Now, I was honestly all set to like this, as Nullsoft hasn't put out anything I haven't liked in a while. All of the versions leading up to their perfect culmination were supreme in their simplicity. Winamp 2.80 had shit tons of stuff for it -- skins, plug-ins, games, whatever -- and it played every single file format known to mankind including horrid baby screaming of death, also known as Punk Metal. Sadly, the same is not true of Winamp 3.

Winamp 3's development led to the creation of a new platform for designers to work on called Wasabi. This new platform would allow each skinner or component scripter to write something that totally changed the software - skins that have fantastic shapes and interactive properties, plug-ins that do everything but make you coffee and the like. And while I'm most certainly not opposed to that, I am opposed to loosing functionality.

Winamp 3 will still play the popular file formats - mp3, wma, and ogg vorbis. But, some of the stranger formats aren't supported anymore, nor is, apparently, in-song skin switching. Track tagging is strange and in most cases unchangable; Winamp will no longer read the correct track tag from a wma file, and it has strange problems with playing any of the other MPEG layer formats.  The program itself is rather buggy, often doing strange and incomprehensibly vile things while I'm trying to listen to music.

The Equalizer seems to be some kind of strange foreign technology to whoever has been writing skins. It is universally tiny, impossible to change, and buggy as hell. Attempting to change to a different skin in which the Equalizer might be more effectively manipulated will cause the program will kick you in the shin and quit, going back to it's 16 mb corner where it will sulk for at least a few minutes.

The playlist system is strangely screwed up, which means that some of your files might not be loaded, your alphabetical sorting will but Aerosmith and ZZ Top in the same snuggling booth, and your attempts to fix any of this will cause both Winamp and the error-reporting program to crash.

They have incorporated an almost MusicMatch kind of "Media Library" which seems to automatically search your drives for media.  Yes, it will play video, but sometimes your computer will stop while Winamp decides if cell x8586497 is supposed to be #004F2A or #FUCKYOU.

All in all, the team at Nullsoft has made some great strides, but they have some serious issues with this release. Unfortunately, they have let this buggy beta software go as a final version ... which is sadly trend-following.

I really hope that Winamp 3.1 is better than this sorry pile of code. But then again, if they do anything more than cosmetic fixes, it can't help but be better.