Karaoke Forums

I sometimes use winamp 5.03 to run my zipped CDGs.

Lately I have noticed a few problems:

1. Music is disrupted when I scroll through the track list during play back. If I am scrolling through the list, or selecting songs in the list, the music becomes choppy until I stop.
2. Winamp freezes and I get the winamp needs to shut down message. This is more frequent when I am double clicking the next track, while the previous track is still playing and about to end.
3. The SHUFFLE option is selected randomly without me selecting it. This generally results in a shut down, when the program is shuffling through at the end of a track.

This has worked fine for me in the past. I did a reinstall and it is still happening. I use Windows 7, i3, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HD.

Any ideas? I am almost scared to double click the next track nowadays in the fear it might close winamp before the previous song has ended

Please help.

Vic in Sydney

Winamp was meant for earlier operating systems. In an ideal world it should work but apparently it doesn't. You have too many background processes running. If this was my computer I would place my hand upon it and say aloud "This is a karaoke machine and I will use it for nothing else." Then I would restore my original 7 configuration and reload Winamp and disable all network connection features unless I was using a kiosk. But that's only what I would do. You could also try deleting Winamp and installing it in a different directory.

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Okay, who took my pants?

I believe that you can turn off the shuffle feature in options

I agree with everything you said except for the part about re-installing Winamp. Life will be so much better without it. Get yourself a dedicated stand alone software program that doesn't rely on a third party (Winamp) to operate. Even Tricerasoft's Just Karaoke at $35 is a relatively inexpensive and better way to go. Using Winamp is so Windows 98.

Now now, Winamp is perfectly fine. It's probably the most thoroughly tested player of all time with all sorts of coders checking and rechecking each other. As for this "Stand alone" business. Windows applications don't "stand alone." That's the whole idea. These days application developers don't write much bit level code but rather depend on libraries written by someone else so they aren't "stand alone" either. They just don't have a user interface to all the details like Winamp. Winamp is getting old and it was aimed at '98 and that whole now defunct group of OSs. Just use a '98 machine and have no more troubles.

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Okay, who took my pants?

I wish I could thank your response weed, because the entire notion of "Stand Alone" is a little misinformation put out by others.

You're right. Most players don't stand alone. They don't have to write their own custom routines for interfacing the hardware. They don't have to figure out what IRQ or port the sound card is running on.

Karaoke software: "HEY WINDOZE I HERD YO GOT THIS STUFF HANDLED! WHERE CAN I HOLLAR AT?"

Direct X: Hey PNP, this guy wants to make some noise again.

Windows PNP: Uhhm, just tell him port A55 and IRQ 7, oh and if he needs to use direct memory access, he can use 3. Actually, I don't want him near that stuff, can you just pass the messages to me?

Direct X: Ya I don't trust that guy either. He might end up burning the house down if we don't keep an eye on him.

Most softwares add a 3rd layer. BASS audio is just a layer to directX/win32 audio or kernel streaming. The winamp output plugins are the same deal.

It's laughable how people quibble over how the bits are delivered to their analog speakers.

We went with winamp because of the plugins, and the API's. We wanted a system folks could expand on themselves if needed. Never thought folks were simply not interested in doing that.

Thanks for the responses guys.

Thanks everyone for your responses -

All I have on the computer is

Windows
MS Office
AVG Antivirus
Media Player
Winamp
Zipped CDG
Sax Dotty Presenter

I took out all the useless Acer applications it came with. Have any of you used the new versions of Winamp 5.7 onwards with a CDG and pacemaker plugin? How did that go?

While I agree to some extent that a 'standalone' might be the way to go for pure Karaoke - my application is slightly different and I have found that winamp offers the things I need that not many of the others do.

Any other advice would be great.

First off, if this for home use or are you a KJ?

If you are a KJ, get rid of off the extras (AVG/OFFICE) espicvally AVG, that running in the background could slow down your puter.


With your prob, and I have had that same prob you are speaking of, it was because I was using Winamp for DJ too, and the Winamp library was getting WAY TOO FULL or corrupted causing Winamp to lag/crash a lot.

Tried re-installing Winamp....no help.

So wiped the computer clean (aka erased hard drive), re installed windows XP, with absolutely NO EXTRAS (ie: anti-virus/office/ect....) re installed Winamp 5.02 and Sax& Dotties, and all was fine. I also download the new winamp5.58 used for library of regular songs and DJing.

So now I run 2 different version of Winamp....
5.02 to go with Sax&Dotties
5.58 for DJing/Filler music.

Get rid of the anti-virus and the problem will probably disappear. Karaoke machines should not be on the internet anyway IMHO.

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Okay, who took my pants?

I agree. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’ve been using the old version Winamp for 6 years now, never gave me any problems whatsoever. Always work flawlessly on my HP WinXP.

Never download newer versions either. Of course, I treat my laptop as another karaoke unit player. Removed the anti-virus & internet connect properties.

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To be fortunate enough to derive an income from a source as fulfilling as karaoke music has got to be as close to heaven as we can get here on earth!

Normally I would agree with this statement however I notice you stated you were using Win 7, if that is the case I would upgrade to a newer version of Winamp that has been made much more compatable with Win 7.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

I'm using WinXP RLC.

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To be fortunate enough to derive an income from a source as fulfilling as karaoke music has got to be as close to heaven as we can get here on earth!

I guess I should have stated rather "I noticed the OP stated he was using Win 7..." my mistake...sorry.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

Upgraded winamp - haven't had the same problem since. Gig this Friday will be the true test. I think this worked.

Thanks RLC.

Vic in Sydney

I kept having this problem even after my last post.

I thought that the upgrade and clean install helped, but it didn't.

Today I thought about User Account Control in Windows 7. Shut it off.

I had absolutely no issues after that. Is anyone aware of any issues with UAC causing winamp to freeze? I think it is really fixed now.

Thanks all.

Vic in Sydney

Sorry I didn't mention shuting off UAC in my previous post. Don't know if UAC has any effect on Winamp alone but I do know it does with Sax N Dotties (although I have switched away from SND awhile back) and also on some other pre WIN 7 applications I use so the first thing I did was shut UAC off as well and had also recommended to a friend who was having problems running VISTA to shut UAC off-solved his issues also...now both my machine and my friends machine are dedicated gig machines and that is all they are used for- as recommended earlier in this thread. Also I learned that trying to enque a song too soon after one had just started playing caused the playing song to abruptly stop -this was when using SND- but by waiting until the newly playing song was 15-20 seconds in everything was ok-don't know if it has anything to do with Winamp buffering or not but the numbers seem to indicate so.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

If this machine connects to the Internet, I wouldn't shut off UAC. The correct way would be to run Winamp as administrator.