Case Study 6 - Winamp
One programs that was an envy of mine of Windows users for a long time was Winamp (back before that, I used to hate it; strange). The closest I ever got to running it was the hopelessly unstable WinampMac 0.67 alpha. Yet, even now that I have Winamp on my own PC, it has joined the collective of programs that has fallen under the spell of my bug magnetism. Nothing ever escapes.
Start off a long file playing, such as a liveset, and leave Winamp’s time display set to time remaining. Watch as it crosses over the 100 to 99 boundary.
Here, I switched from a 225 VBR MP3 to a WAV, and it has left the bitrate readout broken.
ONoodles4 sent me this a few years ago, and says, that came up after i played a .wma; i was playing a cd that i burned in my winamp player at work when all of a sudden this thing showed up. i don't have internet access on that computer so there was no way it could connect to the internet.
The clear presence of DRM
in the address leaves me suspicious. Rather careless of Microsoft; whatever they were trying to achieve.
I think that these next two pictures are merely indications of the endemic problems in the Windows graphical interface. You can see that, when set to always on top, Winamp not only obscures the tooltips of other parts of the system such as the system tray, but even obscures its own tooltips from itself.
Probably the simplest yet most impressive bug so far. I selected a folder full of MP3s (close to 40) and hit enter to play them all, and ended up with seven different Winamps all running (imagine what that sounded like). One copy did have the majority of the MP3s in its playlist, and the remainer had one tune each. The superiority of IPC-based file launching (DDE, AppleEvents) is pretty evident here however.
Finally, what gives with this tooltip?
