5 ms·
Perhaps partly, but the UI was also useful compared to WMP. WMP was slow, bulky, and took up lots of screen real estate. WinAmp, while it was themed, was slim,
by deathanatos 6y ago
Perhaps partly, but the UI was also useful compared to WMP. WMP was slow, bulky, and took up lots of screen real estate. WinAmp, while it was themed, was slim, but also packed far more control into a tinier space than WMP.
(The blue/grey theme that came later was far less performant; I mean the original dark green/black theme.)
And WinAmp would open & play literally any format under the sun. WMP was limited to something like MP3 and WMA. (And maybe WAV.)
- RedShift1 6y agoWMP plays anything the system has a codec for.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoAh, codecs. The biggest PITA on Windows in the 1990s/2000s. I went through two or three different videoplayers for the sole reason they shipped with whatever was needed to open just about any format out there. Meanwhile, trying to coerce WMP to open popular video formats was an exercise in futility...
- hombre_fatal 6y agoMaking users care what codecs are and which are available on their system (and with no UI to even answer that question) is just another example of how bad some organizations are at UX. That's how VLC became so popular. They realized "sorry, you don't have that codec" is only a bureaucrat's idea of good UX so they shipped every codec in software.
- recursive 6y agoWhen Winamp first came out, everything was single core. Decoding mp3 took a significant bite out available CPU. Winamp was relatively efficient in CPU in RAM, especially compared to WMP.