The new developer’s beta of Winamp3 is quite nifty. One silly new feature is the ability to have it crossfade from one song to the next in your playlist. More serious is the supposed ability to script the whole thing. It is quite buggy, but the playback works fine, even fixing a decoder bug where VBR MP3s created with LAME show up in the playlist as having a longer runtime than they should have.

Anyways, it looks like a promising future is slated for the player that still kicks around the competition (RealMedia and Microsoft, namely).

While I’m on the subject of MP3s: this article from PCWorld online must have it in for MP3s, as it asserts that that MP3s fared the worst in their blind “taste test” between digital audio formats. Perhaps that’s true for 64 Kbps-encoded files — RealJukebox did come out on top in that category. However, MP3s did not come out worst in evey other categories; that honor went to Microsoft’s WMA format, which consistently came in far below MP3s in terms of fidelity. What I find annoying is the fact that the article goes out of its way to show Real Software’s superiority while minimizing Windows Media Player’s inferiority, all the while giving the shaft to MP3, which is a free standard.