When comparing Winyl vs Winamp, the Slant community recommends Winamp for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for Windows?” Winamp is ranked 5th while Winyl is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Winamp is:
Modern features are essential for power listeners nowadays, proving that Winamp (while an old app) still offers features users look for in a modern player.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro The library is well organized
Winyl organizes your library by folder and not by ID3 tags. As such, your library stays organized (as long as your music folders are organized) even if you have incorrect or missing ID3 tags.
Pro Looks great
Winyl has a beautiful interface with thumbnails for each album (if the art is in the ID tag). If not, you can easily add cover art. It also has a great mini player and that too has cover art.
Pro You can quickly and easily add music
Winyl is designed to be a fast media player with low resource usage, meaning that it takes about 20 minutes to load 67 000 files. This is a pretty good time frame in comparison to some other media players' import times. So for those with a large library, this may be a good choice.
Pro Album view
Shows albums, covers and tracks next to it, like Google Music.
Pro This program uses .cue files to split albums that are in one file
This is a convenient tool for those who may have many albums that are not yet split into separate files for each song.
Pro RSS, Atom Podcasts, and Internet Radio streams (among other modern features) are available
Modern features are essential for power listeners nowadays, proving that Winamp (while an old app) still offers features users look for in a modern player.
Pro A huge selection of skins are available
Winamp allows skinning the interface and there are thousands of community created skins available.
Pro Functionality can be extended via plugins
A wide variety of DSP, input, and visualization plugins have been created by the community.
Pro Great search and Playlist functionality
Considerable functions to search and develop playlists.
Pro Good sound quality
The sound quality of Winamp is good, especially with DSP plugins like enhancer.
Pro HTTP streaming support
HTTP streaming is necessary for both live and on-demand content, which it can deliver without lengthy buffering or waiting periods. It is also less susceptible to network hiccups than other forms of streaming.
Cons
Con It only shows the file name when playing tracks
Winyl cannot display the format or bitrate of the track as it plays. The user must therefore find the file in their library, select it, and go to properties.
Con Relatively poor quality audio
Compared to other players, Winamp doesn't offer high quality audio.
Reason for Winamp's lesser audio quality compared to other modern audio players is that it uses deprecated audio output interfaces (APIs). In fact since Windows Vista onward, those APIs Winamp is using (such as DirectSound, WaveOut) are emulated in software mixer for compatibility purposes further distancing the audio path from the hardware.
Modern audio players support modern WASAPI audio output for direct access to the audio hardware (especially in WASAPI exclusive mode). For more info see Wikipedia's entry on DirectSound.
Con No Major updates
There are no major updates since version 5.
Con Heavy
At the beginning it was simple to download and install, now it has so many things it became very heavy to download.
Con Cluttered interface
With all controls, skins, and options it's hard to find the basic commands.