What is New in Winamp 5.58?
- Major podcast overhaul
- New Windows 7 support including taskbar player controls
- iTunes Library Import
- Find & manage Add-ons directly in your media player
- Available in 16 languages including Turkish, Romanian & Brazilian Portuguese

the guys at the Winamp HQ in Dulles have released a new version of Winamp this week!
Winamp 5.57 has improved support for Video Playback (mkv, mp4, …) as well as improved Windows Vista / 7 Thumbnail previews.

Grabb the new Winamp now!

Winamp might be great but the developers think everyone runs Winamp in the perfect environment and doesn’t include ways for the installer to fix your Winamp installation for you. This means that if a user, that doesn’t know too much about Winamp, somehow brakes it (and it’s not always their fault) they won’t know how to fix it and probably use another inferior media player.

So what’s the problem you might ask?
Winamp saves all its settings in your application data folder and if you uninstall Winamp these files aren’t deleted and are left behind for if you someday want to install Winamp again and want to have all your settings back again. A simple reinstall also doesn’t touch these files so if these files get broken there’s no simple way for a average Joe to fix their Winamp installation with just a reinstall. Luckily this is just a Winamp problem and hopefully they’ll sort it out because on other installers like VLC ask the user on uninstall or install if it should delete these application data files for you and basically start a fresh installation for you.

Luckily it’s easy to fix manually and here is what you need to do:

1)       Uninstall Winamp

2)       Delete this folder: ”C:\Program Files\Winamp”

3)       Start > Run > “%appdata%/winamp”

• Now delete all the files & folders in this folder
• Deleting this folder will not delete any of your media files though (it will just erase all your settings and make sure Winamp start with a clean install)

4)       Now download the latest Winamp version and install it.

The above will surely fix 99% of all the problems you’ll ever encounter. Remember Winamp works on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 so if it doesn’t work for you anymore then just do the above steps to fix it.

You might ask why did Winamp brake? Well this isn’t as straight forward as it might seem, but normally it can be one of 3 reasons:

• The settings file are corrupt (Probably a bug in Winamp or a plugin)
• Your Media Library became corrupt (The index file became corrupt)
• And old plugin was still in your Winamp/Plugin directory **

** Winamp tries to be compatible with all plugins from one version to the next but it’s possible you might have installed a faulty 3^rd party plugin that might not be playing ball with the llama. Luckily for you there will probably already be a new version for the plugin you use or there might be a different plugin for the same job. Ask around on the forum if you need help.

If your Winamp copy has become slow or you think Winamp should be faster you’ll have to wait for my next blog post about how to speed up Winamp.

These are the daily top songs compiled by Winamp Orgler for Every Day!
The Orgler takes the songs that users are listening too and generates the days top played list.

Check out the Winamp Charts

Want to participate as well? We have already written abot how to setup Winamp Orgler.

Winamp Auto Tagger

You can open this dialog by selecting a few files from your Playlist or Media Library, right-lick and select “Auto-Tag” from the Send-To menu.

Take a look at this Article for more information.

Winamp Now Playing

First of all you can show information about your currently playing song straight from the Player: Open up your Winamp Media Library and navigate to ‘Now Playing’ in the left side pane. Then a site loads showing some essential stuff about the artist you are listening to. With a few clicks you can read the Biography or skim through their released Albums, including samples to listen to.
Moreover you can also search for an artist you like using the search field in the upper left corner of the site.

Winamp Music Online

If you don’t have Winamp running right now, you can also navigate to Winamp Music using a browser of your liking and start a search from there. This site also provides a cool Web Application to listen to your artist without the need of starting Winamp.

BrowserPro

Last but not least you also have the ability to use the BrowserPro widget of our ClassicPro Skinning engine to receive information about your currently playing song. ClassicPro 1.13 features the following services:

• SongBook Lyrics
• Discogs
• Explorer View
• Foxytunes
• Google Search
• Metalstorm Artist/Album Search
• Rate your Music
• Songfacts
• Swisscharts
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo! Search
• YouTube Video Search

The devs of our beloved Media Player Winamp have released a new feature: Winamp Orgler.

Winamp Orgler collects your listening history and submits it to winamp.com, in order to show some kind of charts based on your listening behaviour. The general concept is similar to Last.FM. There is also some more in the planning! Stay tuned for updates.

-Martin