If you love music, and listen to it from your computer then you simply need this program. It is the upitomy of comfort, simplicity and not to mention good looks.

The best part of this program is its price FREE. And going through the other good parts is going to take me a while, but I'll try to keep it simple (KISS method :)

First of all this program can do a lot that relates to music, but it isn’t the best for music editing (look for up coming review of Sound Forge™). Winamp can do a lot of simple things that come in very handy, such as making playlists, the simplest, to something more complex like fading out songs and converting to different audio formats. For example you can convert .wav to .mp3 or visa-versa. I find this to be one of the most useful features.

Also there are other simpler things, like skins for the player which make it look real nice, and even sort of "screen Savers" that do different stuff based on the beat of the music (looks very cool). There are hundreds of different plug ins, that do hundreds of different things, from making weird sounds to cross fading between two winamps, so that you can mix songs. And all of these can be downloaded for free from www.winamp.com

Most of what this program can do depedns on the plug ins that you download. Some examples of what these plugins tend to be able to do are things such as; getting concert information, different visual effects such as a very good looking virtual dancer who responds to the music, an alarm plug in that is totally customizable including fade-in, fade-out and can store different times for different days. So now instead of waking up to an annoying buzzing sound you can wake up to your favorite music. Also there are different language plug in's and even games. Now the reason that I keep on saying plug in's is taht because thats where Win Amp's power comes from. Different people create these add on's and you choose which ones you want, instead of wasting time on downloading all of them and then never using most of them. You controll what you get.

Now of course there are some down sides. The program’s plug in's aren’t always the best because they are made by common folk, but most of the time they work great. The editing plugins which are supposed to take out voice, or slow down the song don’t work very well, but if they did then the plug-ins would be a lot larger in size and in fact I still haven’t been able to find a program that removes voice from a song (I need this because I often deal with karaoke). The worst down side is that I still haven’t been able to find a plug in that would rip CD's. But there's always Audio Grabber for that.

The bottom line is that this program is great! It has never done anything bad to my computer. The playlists keep my music organized (probably the only thing that I have organized) and the screen savers look cool. What else could you ask for?


Recommended: Yes