I have heard mixed reactions to the new Winamp put out by Nullsoft. Being a person that doesn't mind trying a new version, I went ahead and threw it on my PC. It launched, it looked pretty, and the playlist feature was simply amazing. I enjoyed it, I really did. So why now am I running Winamp 2.8.x again? The answer is simple: I opened Internet Explorer.
Now, I wouldn't even be complaining that the audio decided to stutter and lag. I suppose when you do several things on a 512mb 700mhz PIII, this is "normal". After all, in a technology world, this thing is considered obsolete. Curious just how much I was hurting for resources, I flicked open the Task Manager. Winamp 3 (Studio.exe) was taking about 15 clock cycles and over 20mb of RAM. That was even more than Windows Media Player at times. This is also a massive jump from the 7mb RAM that the old Winamp used to take. I was curious if other people were having this problem, so I went to the Winamp forums. There was a complaint thread. After reading that I really decided not to go to Winamp 3. And it had nothing to do with the program. It was all about the moderators, who would make comments to forum posters. Someone would raise some valid concerns about the product (for example: will the lite version not have video support? I never use it.) and you would get a reply like this:
"Someone pick the baby's rattle up, he has dropped it out of the pram."
What the hell? I don't get a reply like that from any other software developer. And you know who the above reply was from? A moderator! These are the people who ideally are nonbiased and help maintain order in the forums. I also point you towards this example of what they consider "model constructive criticism. You have one person claiming that the direction of Winamp is not good because it is trying to do too much instead of making one thing superior, and you have another person (who looks to be part of the programming group) saying that this is the new direction of Winamp, and that's it. Has the developer and end-user communities split so far that neither can see eye to eye anymore? It makes me wonder what the new version will be.
Whenever it comes out, just someone remind me not to go open MSIE.
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