6 audio/video players to ease the sorrow of losing Winamp

Alas, poor Winamp! We knew it well. One of our favorite audio and video player/streamers, we loved that it kept on kicking the Llama’s butt year after year. Time and the competition caught up with it. Support and development have ceased. Sigh.

Of course, no support doesn’t mean that a pretty darn good program doesn’t work anymore. You can still use it. However, in light of the news, that’s too painful to bear. Here are five ways to move on, plus one other historical-footnote player. Sorry if they’re mostly corporate creations that may have hastened Winamp’s demise. Life goes on.

AIMP 3

AIMP (free) is the player most likely to restore a Winamp fan’s faith in the natural order of the universe. Indeed, tiny buttons and text abound. Wisecracks aside, I personally find AIMP a lot easier to fathom and use than Winamp.

AIMP 3 is handsome, easy to use, and reminiscent of Winamp 2. AIMP has tons of effects, some of them rather nice psychoacoustic enhancements.

It’s also chock-full of surprises, such as very good pitch and tempo variation, a good bass enhancer, and even a decent spatial effect. I’m not much into chorus, echo, flange and reverb, when applied to entire songs, but those are there as well.

AIMP serves as a very good organizer without taking up a lot of space, provides top-notch tag editing, and is a surprisingly able format converter that outputs APE, FLAC, MusePack 98, OGG Vorbis, wave, WavePack, and WMA. There are dozens of other options to dig into, and you should—there’s something about AIMP that inspires the inner audiophile.

Windows Media Player

It’s tough to compete with a program that comes free with Windows.

Windows Media Player features top-notch psychoacoustic bass and spatial enhancements from SRS.

Not only is Windows Media Player efficient at handling audio and video, it has the best psycho-acoustic sound enhancement in the business with SRS TruBass low-end and WOW spatial effects. You can add support for virtually any audio or video file type by installing a DirectX filter and it’s a more than passable organizer. WMP rips and burns CDs, but it doesn’t do photos.

iTunes

Though rendered in a style designed to invoke Mac-envy in Windows users, iTunes (free) is as competent a music player, organizer, and tag editor as you’ll find.

iTunes is a mature and nicely rendered player and organizer.

iTunes also supports video, but doesn’t understand DirectX filters, so it’s limited in the types it understands. Still, that includes biggies such as MP3, MP4, and WMA in addition to its native AAC on the audio side.

The iTunes sound enhancer is nicely tuned, but can’t be finely adjusted as WMP’s SRS FX can. In a fit of evil genius, Apple originally made iTunes the sole connected conduit for iOS device updates and backups (though you can do without it now that OTA updates are supported and iCloud is in place). I mention this only to point out that you may already have it installed.

PowerDVD 13 Pro

Cyberlink has been laboring to morph PowerDVD from just a darn good DVD/Blu-ray movie player into a universal multimedia player that also supports music, photos, and video files. PowerDVD Pro ($65) is easy to use and supports an impressive number of codecs natively, but there’s no support for DirectX filters to play those that it doesn’t.

PowerDVD's main gig is playing Blu-ray discs, but it moonlights as a very good music, video, and photo player.

There’s no psycho-acoustic enhancement, and it’s slow to load files in bulk for organizing purposes, but it does a good job once they’re loaded. If you watch a lot of Blu-ray movies on your PC and want to settle on a single player for everything, PowerDVD Pro merits consideration.

VLC

For some reason, I always head back to the VideoLan Player, aka VLC, as my default player. Not so much because it’s free, or because it internally supports virtually every audio and video file type known to computer-dom, but because of its wide range of  effects, playback controls, and video enhancement.

Though it has a face that only a mother could love, VLC plays everything short of Blu-ray discs and has excellent playback controls and effects.

If you want one player to rule them all—without a lot of extra codec installations—this is the program. It’s also available in a portable version, so if you’re a have-flash-drive-will-travel type, it’s the best thing going.

All that said, the program still doesn’t play Windows video files very well, doesn’t offer psycho-acoustic enhancement for audio, and offers little library functionality. The default look is clunky-looking ,and the myriad options are confusing as well. Regardless, you should have this one around for when the others won’t play something.

Zune

Windows Phone and Xbox users probably have this player/device conduit on their system, but it’s tagging onto this roundup because it’s one of the first programs Microsoft fielded that showed it didn’t intend to play perpetual second fiddle to Apple in terms of design aesthetic. Translation: It’s pretty. A lot prettier than Windows 8, for which it was a harbinger. Sadly, it now seems to be as orphaned as Winamp—the last update removed a ton of features.

Zune plays slideshows and music simultaneously. It also features a very nice audio engine.

