Beware that WinAmp skin

Internetnews.com ^ | August 26, 2004 | Ryan Naraine

[Darksheare]

LOL!

Wild Tangent made a few plugin games for WinAmp.. one of them being a driving game that was pretty cool.
Problem was, they stuffed it so full of spyware that it bloated it's coding way out there.
Dunno why they even bothered.

[Darksheare]

Thanks!
Tried Winrip, it goofed things up, slowed the machine down, and left all kinds of registry gunk behind when it was uninstalled.
It handled decoding mp3's in a craptacular fashion.
(Made them sound tinny, even the 320 bitrate ones.)

[Not A Snowbird]

Great, worldwide tech support! I love it!

(I was afraid to ask what this was... knowing this group, it could have been something... well... you know.)

[JoJo Gunn]

Winamp 2.8 ain't bad, if you tell it up front you don't have an internet connection. (I'm not one to use media players on the web anyway).

Real Player is something else again. I learned the first time I tried it how devious those *******'s were, when during an install dialog box there were plenty of unchecked items, but only if you scrolled down did you see 3 or 4 boxes pre-checked giving authorization to phone home. Why wasn't that up front?

What also ticks me off is that over here PBS, (the "educational" organization that gets too much of our tax dollars), forces people to use that garbageware if they want to access anything.

[JoJo Gunn]

Wild Tangent comes bundled with this little HP of mine. Whenever I do a reinstall it's one of the first things to be removed. (I can't remember what the name of it is, but a driving game is one of the things in the bundle. Maybe it's the same one? It looked pretty good, but I didn't like the idea of going on-line every time I wanted to play it. And anyway, not long afterwards I discovered Mame32 and other emulators).

[JoJo Gunn]

I just looked up Winrip, and to me it doesn't look like much to spring 20 bucks for.

CDex doesn't record, neither is it the prettiest, but for ripping and converting it does very well.

A man who messes with audio more than casually should have Goldwave in his toolbox as well, by the way. It's a sound editor, trialware with the typical nag screens, but fully functional. My experience is with version 4.26, which is still available on the site.

Goldwave

[JoJo Gunn]

"knowing this group, it could have been something... well... you know...."

And I was being so sincere.

[Conspiracy Guy]

I use Mule Skinner 1.0. It is slow but reliable.

[Darksheare]

You can tell it to "GOMF" (get outta my face) in it's settings, but you have to hunt the specific preference settings down.
Like it's internet DBBA database setting..
I gutted that thing when I found it.
Also told it not to report usage stats.

[Darksheare]

Isn't that a huge knife?

[Conspiracy Guy]

Sharp is more important.

[Darksheare]

True, true.
Sharp is important, I prefer razor edged but that's difficult to maintain under real-world situations.

[Conspiracy Guy]

Use a flint knife. Flint doesn't dull like steel.

[Darksheare]

Drat, was using obsidian.

[Conspiracy Guy]

Flint, flint, flint.