Winamp3 is Copyright 1999-2001 Nullsoft, Inc. Winamp3 is a trademark of Nullsoft, Inc. Table of Contents: About Winamp3 Some features to try out How to start Winamp3 Some known issues About Winamp3 What is Winamp3? Why Winamp3? Winamp3 is more than an excuse to have "mp3" built right into our product name. Winamp3 is our attempt to create a brand new methodology of complete customizability of the media playback experience via a system of component programming (which adds new functionality to the program) and a brand-new skinning system (to present the features of the program to you.) Collectively, this new technology platform is called Wasabi, or the Wasabi Coding Platform. Our component system gives developers unprecedented access to the program by encouraging them to build directly upon our coding platform (named Wasabi) and add brand-new functionality to the entire system. We provide an SDK (downloaded separately) packed with working C++ code taken directly from our own components and Winamp3 itself so developers can immediately start creating great new components on top of our code. New functionality is packaged in the form of "components". They are similar in idea to general-purpose plugins, except Wasabi components can actually leverage each others' features instead of only using the main Winamp services. Components can add a new window into the system, or just provide a new type of service to the system (like decoding a different type of media file, or displaying a brand-new type of visualization). Winamp3 comes packaged with some standard components, such as the playlist editor and skin switcher. Also, we have completely revamped the skinning system. In fact, we have revamped the entire idea of a skinning system. Winamp3 goes way beyond the idea of skins that are merely free-form. Our skins are both free-form and fully scriptable. Skinners (and now, scripters) can invoke nearly any UI behavior they desire in their skin, from changing a bitmap or vis mode to dynamically blending and rendering brand new interfaces on the fly. Another important reason for Winamp3 is portability. Wasabi currently runs on the win32 platform (Win95/98/NT/ME/2k/XP/TC). We are progressing nicely on a Linux version as well, and we have plans for more operating systems/environments to receive support in the future. This means that components built on the Wasabi Coding Platform will be easily recompilable for other OSes and architectures, and skins won't need to be modified at all to be totally portable. Some features to try out: - Grab the little resizer control in the lower right and stretch your Winamp3! - Click the eject button to pick some music files on your hard drive and play them. - Turn on the crossfader. (The button just to the right of the eject button). - Click on the little Winamp logo (the flashing lightning bolt icon in the lower right of the main player piece) to bring up the Thinger, if it isn't already displaying. The Thinger allows you to open and close component windows (like the playlist editor, or the skin switcher, or other components you might install) and otherwise interact with the components you have installed. - If you are connected to the Internet, open the Shoutcast Server List in the Thinger and double-click on a station list (once the list displays) to listen to that station. - The media library, availble both through the Thinger and through the "ML" button, can sort and display your music collection if it has been tagged with ID3 information. At first, your database of music is empty. It grows as you add new files to your playlist or when you add more files to it via the "add music to db" button in the lower left. It takes a little while to read all the info from the files after you add them, but once it's done you can try clicking on the available queries to see what it's found. Once you find some music, you can drag and drop it into the playlist editor. You can also drag-and-drop files from Windows Explorer windows directly onto the playlist editor or the main player piece. - Right clicking on the player piece will bring up a menu with some more options. - All windows naturally "dock" to each other when they get near. You can undock any docked window (including the main player) by holding down either SHIFT key while dragging it. - If you hold down the CONTROL and ALT keys while moving a window, every window will move along with it. - There's lots more, so explore! How to start Winamp3: (as originally written for the internal alphas) (on a French keyboard) (by a drunken Brennan) (with my left pinky) (blindfolded) Start Winamp3 via whatever method you prefer. That would mean either clicking the quickstart icon, the desktop icon, or by projecting your awesome mutant powers onto a nearby human and exploding their brain in such a way as to cause variations in the sunspot cycle which causes in turn a freakish burst of neutrinos to blast forth from the sun's molten innards (the advanced student can use a nearby star and a buttload of patience) flipping a bit in your computers Instruction Pointer (usually referred to as IP except on the SPARC platform which uses the notation PC, for Program Counter) causing it to jump to the part of Windows that is secretly programmed in at the last second that causes it to feel remorse for sucking so damned bad and always crashing and deleting all your work right when you were JUST ABOUT to hit Save, no really you were, and while wallowing in this black pit of despair and self-loathing it hits it, hey, I know what would make the world a better place, if I was running Winamp 3.0, and it does. Notes - About the HTTP reader: The proxy string can be either: "user:password@host:port", "user@host:port" or "host:port" If "port" is not specified, 80 is assumed. - About the video support: When in fullscreen, you can use any Winamp3 key to control the playback and also use the mouse wheel to control volume. Doubleclick on the fullscreen window or press "ESC" to go back to normal mode. - About CD playback: The CD reader will first try to digitally extract the tracks, so it can provide you with gapless and crossfadable output along with visualisation. The digital extraction relies on an ASPI manager being installed on your computer. It'll also try to use the internal ASPI NT manager, but it might not work on all CD drives. If digital extraction doesn't work properly, try installing an ASPI manager. Check out the following page for detailed instructions: http://www.windac.de/eng/sup02.shtml If ASPI is not found, the WA3 CD playback component will then fallback into a MCI type CD playback (like Winamp 2 does). Some known issues - Configuration is very basic right now, but it's usable. In a few versions we hope to have fully skinnable config in a releasable state. - if no file is valid in a playlist, hitting play enters an endless loop Found one we missed? Go to http://bugzilla.nullsoft.com:3430/ and help us out by reporting it. Or email to steve@winamp.com. Or let us know your thoughts in our forums at http://forums.winamp.com/ Sincerely, Brennan Underwood Francis Gastellu Christophe Thibault Justin Frankel Steve Gedikian Mig Gerard and the whole Nullsoft team^H^H^H^Hsemi-digested hunks of meat