[Flac-users] Winamp 2/Winamp 3 and FLAC plug-ins

[Paul Doland]

I know that Winamp has its loyal following.  I've never used it much.  Also,
I'm a novice at computer music.  I've always just bought CD's and never used
computer music.  So perhaps I'm an idiot or just not very music-software
literate, but I so far haven't been impressed with Winamp, or the FLAC
plug-in.  Just for one example, I've got a dual-Althlon MP 2000 system
running XP Pro, with 1 gig RAM, 15,000 RPM 3.9 msec access time SCSI
Ultra160 hard drives, and a 52X CD ROM drive that does 52X audio ripping.
And yet, when I play CD's with Winamp 2.91, I get pauses and glitches, but
not when I use Media Player.  Something seems terribly wrong to me.

I have heard that Winamp 3 isn't very popular among Winamp loyalists, and
many Winamp users are sticking with Winamp 2.  I've also heard that Nullsoft
has decided to go back to the Winamp 2 codebase, but add Winamp 3's skinning
engine to it and that will be called "Winamp 5".  At least that is what I've
heard on www.wincustomize.com.

Okay, so where am I going.  Well, for one, I've installed Winamp 2.91, the
latest 2.x release, and the FLAC plug-in for it.  When I go to try to play a
.flac file with it, all it seems to do is just convert it to a .wav file,
and then I have to play the .wav file.  I thought the whole idea of FLAC was
that it was good for real-time decoding.  So I was expecting Winamp to play
the .flac file directly without a specific conversion to .wav step.  Am I
missing or not understanding something?  Does the Winamp 3 plugin work
differently and play .flac files directly?