Bluecave Winamp Slider!

Bluecave Winamp Slider! 2 and Winamp3 Compatibility

(C) Copyright 2002 Bluecave Software. All Rights Reserved.

There is no official/native support for Winamp3. However Slider! can be used through Winamp 2x Plug-in Manager for winamp3 Component.

You can download this Winamp3 Component from,

http://members.telocity.com/~schweitn/wa3/wa2mgr/

Slider! 2.0.0 build 195 (unreleased at the writing date) has been "officially" tested only with the Latest Winamp3 (Final 3.0 build #488) and with Winamp 2x Plug-in Manager 1.0.

Bug reports conserning this combination have lower priority.

There are some possiblities to improve the compatibility (eg. the Playback Resume, and some other modifications I've already done). However those improvments depend highly on my free time and interest towards Winamp3.

Features working with Winamp3:

Sliding and Fading (Near full support)

For fading you need to disable setting Winamp3 - Preferences - System - Advanced - Desktop Alpha Setting. Also the fading is most likely jerky, depending on your skin. With the Default skin it works almost as smooth as in Winamp 2. But note that fading requires an highend computer and video card (with it's latest drivers of course).

If you use the Desktop Alpha Setting the Winamp3 uses quite unreasonable amount of CPU (On my Athlon 1000MHz usage about 60-70%!!). However when the Slider! hides the Winamp the CPU usage drops down to 1-5%. Quite an improvement, eh?

Also in Slider! Configuration - Options - Slider! - Windows the option "Auto-detect visible windows" should be enabled as the Slider! will process all Winamp3 windows as Plug-in windows.

I have noticed that Slider! will actually make Winamp3 screen updating FASTER than it would be if used without Slider!. How is that possible? Well, I'm not sure if it's just something with my display drivers and Windows but, Slider! has been optimized to improve the speed and it seems it actually fixes some Winamp3 "problems". I'd like to have some confirmation on this from others.

Hotedges (Full support)

FastJump (Full support)

For the current playlist. Does not support multiple playlists.

System-Wide Hotkeys

The support is partial. Most basic actions are functional, but some, eg. opening dialogs, saving playlist to html file do not work. Just test which ones work and which don't.

SliderMenu

With Hotkey limitations. Eg. Media submenu doesn't work. Playback and Volume control works just okay.

ExecuteAction.exe

With Hotkey limitations.

Title info (Full support)

May not stay fully supported in future version of Slider!.

mIRC SliderIntf.dll (Full support)

Visual Styles for Winamp (Full support)

As full as can be. Means that it doesn't affect any Winamp3 skinned windows.

Features NOT working with Winamp3:

Playback Resume

It is recommended to disable this feature.

Winamp Auto-Shutdown (Not tested)

It is recommended to disable this feature.

Other things to consider:

No support for Winamp3 skinned configuration screen in Slider!

Jouni's personal notes:

My personal opinion about Winamp3 is that it is bloated media crap. It looks great on screen and paper, but in reality it is slow CPU and memory eater monster. With the Slider! plugin you won't even see the "cool" new skins most of the time.

Winamp3 does not provide anything new which couldn't be archived with set of plug-ins for Winamp 2.

Also the great-new-so-cool WasabiSDK breaks the support for other programming languages than the ones the Wasabi has been created for (in Windows platforms that is Microsoft Visual C++/Studio).

However due the demand I try to provide some sort of support for Winamp3.

Jouni Airaksinen
mintus@bluecave.net