| I have to reverse my emplacement 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 slowly to use. Nigh importantly, the audio quality has came with 24-bit support, dithering, seamless / gapless playback, a quality equalizer (finally!) and a high precision decoder. It's easily on equation with Foobar and XMPlay which IMNSHO are the Golden Standards for audio quality in the genre. Eventide the remembering rtequirements are on equation with the abovementioned programs.
Now, altogether is not sweetness and light. The plan has several criminal bugs – I enunciate 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 induce a crash but by invoking CDDB for a newly introduced CD with the playlist capable (I coped that six times in two instants – things went swimmingly if I but closed the playlist). Skin performance could besides be significantly improved.
This plan is besides LOADED with Adware, something I intensely resent. I view adware equally 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 surmise that's the malign influence of the AOL ownership – later all, nothing good has Ever arrived 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. But be sure to consult the Winamp install maneuver (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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