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Hundreds of MP3 players float around the Internet, but one player has broken rank as the clear leader among the hip crowd: Winamp. Winamp stuffs an incredible amount of power into a relatively small package, earning millions of downloads in the past five years.
Winamp has plenty of chops, playing MP3, CDs, MIDI, WAV, AAC, and even WMA — the format that's used for Microsoft Windows Media Audio files. The basic version is free to use, while the Pro version (which includes the ability to rip MP3 files and burn audio CDs at the full speed of your drive) is available for a small fee.
The program's built-in ten-band equalizer adjusts the sound; a minibrowser pops up Web pages when necessary. Winamp tunes in Internet broadcasts from MP3 radio stations around the world. More than 150 special software enhancements, called plug-ins, allow fiddling with the sound — for example, eliminating a singer's voice, storing the files in different formats, or adding 3-D sound effects.
Goofier plug-ins create animated dancers, oozing lava lamps, and light shows to squirm across the screen. More than 20,000 utilities, called skins, decorate the look of Winamp, making it as fashionable as you prefer. Savvy users create their own skins and upload them for sharing.
Want to hear the blues all night? Or a mixture of your Miles Davis and Frank Zappa MP3s? (Man, you do have eclectic taste!) Winamp lets you create customized MP3 playlists for playback randomly, in alphabetical order, or in any order that you choose.
Creating a playlist is easy enough; click the PL button to bring up Winamp's Playlist window. Then drag and drop the files that you want to play into the Playlist window. As the songs drop into the window, their names and lengths appear.
Not into dragging and dropping? Each of the buttons along the bottom of the Winamp window helps manage your playlist. Click the Add button, for example, to reveal the Add Dir button. Clicking the Add Dir button reveals a standard Windows file-browser box. Choose the directory where you store your MP3 files, and click the Open button to add them to the Playlist.
As you create playlists in Winamp, remember these hints:
- After you load files into Winamp, click the Misc button to sort them alphabetically.
- To save a playlist, hold down your mouse button on the List Opts button in the playlist's lower-right corner. A menu pops up. Without releasing the mouse button, slide your cursor up to the pop-up menu's Save List option. Release the mouse button, and a window pops up in which you type the file's name.
- To load a playlist, repeat this process, but slide the mouse pointer up to the Load List option and then choose your playlist.
 | - As opposed to MP3 files, a Winamp playlist file merely contains text. Each line consists of a file's name, its path on the computer, and the artist's name and song that are listed on the ID tag. Winamp uses the playlist as a map when pulling files from different directories. Playlist files end with an M3U extension; MP3s end with an MP3 extension.
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- The Misc button allows you to sort the list, create an HTML version of the list, and do other goodies. Feel free to experiment.
- To select all the songs that are loaded on Winamp's current playlist, double-click the Sel button. Press Delete or click the Rem button, and Winamp removes all those songs from the playlist. It doesn't erase any files, it just removes the songs from the current list.
- Click the Sel button once, and a menu appears. Choose Sel Zero from that menu, and Winamp deselects any songs that you've currently selected (but it leaves the songs on the playlist). Choose Inv Sel from the Sel menu, and Winamp deselects any songs that you've currently selected and instead selects the songs that you hadn't selected. Yes, you have to play with these playlist buttons a few times before you figure them out completely. Just remember that they never delete any files; they just alter your playlist.
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