Zune rips, burns, and handles audio, photos, and video extremely well. Frustratingly, but understandably, it’s limited to the file types that the Xbox and Windows Phones support (ah, for DirectX support). But I’ve used the program more than once simply for its ability to simultaneously play a slide show of my photos and a playlist of my favorite songs. If your audio and video are Windows-codec-centric, I say take a look. It’s also interesting in that you can see what Windows 8 might have been.

Winamp had a good run, but losing it doesn’t have to break your stride. Switch to one of these competent replacements, and soon you’ll be enjoying your music and video again.

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Distant Worlds gives 4X Players a huge galaxy and many options

Distant Worlds $30.00 Anyone who likes complex games and prefers being a governor to being a god should check out Distant Worlds.

Buy Now

Distant Worlds is a massive 4X game that shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of the genre: detailed systems, technology, and options; very long games that form their own histories and stories; minimalist graphics and effects; and a steep, steep learning curve.

Distant Worlds gives you more sliders to fiddle with during "New Game" than some games give you for the entire experience.

Distant Worlds is definitely aimed at the hardcore player for this genre. It does not attempt to simplify or strip down gameplay or worry much about "approachability." I have a weakness for games like this (see Aurora and Dwarf Fortress) but they're not to everyone's taste. Code Force/Matrix Games has designed Distant Worlds for a specific niche, and they've produced a game that will satisfy the target audience very well.

The default beginning for Distant Worlds gives you a small fleet with which to begin your conquest.

Distant Worlds is sold as a core game and a series of expansions. This review is based on the latest bundle, which included all of the released material. The expansions don't just add "more stuff." They add in entire new categories of activity, such as planetary facilities, changes to the tech tree structure, and so on.

My escorts ward off some pirate ships in Distant Worlds.

The latest expansion, Shadows, adds something very new: the chance to play as a pirate, rather than an empire, focusing on raiding, constructing hidden bases, smuggling, and generally ruling the galaxy from the, well, shadows. The Shadows expansion also offers a mode of play where you begin at a primitive level, with no FTL capacity, and must first develop your home system and learn to build even the most basic craft. The default start position gives you a certain amount of technology and a small fleet of exploration and construction ships.

In many 4X games, the player has total control over all aspects of their empire. In Distant Worlds, civilians run the economy. As the empire grows, fleets of freighters and transports appear, carrying cargo between worlds, constructing mining stations, and so on. You can add mining stations of your own, but the transport of resources across your empire is almost entirely out of your hands, short of making sure you've secured the worlds that have the resources you need on them.

So many choices. So few research points.

This can lead to frustrating shortages if the civilian AI isn't moving the goods where you want them the most. However, this "living universe" feature is one of the most compelling aspects of Distant Worlds. It's a lot like Sim City, in that you can build the structures, but you can't control the people.

As is typical of high-complexity/small-market games, the documentation is sparse, and the full impact of your choices is not always obvious. Distant Worlds offers a lot of freedom, and that means a lot of ways to undermine yourself. Random factors play a part, as well. A game where you begin with high-quality colonizable worlds nearby is much easier than one where you don't find a potential colony world for a long time. A random disaster took out most of my homeworld's infrastructure in one game, leaving me with basically no economy and a perennially-increasing debt, so I couldn't build the facilities to repair the damage.

Distant World's AI can handle nearly all of your empire's tasks, or none, as you see fit. (Private trade is always AI controlled.) It can design ships, form fleets, conduct exploration, and so on. At the highest levels of automation, you can mostly watch the game play itself; with everything off, you can micromanage hundreds of ships and dozens of colonies. Galaxies in Distant Worlds can be immense, with 1400 stars and thousands of worlds and moons.

A medium-sized galaxy in Distant Worlds. Note that none of the stars are background images. You can zoom in on each glowing point to reveal a solar system with multiple worlds and moons. This game is huge.

While playing Distant Worlds, you will stumble upon abandoned ships, alien ruins, pirate bases, space monsters, and strange mysteries. You can send espionage agents to steal secrets or perform sabotage. You can construct wonders of the galaxy, conquer worlds, and forge alliances.

You will also deal with an occasionally obtuse interface, lose track of exactly here you wanted that fleet to move to, and confront bugs. To their credit, Code Force/Matrix Games is quick about fixing issues, but there have also been a lot to fix, most trivial, some major.

The Distant Worlds Expansion Planner shows the worlds I could colonize, if I had ships or money.

The lack of a demo/trial is problematic for a game like Distant Worlds, because of the niche nature of the product. While the core game costs only $20, the feature set has changed a great deal through the expansions. However, the essential gameplay has not. If 4X/Strategy games are of any interest to you, try the core game, and if you like the general feel of it, get the next three expansions and play in the Age Of Shadows.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download this software.

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