Winamp Alternative (I still have to figure out a better name)

This application is, as you might have deduced yet, a mp3-player similar in functionality to the very first versions of winamp. Why would anyone need an alternative? I was missing two features:

• Ability to "remote" control Winamp. I mean with this, still sitting in front of the computer, but not having to search the winamp window and pressing a button to stop the music (or for that matter pause, change volume, etc).
• Ability to "mark" the pieces I like best and be able to sort them by this score. After discovering internet-radios I had thousands of mp3 files and I wanted to score them with just a key (well actually two keys). Additionally I implemented in the version 1.2 the possibility to create a list of tags which can be assigned to the pieces. Of course all this scoring happens also with a system-wide shortcut.
  
• And less important but nice anyway: I wanted the current play position saved often, so if the system crashes, I don't have to guess what I heard last and what I didn't hear yet.

Controlling the application

The overall GUI is very similar to the winamp. I didn't bother with skins, fancy colors or appearence in general because I just want it for hearing music. So the application has just a menu, a list of files, the usual track bar for seeking and the obligated navigation buttons (play, pause, etc).

When minimized, the application shows only in the tray icon area, but still can be controlled with some shortcuts. For the shortcuts I used some keys in the standard keyboard which I never use for other purposes (the left windows keys):

The M key (the right windows key) acts as a modifier, by pressing this key and one of the red marked keys you can score the piece currently being played (1,2,3,4,5 keys), change volume (8,9,0 keys) and jump to the next or previous piece (cursor keys). For play / pause you can use the windows context-menu key (without modifier key).

If you own a multimedia keyboard then you can use the play/pause, next, prior, volume up, volume down and mute keys to control the application.

Scoring pieces

You can score every song from 1 to 5 as many times as you want. The total score is the average value. This average value is shown in the last column of the list and in the tray icon itself. With the menu you can score the selected songs or remove the score. The score of all songs is saved in the file score.xml in the directory where the winamp2.exe lives.

If you happen to hear music at two different computers, you can synchronize the scores of the two of them with the merge function. Just copy the score.xml file from computer A to computer B and select merge from the score-menu. The score.xml file in computer B contains after that the scores of both computers.

Tags

As you listen the songs you can tag them also with a shortcut. There can be as many tags as letters, when creating a tag you specify which letter is to be assigned. During the play of the songs you press M key and the configured letter and the song is tagged. To remove the tag you press again M key, Shift and the configured letter. By using the menus you can set or unset the tags for a group of files.

Rendering engine

The engine playing the mp3 files is DirectX. This means, that winamp2 won't be able to play any files, if windows media player isn't either. If you have this problem if probably because you need a mp3 codec.

New in Version 1.1

Entries can be sorted by dragging them.

Entries can be copied to another directory by holding CTRL key when dragging them to an open explorer window.

In the entry context menu it is possible to open the file in an explorer window.

Download

here