Winamp is normally the best application to use for almost all your media needs but when things go bad and Winamp doesn’t want to start anymore and a reinstall doesn’t do the trick, where do you go then?
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 3rd 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.
