I’ve been using Winamp for years; ever since I started using Windows-based PCs regularly in fact. I’ve always liked its interface, which provided the inspiration for its open-software cousin XMMS, and more recently was bowled over by the Media Library browser. It was absolutely brilliant! It was responsive and quick, offered effective search, and basically it just worked. That being said, note the use of the past tense. Winamp’s media library browser isn’t “all that and a bag of chips” anymore. In fact changes in Winamp 5.2 took what worked extremely well and turned it into an under-featured, user-unfriendly, unsearchable dog. Winamp 5.2, I’m afraid to say, is a huge leap backwards in terms of usability, and it’s left me scratching my head wondering what the hell the Nullsoft people were thinking when they approved this downgrade.
Unfortunately if you’re a Shoutcast TV enthusiast — as I am, I really can’t do without old Top Gear and Bullshit! episodes — you no longer have the option of using an old copy of Winamp 5.1x, because Shoutcast has recently changed its directory format; if you use the older version you’ll only see 30 streams of Shoutcast TV or radio. That’s a real pity, because the old version is, from the standpoint of an online media addict, miles and miles ahead of what’s current. In fact that’s why I’m writing this article now instead of when 5.2 initially came out. I was just hoping to not have to deal with it at all, but that option is, sadly, not open to me.
Seriously though, what were they thinking? In an era where even web interfaces have become more instantly responsive to user input, Nullsoft went from an instantly-responsive interface to an HTML-based underperforming dog. I can’t think of a single good reason for this nonsense. What’s more, there is also a bit of what appears to be dodgy javascript in there; I’ve gotten a couple of unfixable Javascript errors which required me to restart the application. Why is that? Well, for one thing there is no refresh button anymore. Ponder this for a second. We’re dealing with an interface to media which, in the case of radio or a channel such as GBStv, can completely change every 5 minutes. If you like Shoutcast TV, the ML browser is the very place where you would look to see what’s showing on a channel at the time, but Nullsoft’s usability people — assuming they have even one usability person, which frankly is far from certain — didn’t think it would be a good idea to let the user keep the media info current. That’s just stupid.
It’s not quite as stupid, though, as having a search function that does absolutely nothing, which is exactly what’s been included in the latest Winamp. You see the big list of stations, so type something in the “search” box, click go, and… see the big list of stations again. Sometimes the number of stations is slightly lesser, but this doesn’t seem to follow any logic whatsoever, and is still completely useless at finding what you’re looking for. Most of the time you’ll just see the entire list again, unlimited in any way by the search you were trying to run. And when I say that you see the big list of stations, well, you’ll get that if you’re lucky. Half the time I get a response that there are no stations available, although to be fair that could be a Shoutcast rather than a Winamp problem.
All this adds up to a frankly unpleasant user experience for a user going through the so-called “upgrade.” By my personal account Nullsoft took something that wasn’t broken and decided to fix it — that’s never a good solution. And whereas an upgrade could have been done to improve the looks, usability, or stability of the software, that certainly doesn’t seem to have been the case here. I still have Winamp crash on me occasionally, as much as I recall happening before in any case, and the software is now less functional, less usable, and less user-friendly than it was before. It boggles the mind to wonder why Nullsoft has done this, and there really are no good answers to that. The new media library browser is rubbish, just rubbish.
So, Nullsoft, stop it. I (and no doubt many others) don’t know why you’d do such a thing — are you trying to lose the userbase? — but you really need to go back to the sensible interface. Which one is that? Well, it’s the one that works, that has the better usability, and that’s more user-friendly… and that’s not the one you’re using now.