skinning. The progy is bloated. It uses a lot of sys resources.

The other mp3 players are great but not as good as Winamp 2. The main reason being that they use a lot of CPU and mem power. The great thing about Winamp 2 is that you can play a game and have mp3s playing at the same time.

Winamp2 foreva :p

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And we all know how important free form skinning is for the music listening experience.:right:

Free form skinning will only get you bloated programs with non-standard intefaces. It's such a poinltess feature.

Back on topic. I'm sure the hand that feeds Nullsoft, AOL, had something to do with it. Maybe it'll be packaged in AOL 8.0, who knows.

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Let's see....

the reason for a CRAPPY Winamp3 compared to Winamp 2.80.....

AOL owns the company now.....

AOL has NO comprehension of software development.....

Remember the days (and it is a strecth) when you had only

16k-48k to right things in, and you found amazing tricks and techniques to fit more than possible in that area.....

Welcome to AOL's Developers, look, a few machines have 2+ gig's and 1 Gig of Ram, just write the thing, memory leaks and all, process hooks, it'll run somewhere.....

I think I have noticed the correlation....

AOL buys a successful company.....

That Company ceases to be better than they were before....

Have to come out with new version (or else why would AOL pay more than they should have for them)

Company releases a step backwards in the previous software...

AOL blames MS for their problems.....

AOL SUCKS !

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heh i just uninstalled wa3 before reading this, caused bad problems with divx files clashing with explorer when i tried to delete them...

/me huggles wmp9

theres no need for winamp anymore it used to be good when wmp7 was out cause that was bloated crap :)

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Originally posted by Evil2000

you should try using QCD, it eats very little system resources and has freeform skinning :rolleyes:

i was using winamp3 to try out but ditched it for now...

go for the QCD player with the iTunes skin ... its cool :cool:

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Originally posted by yashiro

Winamp3 suffers from:

instability,

poor load times,

poor customisation of playlist display, (no in_mp3 tweaks)

forgetting equilizer settings over time,

hangs with multiple playlists,

hangs on skin changes,

No builtin legacy plugin support,

Very slow UI (akin to Mozilla's current XUL badness)

The whole app feels very sluggish and unfinished

They really blew it with WA3. They added a whole bunch of unneeded features, like multiple playlists, instead of keeping good old features like the 'j' feature, which as we all know was in WA2.x. One can easily accomplish multiple playlists with WA2.x too

Shame .......

P.S. AOL SUX!!!

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I don't think Winamp 3 is intended to be the replacement for Winamp 2. I still prefer 2 as well. If I'm not mistaken, Justin is the only one working on WA3. It's not like there was a team of developers or AOL developers working on it. It's one of the original team who started from scratch. WA3 is fun to play with and offers some sweet eye-candy, but isn't practical yet.

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Originally posted by adonai

I don't think Winamp 3 is intended to be the replacement for Winamp 2. I still prefer 2 as well. If I'm not mistaken, Justin is the only one working on WA3. It's not like there was a team of developers or AOL developers working on it. It's one of the original team who started from scratch. WA3 is fun to play with and offers some sweet eye-candy, but isn't practical yet.

So why not include all the feature of WA2?

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Originally posted by pinky

And we all know how important free form skinning is for the music listening experience.:right:

She was comparing QCD with Winamp 3 but you don't seem to understand that. Maybe you should try and learn how to read. It might benefit you, like when you go looking for a job :devious:

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When WA3 came out I downloaded it right away. After installing it I got really excited about that Media Library, until I realized it was only for files on your own HD... DOH!

I have since returned to 2.80 and I am much happier with it. Having freeform skinning is fun for a while, but I hate XML with such a passion that just knowing that's how it's all done sickened me. Besides, 3 isn't stable enough for me yet, I had to keep resetting all my preferences every time I loaded it, and the Media Library just led to confusion...

...and yes, I hate AOL also. I hope this thing with the SEC uncovers some serious sh!t on them and they go under. Can you imagine what life would be like post-AOL? /me shudders...

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want to know what the problem with WA3 is? AOL! I have been awaiting WA3 for like 3 years nows. And its stuck in a perpetual cycle of betas. Not only that it is bloated, like everyother AOL product.

I gave up on WA a long time ago and now use UltraPlayer

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Jump to is still present in Winamp3, in a roundabout way. Hit F3 if you don't have the "Select" box showing, and then type your query in the box. It works, but poorly when compared to Jump to.

And Justin wasn't the only one working on it. I know Brennan was working on it, as well as Christophe. There were probably more.

Winamp3 is three years in the making, so I am a little disappointed in its first showing, but like all software projects, these things take time. From a programming viewpoint, it's a great accomplishment and very very well done. From an end-user standpoint, the current only offering on the Wasabi platform is not ready for primetime.

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Just as AOL buying Netsscape was the death of that product, so will it be for Winamp. And any other excellent piece of software they buy out. They turn it into crap.

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the funniest thing i ever read in my life was one time when aol said that if microsoft didn't stop with the monopoly abuse that they would be forced to write their own operating system for their web access software to run on... ha!! what a piece of sh*t that would be :o

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