I've been using WinAmp 5.xx (well ,mostly 5.5 since I never cared to always try to run the latest version of whatever) for the last 20+ years now and nothing will be replacing it anytime soon - at least for playing music.
I put it on every XP and 7 PC I intend to use for myself.
There are a couple reasons I prefer WinAmp 5.xx:
1) First, the "Modern Skin" (it's now, what, close to 25 years old, 🤣). The classic one is not bad either, but I find it a little too colorful and somewhat more distracting. "City Night" is what I usually use as it's easy on the eyes.
2) The option to save preset/EQ settings and even move the said saved preset/EQ to another system. This is actually a HUGE one for me, because I have and use various headphones, some of which need a lot of EQ'ing to flatten their response (and also to always add a little extra bass, because... well, who doesn't like it 😉 ). Being able to take a saved EQ preset and put it on another system makes it so convenient when I jump around between my various PCs.
3) There are some really awesome plugins for WinAmp. I haven't tried that many TBH, but one that I do absolutely love and put on every WinAmp installation is PaceMaker pitch/tempo controller. Sometimes, depending on how sleepy I am or if I had too much sugar, it can be fun to speed up or slow down songs a little bit. In fact, I have modified and saved a few songs permanently (through Audacity) after playing around with the pitch/tempo. For some songs, I actually prefer my modified versions over the original.
4) I find that WinAmp 2.xx adds some really weird harmonics/distortion when using the EQ a little more heavily. This does not happen with the latter versions of 5.x. And since I do use EQ a lot, I generally tend to shy away from 2.xx, unless I have no other option.
That said, I use WinAmp exclusively for playing music and/or audio files only. The fact that it can read various tracker formats makes it all the better too, since there are some really cool '90's "crack.exe" type music. I discovered ModArchive fairly late, but that's been my main source for these (and with over 10 GB of files from there, it will be a long time before I even go through it fully.) The other thing I use WinAmp for, though very rarely, is when I rip music to WAV or FLAC files, since older version of WMP don't really let you do that.
What I don't like or use WinAmp for is playing videos. It's been too buggy with way too many video formats for me over the years, so I just don't let it touch anything video-related. For that, I have either VLC... or in the case of "simpler" video formats/containers (e.g. WMV), I even let Windows Media Player do some work here.
And for ripping CDs to MP3s: WMP again. And that about covers all of my multimedia needs on XP and 7.
theelf wrote on 2026-03-30, 21:33:
2.9 all the way, foundd 5.x too heavy
??
I've used WinAmp 5.5 on a 400 MHz Pentium II laptop with Win2k, and even there it didn't feel that heavy. Sure, with the Modern Skin and the player visible, it does have moderate CPU usage (10-20% on average, approximately.) But when minimized to taskbar, the usage is much lower. I didn't try WinAmp 2.9x, but I imagine it should be better in that regard. And surely, WMP is probably even more efficient. But again, there are just way too many options/features (and very conveniently though of) that WinAmp has that I don't see myself replacing it with anything else.
