A buggy upgrade for Winamp. Review on Winamp 3 (Beta)

Review Winamp 3 beta 1 love build # 448 The most popular MP3 player just got better. Well that's what the guys at Nullsoft say anyway. Still in its beta mode, there has been a number of changes especially in the way options are accessed. The main control window and equalizer is still there but no sign of the very useful play list window.

It has been replaced by a new window called the ''thinger''. From here you can access all of winamp's options. First time users (and even faithful followers of older winamp versions) may find themselves lost in the interface. The play list can be accessed from here. A media library has been included that allows you to sort your songs by type (Just like in windows media player). The classic visualization options are still there. There is a new visualization studiothat comes with a huge collection of visualizations. Also the studio allows you to change all possible aspects of the visualization. It also adds a new beat detection optionwhich allows you to see those ''oomphs'' in the song (finally!).

There is a database explorer that allows you to query your system for songs that match a certain criteria. It showed no signs of working when I tried to use it.. Support for shoutcast has been included. Winamp3 now allows you to write your own scripts to interact with the UI. Which brings me to wasabi. Wasabi is a completely configurable system for building skinnable applications, quickly and easily. It is written in C++ with some assembly code for optimizations. Wasabi allows developers to control every aspect of the interface. We will be seeing more of this when a wasabi-only SDK is released. The skins now come with a .wal extension. Part of the wasabi specification I guess. Some of the old .wsz and .zip skins do work. Some of them even managed to crash the program.

The program comes with its share of bugs. It freezes very often. You lose control of the interface at times. Several of the new features are not fully functional.The preset button on the equalizer does nothing. So should you change to winamp3? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. Not until they have ironed out the bugs, and maybe improve the accessibility a bit. Until then I am sticking to winamp2. Moreover the casual user would never feel the need to move over to winamp3.