Saturday 10 November 2007

Pic of the day: Screenshot. Yes, it is financed by advertising.

Winamp Remote

Winamp has been popular for years among young people, who have the curiosity to install something that didn't come with the machine. It is a small music-playing program that runs on your PC, playing MP3 files and all the other competing formats. Lately it has also been playing video. It is still small, it is still fast, and it is still one of the best at what it does. But now, as of version 5.5, it does something else. It lets you play your music wherever in the world you are, as long as you have access to the WorldWide Web.

Winamp Remote consists of two parts. One runs quietly in the system tray of your home machine, and waits for a signal. The other is a web site. When you log in there, a request is sent to your home machine, which will then list the music on you hard drive(s) that Winamp is aware of. The user interface is pretty much the same as the new Bento interface for Winamp itself. When you select a song, it is streamed from the home computer. So obviously you need to have broadband at home for this to work.

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So is this the ultimate music experience? No: Even with broadband both at home and at work, I found that the sound quality was inferior not just to listening at home, it was also inferior to online music services. It was acceptable, but I sure hope it improves over time.

It also took some time for the program to connect - despite my fairly high speed broadband and no peer-to-peer programs running at the time. In fact, the program times out fairly regularly on first try, but will connect on a reload.

The program also was confused as to what was audio and what was video. Ironically, it was the songs I had ripped from CD with Winamp 5.5 that Winamp Remote tried to play as video. Good old MP3 files played fine.

I like to think that all these things will be fixed over time. This is a new product, and in fact a fairly new idea. I expect it to become standard in media players soon enough, but possibly (at least with Windows Media Player) with some complicated and error-prone Digital Rights Management to make sure nobody loans out their password to a friend. Because obviously it is wrong to let a friend listen to your music. In fact, why not forbid loudspeakers and require headphones for all who want to listen to music? As a temporary measure until we get reliable brain scanners that can reveal people who remember music they have heard in the past, so they can be billed accordingly.

But for the time being, we have Winamp Remote. It is far from perfect, but it is a rather neat idea and it mostly works.