Why a radio station should never run on WinAmp

[MrBoogerhook]

Maybe it's the gay music playing! Just sayin'!

[vwestlife]

@MrBoogerhook I am gay, so therefore all of the music I play is gay too, and that's wonderful!

[MrBoogerhook]

@vwestlife More power to you my friend but i still think it might be the music!

[gery315]

I'm using sam broadcaster for my pirate station, i tried some radio softwares, but i think sam is the best(for me). And the most pirates in Hungary use this. But about 6 years ago i used winamp with sound solution plugin(audio processor) and with auto fader plugin, it was good enough, and it was never lagged.

[mountain177]

what are those songs?



[adiblol]

pwn3d ;D Soundcard buffer underrun.

[tonytonytee]

fuck you you pieces of shit..

[adamkleinschmidt2003]

"Sooomtimes"

[adamkleinschmidt2003]

@adamkleinschmidt2003 0:49

[supabunny]

this is NOT a glitch or hiccup in Winamp. blame the computer itself, as in soundcard and/or drivers

[sweetgyy]

WINAMP! IT REALLY KICKS THE LAMA MA MA MA MA MA MA MA MA SSSS SSSS

[TheComputerGuy24]

I remember watching this video last year before I had a YouTube account and one day I heard this song at a store with no glitches. I know why.

[iamnaughty123]

I agree with majcherek,,,,sounds more like a wimpy computer that cannot keep up with the task at hand. Resources or CPU at 70% not winamp's fault.

[G8GT364CI]

Too bad I thought it sounded great until the glitch.

[majcherek128]

Well... I'm no fan of WinAMP, however... This wasn't WinAMP's fault.

More like a lack of system resources, or sound card driver bug.

Try switching away from Win98, I think that would solve a lot of problems ;)

I don't know the specs of the machine, but chances are that it will be able to run Windows XP.

I do however remember you mentioning SoundBlaster 16, which is an ISA card. That may indeed cause some headaches. Easiest way is probably to get a new soundcard.

[LanceCampeau]

Whatever.... been using Winamp for over 10 years with no glitches. No reason to change.

[ferdy1972]

What da fuckk is this?

[thelazycomic]

Wow... I haven't seen a CRL unit since I worked on the air in AM radio... and that was back in the late 70's / early 80's. The station that I worked at installed a CRL that was modified by Chris Hood. It made the station sound incredible. Now, they play shit... so it doesn't even matter.

[shiraq07]

I still dont get it. why?

[vwestlife]

@shiraq07 Did you hear the audio glitch towards the end?

[DeZorgenkindjes]

@vwestlife

get a faster computer

[AtariFTW]

@vwestlife price is right sound clip WIN!!!!

[Fuzy2K]

What's wrong with this?

"Somettttime" is a perfectly cromulent word! :P

[GMSamuelRhine]

winamp's never done that to me at all.

[777Ring]

0:48 Fail.

[LumpySpunk]

Gay

[vwestlife]

@LumpySpunk You're damn right I am! :-)

[goffy44]

@vwestlife STOP IT YOU SILLY GOOSE HAHAHAHA THATS GREAT AGREE TO DISAGREE

[thecooldude9999]

and yours does....

[Yarach]

Hi there again,

I have a question. I recently installed a Denon DRa-25. It has great audio quality and a very low power consumption. That all is great but I can't get the radio working. FM nor AM will get any reception. I have the coax cable connected properly ( I think). It used to work great 6 months ago. Do you know what could be the problem?

kind regards,

Jarek

[vwestlife]

@Yarach As much as I'd love to give free tech support for everyone's questions, I can't do it all the time, nor am I an expert on every piece of equipment ever made. Did you try asking in an audio help forum like AV Forums, CNET Forums, or AudioKarma?

[Yarach]

@vwestlife no, not yet. I just hooked it up to my pc and noticed the radio doesn't receive any signal. It still had stored all the channels i put in to the memory 6 months ago. I'll as someone on the forum. Thanks!!

