(just realised another reason I’ll end up switching to iTunes: it’s made for podcasts (or vice versa).)

: P

I would have linked the page, but I can never remember how to do it and last time I tried I broke teh ‘brain.

I’ve actually been listening to the Reith Lectures 2006, all about music…

Maybe I should spend a bit of time listening to podcasts after all….

I loved winamp too, in its day, but I do remember getting a rather unpleasant CTRL+C / CTRL+V cramp after editing id3 tags for an hour or so…

I know I’ll end up switching to iTunes, the library cataloguing is vastly better (well, it’s _there_, for a start).

I agree that Winamp’s double-sized skin is ugly, to be honest the main use I had for it was to play music while I was working at the computer or to play sound files I was transcribing. I used to use it in “rolled-up” mode in the title bar and, because it was so tiny, just use Alt-Tab to switch to it and then use the keyboard shortcuts (z,x,c,v,b for the buttons, arrow keys for forward / back 5 seconds).

If I had an iPod to play with, I suspect my transition to iTunes would be quicker but I suspect that if I’m sitting at the computer and I know what I want to listen to (and where to find it), Winamp will be the first program I choose. For now.

: P

with a decent interface (OK, “skin”)

Skins don’t change the interface. At least, not in versions below 3. The buttons will still be tiny. Which is bad.

double-sizing that skin

That’s just silly. It always looked crap when you double sized it. And it didn’t all need to be double sized, just important stuff like the pause/skip buttons (see the above link). If they’d included high and low res versions in the same skin however…

Which, to be honest, is all I want.

Fair enough, granddad It was all I wanted too, but then you get used to niceties like it being quicker to use a search than to manually look for a specific album, and the way seeing album art is so helpful in figuring out what’s playing. I like the way getting music on and off the ‘Pod is so simple. You can write (or use someone elses) scripts to put your favourite RSS feeds on your iPod for later perusal. If I had the time to listen to podcasts, that would probably be in this paragraph too. There’s lots in iTunes (and pretty much every non-spartan music player) that I don’t like, but there’s a whole bunch of good stuff too.

iTunes gave me several hundred files with no artist, no album, few details and practically no organisation

Hmm. I can see how that would sour you to the whole thing.

they seem to be the only reliable way any player organises files anyway

You can even do radical stuff like put a ” or : in the song name, if that is what is called for.

Just a thought, but if your directory/file names are uniform (ie, artist/album/trackNumber trackname.mp3 or whatever) you could probably hack together a Perl script or something that would go through and copy the appropriate text strings into the ID3 tags. I’ve only scanned the beginning, but this article might be a good starting point. If they are not uniform, you could get the script to take an argument that makes it parse file paths in different ways, then group together the similarly named ones and do them a batch at a time. You may be able to get at least the lion’s share of the work done this way.

There might even be something out there that does this already.

The wondrous iTunes still gave me several hundred files with no artist, no album, few details and practically no organisation when I added just a few music directories. Maybe I’m a bit anal about it: I know I need to get round to sorting out my mp3 collection’s tags at some point, they seem to be the only reliable way any player organises files anyway.

So until iTunes (or anything else) can magically recognise horribly amended filenames and empty ID3 tags and conjure up a reliable list of what the track actually contains, I’ll stick with a small player that does the job I want. And its shortcomings.

: P

I think it was very much a product of it’s time (much like the blink tag), one which has now passed.

This whole Winamp thing has been a fun trip down memory lane, but managing the folder names (and the file names, oh god, managing the file names) of your media library is, like, so last century. Let go, Luke.

: P