Jon Kruger’s Blog

Winamp has been my media player of choice for years, and for two very simple reasons — global hotkeys that allow me to change what’s playing without opening up the app, and the Classic Skin which is really really small so that it doesn’t take up lots space on my desktop with some gaudy looking interface. No other media player has these things (even though someone could probably code something like this in a day or two).

I installed Winamp the other day (I had just been listening to music on my mp3 player for awhile) and I discovered that the equalizer no longer works on DRM tracks! I thought, there has to be some mistake. Without the equalizer your music doesn’t sound right at all.

Apparently there is no mistake. It sounds like AOL (which now owns Winamp) was in danger because it was fairly easy to create Winamp plugins that would allow you to strip DRM out of your music files. Because of this, AOL was getting pressure, so they first completely took away the ability to play WMA files in Winamp and eventually fixed so that you could play WMA again — but now the equalizer doesn’t work.

So now because Winamp was a little too user-friendly, Microsoft and the music industry are playing hardball and are forcing us to use their inferior media players. I never really minded DRM because DRM helped bring about iTunes and other online music stores without the mass piracy of the last 90’s, but when something like this happens, it’s really frustrating.