[RiaRadioFMHD773]

@Yarach I have noticed sometimes in newer tuners the am and fm go out at the same time mostly due to a PLL (phased locked loop) failure. That is where the variable capacitor used to tune in stations has been replaced by variable resistance controlled by a TTL logic circuit. This is where the user has even less control over what the demodulator recieves. Though I am speaking with 4 years of basic electronics knowlege that has not been applied in 3 years lol. Don't use it, lose it thing.

[Yarach]

@RiaRadioFMHD773 Ok, thanks for the info. I recently discovered iTunes has internet radio support, so that kinda does the job for me now XD

[tylerwatt12]

i ran my internet station off winamp, used a modified version of ajaxamp so listeners can select songs. never had any problems

[sublimerulz1]

Many commercial radio stations (or at least the ones in Atlanta) run on a program called enco presenter.

[dylan8495]

Win amp is very professional online radio stations use it all the time. But you must know how to use it.

[oatstao]

@dylan8495 sorry, that's a fail. It is nowhere near professional product.

[wogfun]

Don't radio stations use a system called Profhet (spelling?). What kind of radio station would use freeware WinAmp software anyway??? And how would you trigger the cue, with a mouse??? Not very professional IMO.

[chrismaster1]

It took me a few listens to find out what happened. thats why i dont use winamp for my radio station

[xmaddict]

My Dell desktop (Inspirion 530) Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz. 2Gb ram does this when ripping tracks on my computer. It's running Vista. My Dell laptop DOESN'T. It's specs are less but it's on XP.

[coondogtheman1234]

I recorded a song yesterday off the radio to my computer and the song skipped near the beginning and it does that every time the station plays that song so it's the song file and not the equipment and that station might use digital files for the music. the format they use is unknown but probably wav b/c mp3s can be too lossy. and it's not my computer b/c my sound never skips on my machine. I have realtek AC97 audio.

[vwestlife]

@coondogtheman1234 One of my local stations also has momentary glitches that happen every time they play certain songs. I think this was due to errors when "ripping" the songs from CDs into their computer system.

Radio stations generally do not use MP3s for music because they quality isn't good enough, although they sometimes get commercials e-mailed to them as MP3 files. Also network programming is digitally compressed as it is sent through the satellite dish.

[coondogtheman1234]

@vwestlife

Yeah that must have been what happened to my station. it was a bad rip of the song. I'd like to show you this but i dont feel like getting banned for posting music on here. and radio stations probably use uncompressed wave or some other lossless format for the songs. have you seen the headset radio I've modded with a line output?

[SmashCOBamberg]

@vwestlife so whats the best format for a good quality broadcast?

[vwestlife]

@SmashCOBamberg WAV or FLAC.

[SmashCOBamberg]

@vwestlife but WAVs r huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge lol thnx for the quick & helpful response! :)

[vwestlife]

@SmashCOBamberg Hard drive space is cheap these days. Most radio stations probably have several terabytes available for storing music.

[oatstao]

@vwestlife very true.that is why Flac is obsolete. Ok in 1999 maybe.

[oatstao]

@vwestlife gimmie a break. FLAC for broadcast? I have a dual processor computer and FLAC frequenty causes major problems. There is a ton of decoding going on with Flac. Stick with WAV or AIFF . Flac sucks balls.

[oatstao]

@coondogtheman1234 yes I hear mistakes on Itunes radio stations all the time. Digital distortion is the worst. Way more irritating than vinyl skipping.

[coondogtheman1234]

@oatstao I hate digital distortion. that's why I only accept mp3s if they are 192kbps or better but I prefer the 320kbps ones. I have some that I made from converting audio files from one of my PlayStation 2 games and they came out fantastic. I made them 320kbps 48,000hz and they sound awesome with no artifacts. 48,000 was the sample rate of the original game audio files.

