WinAMP

It is to my deepest chagrin that I admit WinAMP is too bloated for me, these days.

"If you can guess a landing spot on the moon, I suppose you can guess a cake!"

I've been using WinAmp since I was getting beat up in the high school locker room. I've been an avid follower, and was delighted when WinAMP was one of the first players to support OGG files (perhaps 85% of my collection is OGG these days).

In my anti-social nature (mentioned in the last post), I have taken to listening to music incessantly here at work. ...But my work machine is the most absolute of burger-sucking dogs, and when one works in such software as Visual dBase, Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, and--powers of the universe preserve us--Internet Explorer, one is bound to find bits leaking out of their little unprotected blocks and spilling onto the CPU, making a terrible mess and stinking of ozone.

WinAMP does not enjoy this anymore than I do. In fact, I believe it makes matters worse.

I don't like bloat. This is why I hate all Microsoft software. All of it: I haven't found a single counter-example. Everything is bloated. Hell, I would rather skip buying a CD than listen to sound examples in anything made by Real, that scum-bag sucking fat zombie mime fuckhole company. AOL is something to be approached with fallout gear and large, preferably long-range weapons.

Pardon me. Where was I?

I use XMMS at home. (On Linux.) I believe XMMS is perfect: it does what I want, it looks reasonably cool (winamp skins), it's free, and it's got a footprint on the scale of rodents. Small rodents. There is no "thinger", there is no internet-scouring script looking for album covers... even the built-in visualizations are limited to oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers. And I don't have to go through six screen to install it. (Hell, I just enable it with a package manager, dammit: I never see a single dialog box!)

"I think if I were a spaceman, I wouldn't care if people believed in me or not."

So, I merrily resolved to install XMMS here at work and be done with it. Alas, I quickly discovered that there are no win32 binaries for XMMS.

Drat.

I begin scouring for another player, but am quickly assaulted by free-download sites that cause AdBlocker to groan under the pressure. I fear looking for bloat-free players in this manner will be fruitless.

As I said, 85% of my collection is in OGG format, so I choose instead to float on over to the Vorbis site and check our their recommended players. To my dismay, almost all of them are commercial bastardizations of freeware (much like WinAMP is, though I fear winamp is one of precious few companies that aren't really stepping on me when I download the free version of their software: almost no nagging, and no crippled features that I care about.)

Then I stumble upon Zinf. I've heard of it before, I think: I've probably passed over it in linux installs. (There's that "mindshare" thing, eh?) It's smaller than WinAMP, and just barely bigger than I think it should be (it's 1.7 Meg). I install.

Okay, so it's not sexy... but not hideous. It plays my OGGs. It's got a music manager that I don't particularly care for, but I start using it anyway: we'll kick the tires.

...And that's where I currently stand.

"Maybe I'm dreaming. My eyes are open, which means maybe I'm awake, dreaming I'm asleep. Or... or more likely, maybe I'm asleep, dreaming that I'm awake, wondering if I'm dreaming..."

So, if you haven't noticed, the quotes have been from Aleksi Virta's "...meets tortsi" album. ...One of the best albums ever, mind you. I'm listening to it now. Memory footprint? 14Megs. This is more than I expect, so I check WinAMP playing the same song, and I lose my breath when I see it's taking up a massive 44Meg! ...Eeep. Okay. So, for the next few weeks (?), I will be testing this Zinf thing, and seeing how it goes, because only time will tell.

Still, I lament the fact that I'm abandoning WinAMP. It used to be one of the only programs I really trusted. [sigh]

"An anti-American eagle? It's diabolical!"

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