winamp's greatest annoyance

[Doom9]

Winamp is a great piece of software and I'm sure many of you are using it. Yet, have you ever wondered why on earth the volume slider in the program directly influences the wave slider in the masters speaker volume dialog of Windows. Other A/V programs I'm using, like MPC or WMP, or ABC's Media Player for their streaming offering, all operate independently of the master volume control.. so any changes you make apply only to the software at hand.

I'm wondering, is there any way to make Winamp leave my master control alone so I don't have to bump up the wave volume each time I switch from winamp to another media player?

[Shinigami-Sama]

switching output plugins

and as for me, I think it's wanting to read CDs placed in and stoping everything from functioning while it waits on the IO to go though is its worst feature, but thats just me

[sysKin]

switching output plugins

To elaborate: you want directsound as output plugin, not waveOut

[communist]

Yep DirectSound ouput plugin will fix it. Though I noticed that DirectSound has a lower max volume than waveout and on cheap onboard sound chips this is rather annoying if you want to use a headphone.

[Inventive Software]

Woohoo! I've been looking for a solution to this problem, and it turns up on my doorstep! Winamp is a great music player, and it's unique in supporting only Windows, and being stupidly popular. It also supports your videos and other formats via it's DirectShow plugin, but for those, I'll stick to MPC.

[jon.schaffer]

Yep DirectSound ouput plugin will fix it. Though I noticed that DirectSound has a lower max volume than waveout and on cheap onboard sound chips this is rather annoying if you want to use a headphone.
I didn't use Winamp for a while. But can it be possbile to increase the gain (preamplification) in the equalizer?
Or is this leading to saturation/clipping?

[Doom9]

Thanks yous.. you have no idea how much better Winamp just got :)

[Doom9]

by the way, there's a nasty little setting I found as well yesterday: Allow Winamp to report anonymous usage statistics.
Considering that you are likely to allow Winamp to access the internet, especially if you're using online radio, having this on by default is a really nasty habit.
I don't want to receive a bill from the RIAA for radio usage one day (even though I pay the appropriate fees for radio and TV reception every month).. and they might especially not like that the streamripper plugin is installed, even if I haven't used it in a while.

[sillKotscha]

if you have an amp/reciever...

try out Winamp Kernel Streaming - just great. I don't use directsound nor waveout anymore!!

http://www.stevemonks.com/ksplugin/

[videomixer9]

Kernel Streaming bypasses many parts of the drivers, if you use Creative's CMSS or similar upmixing or downmixing thing included in your drivers this will bypass them. If you like Kernel Streaming though and want to use it for video playback too you can easily make this possible by using reclock which has kernel streaming capabilities. The bonus is low latency similar to ASIO, though using ASIO output plugin for winamp might be even a better choice, latency for ASIO is usually below 2ms. Both interface have the same major downside as waveOut, only one application can play sound via them.

Btw. Winamp asks on install about the anonymous statistics and you can turn it off there already. Otherwise it'll try to enable it each time again, after all Nullsoft is now part of AOL :p

Winamp doesn't want to read in CDs when inserted, that feature is called autoplay and comes with windows :p When reading CDs or starting playback nothing of Winamp 5.x freezes anywhere, and the CDDB dialog is non-modal.

[Shinigami-Sama]

autoplay is disabled, same with cddb, thats the thing; but if I close the playlist it stops the problem, but I usualy forget to do that, oh well

[gameplaya15143]

by the way, there's a nasty little setting I found as well yesterday: Allow Winamp to report anonymous usage statistics.
.. and you just found that? That has been there since winamp2 :rolleyes:

There is an option in waveout, 'alternative volume control (slow)' ..or something like that. If you check that, winamp's volume won't control the main wave volume, but you will have to wait for the length of the buffer for the change to be heard (similar to when the EQ is turned on/off).

[fakey]

Surprised to know someone like Doom9 have never used winamp.

IIRC old Sasami2k(you guys remember?) started as a winamp2 plugin.

[Doom9]

and you just found that? If you have a hundred options, do you really look at every one of them? I've always just told Winamp that I'm not connected to the Internet as as not to be bothered by anything that requires connectivity - like checking for new releases, etc.
And I've never seen where I'm being asked if I want to activate this feature or not.. I guess you're only being asked if you answer that you're connected to the net?

[darkavatar1470]

I'd say it would be zero unicode tag support, making foobar looking more & more attractive by the the day.... but since I've being waiting for, like 3 years? I guess it wouldn't hurt too much to wait for a couple more....

[foxyshadis]

Winamp's current mp3 and vorbis plugins, at least, and I believe its mp4 plugin, support unicode just fine. (Goofy mixed up text entered in the tagger's own code page can't be fixed by simply supporting unicode, sadly.) Trouble is, the playlist and media library don't, which is pretty obnoxious.

Personally, the way the mp3 plugin tries to play *.aac files is what hurts. I hate having to rename to mp4, especially when they aren't even really mp4 wrapped. What were they smoking?

[GodofaGap]

As a better work-around you can delete the .aac extension in the preferences. (preferences > plugin > input, select mp3 decoder and press configure).

But indeed it's a little idiotic.

[foxyshadis]

Well, the problem then is that then it isn't associated to any input plugin so mp3 plugin picks it up anyway. :p (Unless this has been fixed in the latest version, haven't tried yet.) Be nice if mp4 plugin had any configuration at all.

[darkavatar1470]

You're right, you can see the tags if you right-click and select "View file info..". But the main problem is not showing up on the playlist, which is where we (are supposed to) see them most of the time.

[Slogra]

i use foobar 8.3 with the "Volume control toolbar" component so i can choose which volume bar it controls.

But i control the master volume with it, because i believe lowering the waveout volume will decrease audioquality.
The master volume only affects my analog out which use for headphones. The master volume doesn't affect digital out, so i use my speaker volume control for that.


I didn't use Winamp for a while. But can it be possbile to increase the gain (preamplification) in the equalizer?
Or is this leading to saturation/clipping?
This will lead to more clipping. I say more clipping because most nowadays CDs are already clipping all over the place (:(), so any volume increase will result in more clipping.

[gameplaya15143]

If you have a hundred options, do you really look at every one of them?
I certainly try to. I might not have any idea what some of the options do in some programs, but I like to have an overview of what is there.

@foxyshadis:
in_mp4 that comes with winamp just parses MP4 files, then decodes the AAC that's inside with in_mp3. Personally I use in_mp4 from codingtech. About in_mp3 decoding aac when you remove aac from in_mp3's extention list.. winamp has an option to give unknown filetypes a known extention. By default this is set to 'mp3', and therefore gets decoded by in_mp3. If you change that option to something else, like 'wav' or 'mpc' or 'ogg', you can very easily break winamp's ability to decode shoutcast streams (since they are extentionless URLs).

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'm all about Winamp2. Hardcore Winamp user since 1998, but I never got down with the "new" versions. Too slow, no more fully single click interface, too big etc...

AND....

One word:
MilkDrop.

1600x1200. Playing Hardcore Psytrance. On E. Oh yeah.
:D :D :D

~MiSfit

[gameplaya15143]

I'm all about Winamp2.
I use winamp 2.95 myself :D