Winamp – free music/video software

Time for another free software review! This is one of those programs that I consider almost essential. It’s a program that is running on our computer almost every day. And yet, as I was writing this post, I discovered more things it could do that I didn’t even know about!I realize most of you already know about Winamp. After all, the Winamp website is listed by Alexa as the 708th most popular site on the net – that’s huge in internet terms. But for those of you who still don’t know about it, or haven’t thought about it in a while, it’s time to give it a chance.

Essentially, Winamp is a program that allows you to watch video and listen to audio, much like Windows Media Player. Created by Justin Frankel many years ago (and since developed by many), the program does what it does with style. You can listen to CDs, to MP3s, even to streaming audio off the internet (and you can even do it on a dial-up connection in many cases). You can listen in sequential order, or random order, or make your own order. You can watch video full screen or in a little box. You can watch pretty flashing lights while the music plays.

Winamp can be just a small bar on the top of your screen
One of Winamps fine features is its ability to use skins (changing the look of the player, and even how it functions) and plugins (basically to add functions). There are many skins based around movies, products, or just aesthetic appeal. You can always change the colour to match your desktop. And the plugins are endless. I found a great one recently. Since we’re often playing music in the house, we’ve found ourselves rushing for the volume control when the phone rings. No problem – I found a plugin that automatically turns the volume down when someone calls. How cool is that?Let’s see, what else? Well, there are many radio stations available from all over the world that you can listen to on Winamp (many listed on Shoutcast.com, but also listed within the player). That goes for video streams too. You can also listen to AOL radio on Winamp, among other things.

I set up a little menu on the bottom of my screen with playlists of the music I have on my computer. With a couple of clicks I can play all the music I have by one artist, or play a certain theme, or just play kids music. This is the beauty of Winamp playlists.

A pay-for version, which I haven’t tried, also allows you to convert music into MP3 format.

That’s just a hint of what you can do with Winamp. Perhaps its biggest problem is that there is just so much you can do with it – you’ll never finish checking out all the features, plugins and skins. But in the mean time, just download it, stick in a CD, and press play. You can learn from there.