Winamp 5.5 Beta (Build 1550) was released yesterday. The major changes in this update are album art support, a SingleUI skin and a new unified meta editor for all various file formats.

Winamp 5.5 Beta Preview 1
Winamp 5.5 Beta Preview 1 (Bento Skin)

I love the new skin. It’s called Bento and it looks really neat. It has a dedicated box to display the various information for the current song, unlike most other skins which display only as much as you are willing to cramp into the scrolling song ticker. The also makes use of the new album art support and displays the album cover in a little box next to the song information. I like it so much that I ended up spending nearly six hours going through music folders to resize and format my cover scans… <_<

Playlist and Visualization panels
Playlist and Visualization panels

The reason why Bento is called a “SingleUI” skin is because it keeps all of Winamp’s various panels in one single interface. The rectangle expands downwards when you open tabs like Media Library and Visualization, unlike the default Winamp 5 skin which splits them into individual panels that can be move around independently.

Media Library panel
Media Library panel

The panels can be resized relative to each other and the entire rectangle can also be resized. However, there is a minimum size for each component and their positions are fixed. This design may be good or bad depending on your preference. You can’t have the playlist and main window on different monitors now with this skin, and the width of the playlist is somewhat limited unless you want the entire player to be really elongated.

Media Library and Playlist panels
Media Library and Playlist panels

The font-size used by the theme is also not very good for displaying Asian characters. Well this always been a problem with Winamp skins and it can be solved by manually mapping the fonts for each individual component in the settings. However, this doesn’t seem to work on the 5.5 Beta for some reason. Hopefully it will be fixed in the final release. Still, despite the slight drawbacks, I personally like Bento’s integrated feel.

Album art
Album art

Of course the feature I like best is the new album art support. That brings us back to why I spent nearly six hours resizing images. Cover art display is nothing special, and other players and even Winamp plugins have long supported it, but it still makes me feel all warm and tingly to see the album covers of the songs I’m listening to. :P

Notification
Notification pop-up

Another nice thing about Bento is that it has a notification window that pops up when the track changes. You can change where you want it to appear and tweak the transition animation. And of course, it displays the album art of the song. Nice.

Sample folder
Sample folder.jpg

Unfortunately, album art support is not done automagically. Winamp does not connect to any database or use any algorithms to smart match your MP3 files to the proper CD covers and fetch them for you. You have to do it yourself by either embedding the cover image into the song itself using a meta editor like the latest release of Mp3tag, or by placing an image file named “folder.jpg” or “cover.jpg” in the album’s folder.

I find the first method to be rather silly as you need to embed the same image into every single song belonging to the same album, which takes up a lot of unnecessary diskspace. I guess it’s only good for people who do not organize their folders by albums. (Which is also a rather silly practice if you ask me…)

Sample folder
Sample folder

While both “cover.jpg” and “folder.jpg” work for Winamp, “folder.jpg” has the added advantage of being used by Windows as the preview thumbnail for the album folder. This makes directory-browsing quite interesting. On an unrelated note, here’s a screenshot of my Maaya collection! LOL.

After formatting all the existing cover scans, about 60-70% of my song collection still lack cover art. I guess I have no choice but to do it manually. There are some programs out there that try to grab album arts automatically from Amazon API but they are generally hobbyist projects that do not really work, usually due to a lack of proper Japanese support. You can give them a shot if your songs are mostly English. MediaMonkey seems to work decently. I would’ve used it if it wasn’t incompitable with Amazon Japan’s unicode API output.

Anyway, I love album arts (even though they are so useless)!!! Now that I have wasted so much time on them, I should really get an iPod touch to make them worth… >_>

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