Devious Journal Entry

As you may/may not have heard, Winamp will be releasing an Alpha of version 3 shortly. It seems that the feature touted the most is free-form skinning. I just wanted to take a moment and share my views on the whole Winamp versus QCD debate.

Personally, now that my WA2QCD skin converter functions (most of the time), I don't even notice that it's QCD and not WinAmp. Unless, that is, I look at that nifty Task Manager(WinNT) icon in my taskbar. Then, of course, I KNOW it's not WinAmp.

How? Because it's not full. Even when WinAmp is doing nothing, it hogs as many processor slices as it can. Being somewhat of a programmer, this seems to me to be not only bad form, but inefficient use of system power. If I had a dollar for every time I would wait for an app to load while listening to WinAmp, I could buy NullSoft and AOL/TW.

To me, this is the MOST important feature of QCD -- it only uses what it needs!!! Playing an MP3, with External Vis & EQ on, and a taskbar that looks more like random belches from an Icon program (i.e.: VERY full, 10+ apps loaded) I only get 2-10% CPU usage for QCD. With Winamp...

So what if Winamp is free-forming their skins... I'll lay dollars to doughnuts that they still haven't fixed the CPU usage to only use what it needs. If anything, I'll bet it uses more.

In closing, thanks Paul/Matt for making a wonderful media program that isn't cpu greedy!! Ever since 3 first came out, I haven't played my music on anything else!!! (so not only does it play music, but simplifies my growing collection of shortcuts!!!)

*handing the soap-box to someone who really deserves it*