Winamp is still my player of choice
Well, in my last post, I mentioned that MP10 was out.
I feel it's important that people know what's going on, and have the full set choices in front of them to make a wise decision.
That said, I've upgraded to MP10 and I still don't like it.
Why? Because it tries to take the computer away from me. It's a little thing, i'm sure, but it shits me no end. The installer explicitly says that it will become the default player for all music and video content. Uh, no, _I_ make that decision thanks.
When setting up the config, I then unticked all the boxes that i prefer to play in winamp - mp3, cd audio, mpeg, wma...i just leave MP with the stuff that's really MP specific, like dvd and divx (i prefer video that's divx or a dvd rip to be played in MP, but that's it. little pissy mpeg movies go to winamp).
So the install finishes, i go back into the options, and oh look, it's taken back most of the things i took away from it. But this time halk of the tick boxes are dark grey, as if to try to tell me off for removing them in the first place. I was still able to untick them again, but what was the point in making it settable in the install if it just ignores me anyway?
From a UI POV, i still don't like the way it looks. The play button is fairly intuitive, but the rest is not as easy to use - which is not as big a deal as you would think - after all, i don't want to learn, anyway :) But why does it look the way it does? Specifically, if you are going to make something look as non-windows-formsish as possible, at least do it right. When i drag the player around the desktop (and i have 'show window contents while dragging' turned off) the rectangle that i drag is much larger than the player itself. Why couldn't they make the player border less, rather than try to just _hide_ the title bar and stuff? Why does it needround corners? Why waste my cpu trying to make it look pretty, when it's purpose is to be a background app? If it's playing music, i'm not looking at it, i'm looking at what i'm doing, i'm only listening. If i'm playing video, i'm looking at the video, not the player the video is contained in.
Arg. It just shits me. Winamp 5 is small, clean, unobtrusive, and uses very little system resources. It supports plugins if you like that sort of crap. It jsut works. Easily.
Why is 10 versions required for something that just needs to hide in the background? couldn't they have got that right years ago?