[Cringle84]

I once did radio, The computer I used the Windows 98 environment on an old AMD K6/2 550, heaps of SDRAM, 224MB of it, despite many people telling me that Windows Media Player caused more crashes than any other program at the time, I always ended up reverting to that program, despite it ran the CPU flat out constantly. I just found Winamp too unreliable and glitched, plus SRS switched on with all the settings turned down made a nice and simple Auto Volume leveler. Ran for weeks without a reboot.

[SmashCOBamberg]

My station (Laser 105.9) totally got fucked up cuz of a winamp lag: 1 of the servers was responding 2 slow and caused winamp to glitch up and freeze the whole pc. We've had at least 20 seconds of dead air after this. Not funny. Just use MegaSeg, it's better!

[spunker88]

One of my locals had their computer freeze up on air. Audio got glitchy and then everything went silent for a minute until you could hear XP boot sound and then the audio restarted.

[dewdude82]

that's not exactly winamp. that's more of a buffering/latency problem with the sound equipment. was that onboard sound output by any chance?

[vwestlife]

@dewdude82 It was an old Sound Blaster card. But you're right, Windows 98 was mostly to blame here. There's a good reason why the government, military, and financial industry never trusted Windows 3.x and 95/98/ME -- it simply isn't stable and secure enough to be "fail-safe".

[dewdude82]

@vwestlife yeah..windows 98...sound....i had some success with stability with some older ISA cards on windows 95 and the onboard sound in my old compaq seemed to behave under windows 95...but then the output opamp exploded. ahhh..memories.

[Cringle84]

@dewdude82 Yeah, I used a trusty old AWE64 in my setup running a community low power AM station in some Hippie area... was very reliable. Before that I used SB16, both were ISA.

[cartoonfan1920s]

I have actually heard glitches like that on REAL FM radio stations. Sighs, we need to bring back some proper DJs with their turntables and tape cartridges!

[jrcstudios]

Does Winamp's EULA even permit you to use it for broadcast? Probably not!

[audubon5425]

Love the sound clip at the end

[Organgrinder010]

I've actually heard these glitches in broadcast. Back north there was a small station that broadcast indie rock and such. For about 4 hours that day, everything sounded as if someone was fast-forwarding through a CD.

[mig189189189]

Nice vid!

[maskedmillionaire]

price is right...classic

[traxonwax]

I never had a problem running winamp when it came to sound. Most of the problems that I had was after a few months, it would crash more and more, especially when trying to burn a cd. I still use it on my main system today.

[AG3304]

Oh dear.l don't get that with my old cassettes!My sister's MP3 is always doing that,she gets pretty wound up!

[jedw]

ha! my sisters PC regularly skips like that even just playing mp3's without running any dsp.

- windows media player for you, coupled with cpu leaching onboard sound.

[themaritimeman]

Haha, perhaps that's a new style of music coming around? ;)

Wow, how I remember WinAmp (fondly, might I add)! I remember when there wasn't a computer that didn't have it. I don't even know the status of WinAmp now, whether it's still being developed or what. Off to Wikipedia!

[oke139]

@themaritimeman Lol winamp is still VERY famous and is being developed.

[themaritimeman]

It can't be that famous if i've never heard about it until I saw this video lol.

[dianablanton1984]

It is a VERY GOOD thing that I don't use WinAmp for any music to listen to...

I feel your pain, honestly.

[pcwalker]

That wasn't the only problem in some versions around 2001-2004. The mpeg decoder was horrible causing some mp3s to have a really bad ticking sound on some frequencies while using the equalizer.

[Maxxarcade]

I've had iTunes do that too, on my netbook when the CPU gets too loaded down. I used Winamp 2.95 up until recently, and I don't think it ever did that to me. There are adjustments for the buffers that might help too.

[weasel2htm]

I'm just curious how you knew it was winamp?

