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Winamp3 is Copyright 1999-2002 Nullsoft, Inc.
Winamp3 is a trademark of Nullsoft, Inc.
Table of Contents:
Presenting Winamp3
Some features to try out
About Winamp3
How to start Winamp3
Notes
Some known issues
Presenting Winamp3
More than 3 years in the making, Winamp3 is the culmination of Nullsoft's
attempt to create a whole new type of software: the ultimately skinnable
program, also known as the highly metamorphic application. We rewrote everything
from scratch while doing our very best to preserve and enhance those
subtle qualities of Winamp that make you (and us) love it so much. While doing
that we even managed to create a software platform known as Wasabi.
Welcome to the next generation: Winamp3.
Some features to try out:
- The main system menu is available to you, in any skin, with a right click
on almost any part of the player. It is also available if you click on the
little waveform icon to the left of the + menu.
- Grab the little resizer control in the lower right and stretch your Winamp3!
Use the + button to make it transparent (on win2k and xp)
- Control-P is a convenient shortcut to get to the Preferences window.
- 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 right click on this logo you get a shortcut menu to
toggle each window.
- The playlist editor supports multiple playlists and multiple editors now.
Try hitting Control-N to get a new playlist editor.
- If you miss the J key from winamp 2.x, try hitting F3 in the playlist editor.
- 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 to Library" 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.
- 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!
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.
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/etc). 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 Wasabi will be easily recompilable for other OSes and
architectures, and skins won't need to be modified at all to be
totally portable.
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
- 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 aus@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