Winamp 5.33 vs iTunes 7.3

Well I have talked about this before, iTunes vs Winamp but I have recently jumped ship from musikCube and moved back to winamp. So I figured I would give both the newest versions a spin and did what I could to make both use a little memory with actually hacking any files.

All I want my music player to do is to play music. That it’s. i don’t give a shit about visuals or stores, or podcasts, or internet radio, or ipod support, or whatever. All it has to do is play music, cd’s and rip them if I for ever some reason have a cd.

So how did things turn out?

Well I installed the latest version of winamp and itunes.  Winamp 5.33 and iTunes 7.3

In Winamp I literally removed every plugin that isn’t needed to play my library or rip/burn cds.  In iTunes I turned off every feature but the library. I didn’t delete anything because the preferences didn’t give me the option like Winamp does.

I stat again I did not hack or did anything to change the configs other than use the options available to me through the preferences.

Anyways, Winamp’s memory usage sits between 6000k-20000k which is pretty good for a media player.

iTunes, after installing and turning of all the features used 44000k.  And when you add all the other crap processes it runs, updater, devices and I dunno what else, it was over 55000k mem usage.

Obviously I choose to keep my Winamp installation.

If you purely want to listen to music through a library, Winamp is your best bet. If you want only to listen to playlists, you may want to consider foobar, but!!! it just as much (and more if skinned) than Winamp.

You could also consider Evilplayer but I wouldn’t. No id3 tag support, no way in hell I’m using it.

So there ya go. Winamp wins hands down if you ONLY want to listen to music. If you want to buy songs (pff) then iTunes may be useful. Don’t even mention ipods. I have an ipod and I run the software from the ipod. I can run it on anyones Win installation. If ya have a mac you have iTunes so no worries there.

Oh, btw, I am obliviously talking about all Windows software here.

I am going to try to hack iTunes a little and see what I can do. I have nothing against mac. I use a mac at work and I rather enjoy it. But I am looking at things in a purely functionality/memory usage point of view. Take my word or not, makes no difference to me. Sorry if I sound kinda rude but I got slammed for my last review because Winamp won then too and that was without configuring and I just want to make sure people don’t bitch that I’m a fanboy or anything. I will switch music players if you can show me a better one.

mp3 player - ActionScript

Hey for anyone that reads this. It has been a little bit, but I have a new code snippet for ya’s. It’s a pretty simple mp3 player that you could easily embedded on a site.

Here’s there script (link). It uses a pretty simple XML also.

<song>
<t st=”songtitle” l=”url” a=”artist” />
</song>

Give it a whirl. I will be trying to remake it with a slider on the next version and make it smaller.

Can anyone help me with my Mac?

I have for the last week been looking for a while to make my Finder, always list folders before any other file type. Organizing by kind doesn’t work because I have a crap load of AS and Adobe files.

So this is a plea to all you mac hackers out there: Please make my Finder act like a good file explorer.

Wishlist for next gen of social networks

So today I was playing around with Facebook and every few days it draws closer to what I really want to see social networks to become like.  So I am going to list for you want I really really want to see in the next gen of social networks.

• Email
• RSS
• Online docs
• Blog
• IM
• Communities/Networks
• Persistent messaging system
• Calender

Pretty much take everything Google does, add it to the core of facebook and give it a descent desktop app and you’re set.  But the biggest problem would be not limiting the service you allow people to connect to. If I want to use bloglines, Gmail, Zoho, and WordPress I should be able to.

So that list isn’t just things I want to see aggregated, but features that allow me to interact with them. So I can post to my blog, mark favorites on my RSS stream, create,edit, delete docs, or add events to my calender. I also want to have trusted friend able to edited or add things using the central system.

I don’t see the feature of social networks as just a place to gather and stalk what friends are doing, a centralized portal to who I am and linked to on the internet. I am really excited for the google social network, not because I think it will necessarily be better than Facebook, but because it will be good and it will (hopefully) be real competition for facebook and push the development of Social networks.

coding habits

so I’ve been thinking about my coding habits lately, mainly because I am going to shortly leap into a rather large project: scripting a web based game by my lonesome. and as I was thinking about my technique, I started to think about the web development course I just finished a few months ago.

thinking back, if I  had the chance I would have pushed my teacher more to teach how to properly create code. every time we started a new project I would pester the teacher to explain how I could write code once and have it work. basically, though I didn’t know at the time, I was asking him to teach me how to make functions and classes that could be used and  reused.

this stems from my thoughts that code should only need to be written once for maximum speed/efficiency. and I still think this after scripting tight out for the last four months for a small web development company. you may be thinking well I can write that code with more ease if I just use a lot of if’s or repetition. but you’re wrong my fine friends who believe this. after you learn to write code using functions (I haven’t learned classes yet :S ) your productivity, ease of maintenance and overall better code levels will increase.

you should also not forget includes! for instance this morning I had 8 files to edit a script to that would read children from a XML file, turn them into links and spit em on the page. Then on click bring up a corresponding child. I wrote a 50 line script and saved it three times.  I could have done it the once, but that could have meant ripping someone else’s FLA apart and would have taken about another hour or two. So instead I edited 1 number in each of the external AS scripts and included them into the fla they related to. And done.

far easier than and faster than writing the same thing without a loop or without the includes.

so if you  have the time, and if you don’t I suggest you make it, go and spend some time learning to make coding reusable and more efficient. It will make you far more productive in the long run.