I recently ditched winamp (too bloated) in favor of foobar2000

[vwestlife]

I know it was WinAmp because it was my own low-power radio transmitter. :-)

[weasel2htm]

Well that explains it. :D

[EncoreEnterprisesLLC]

You can customize the Winamp installation to make it less bloated. For my older PC, I tend to remove options that make Winamp run slower such as Media Library functions I never use.

[bbishoppcm]

Funny... while listening to "Still the One" in my 1997 Mazda 626, cruising at 40 MPH, I was hit head-on by a 75 year old man in a Chevy S10, and rear-ended by the car behind me... there was not one salvageable part left on my car (engine block cracked, every body panel was damaged, even the front and rear seats were destroyed!) that song still sends chills down my spine, six years later...

[vwestlife]

The only thing I can compare to that is Elton John's "I Want Love"... the last song the radio station I was listening to on the morning of 9/11/01 played before they switched to all-news coverage of the day's events.

[ReviewTechUSA]

winamp has been awful since like 2002. It was nice in the beginning because it was the first of its kind. Hell i remember using the thing in 1997, but once mp3's and digital music became mainstream, a ton of products proved themselves superior to winamp.

[kevin12567]

Price Is Right losing horns, lol

[Jamiep84]

I've never experienced WinAmp skipping like that, even with the lousiest of plugins loaded.

Perhaps it's your PC and soundcard.

As others have said though, I'd never trust a regular PC to run my commercial radio station's playout system if I had one :)

[wilkes85]

LOL that's awesome. It's funny hearing glitches on the radio, like the DJ forgetting to turn off the mic after he starts a song lol

And my mom says that back in the day, the LP would occasionally get a lock groove, and sometimes it would go on and on for a few minutes if the DJ wasn't paying attention or something lol

[ForgetfulCollector]

I once heard a local station have technical problems like that, where the song just started doing random stuff. The DJ went "uh-ohhh" and changed the tune. It was hilarious because of the way he said it.

[coondogtheman1234]

thats probably a crappy soundcard on the PC. my mom's old PB multimedia C115 did that when playing music. thats why you should use a dedicated playback system to playback audio on the air. I heard windows sounds on a radio station once. I see many companies that use regular consumer PCs for stuff and PCs are not reliable. personally I like the winamp player but I wouldnt depend on it to play music on the radio.

[vwestlife]

@coondogtheman1234 WinAmp skips like this when its playback buffer runs empty. On a slower computer this often happens when WinAmp starts playing a new song, because it tries to pre-load most of the file from disk in one shot, which causes a large load on the CPU and disk drive.

[coondogtheman1234]

that happened on my moms pc it was an old PB with 16mb ram and only a 120mhz cpu. and winamp on that PC skipped every now and then while playing mp3s. also it had a crappy combo modem/sound card. I dont have that problem on my XP computer. winamp doesnt skip on this machine.

[Comptekhs]

I remember some computers in early 90s had a problem with the graphics card and winamp. When you would scroll a web browser or anything else while playing mp3s it would make the audio skip.

[coolbluelights]

but wait a minute.. one time about 18- 20 years ago I heard some station that was still using turntables and the record started skipping! no joke! lol

[SlimeTron5000]

Irresponsible people or equipment.

[SlimeTron5000]

But that sounds a lot like a CD skip to me. My records never skip (unless there is a deep scratch). I wonder why?

[coolbluelights]

definitely a digital skip

[SlimeTron5000]

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Give my comment thumbs down, I don't care.

[vwestlife]

@SlimeTron5000 WinAmp actually skipped twice during this clip... just slightly at 0:45, and then really badly at 0:49.

[vwestlife]

@coolbluelights By the '80s most radio stations copied their most-played records to tape, and then just played the tapes on the air, so that the records wouldn't wear out or skip.

[coolbluelights]

I don't remember what year it was, i'm almost going to guess 1991, but I definitely heard the record start skipping like a record does. I think it was an AM station

[SlimeTron5000]

Actually, radio stations were transferring the records to analogue tape for a long time.

[coolbluelights]

I'd be like WTF if I heard that on the radio!