Cool player, why isn't it used?

hrm, well, I have always skinned coolplayer, and I like it. I use it on my laptop a great deal; it is p90 with 48 megs of ram, and Coolplayer is the prefect low-level choice.

On the other hand, I use Winamp3 on my design machine. I have never been comfortable with Coolplayer's playlist. It has been a while since I downloaded a new version, and they may have cleaned it up, but it is flakey to me on the version I use now.

Also, Winamp has always had a good deal of interface-ability with various shells and skinnables. I use both Talisman and Litestep periodically, and Winamp is rarely ever visible, I use external controls. Others use Windowblinds-based controls, and various other apps, so that would be a big factor in choosing a media player for most people who use skinnables, IMHO.

To me, Coolplayer is great for what it claims to be, a really lean, resource-friendly app. For most people 10-15 megs of ram and a couple of percent of cpu is no big deal, though, so they are going to lean toward more feature-rich, mainstream players.

that's my 2 dong, anyway... (don't you get tired of cents?)

Simple. It doesn't play OGG files. Does it?

Uh...yeah it does...

Then it's simple. Winamp's still better.

I agree that winamp 2.8 is better (although limited as far as proper skinning goes), but winamp 3 is a resource pig!

Peff: i'm not having this conversation again... I posted a comparison of all the resources various players use on my system about a month ago. If you say winamp3 is a pig, please have the stats to back it up.

hm, dasn't make it clear to me

but, i am now for a while in the "skinning thing" but not in the "programming thing" .
Now learning how to skin windows media player and winamp at the moment, it's 2 bad that there aren't much people that use cool player. (how ever winamp 3 support .png files (for the persons who skin their own skins) and that makes it to a great skin, cause its transparant, and you dont have the ugly stupid strange collored pictures at the eges...)

Generally speaking, CoolPlayer isn't as popular as other players such as WinAmp. Why? I'm sure there are dozens of reasons, such as it was written by a programmer in his free time as opposed to a team or programers owned/sponsored by a large and wealthy company. Or maybe because the programmer stopped working on it and it got 'stale' before being moved to source forge. Perhaps it's because it can't (or at least couldn't) play CDs. Maybe because it doesn't have visualizations. That said, it's a darned good player and does an awful lot everything considered.

Also, right now there are a lot of good and popular players out there to choose from. There really isn't a "best" player - it's whatever player comes closest to suiting your needs. People often have very different needs/desires in media players, which is why there isn't one player that everybody uses.

I would add that it is kind of self-perpetuating, as well. I mean, more people use it, so then more people skin it, and that means there are more skins for it, which means there are more reasons for people to choose it. If coolplayer had more really nice, exclusive skins, then I am sure it would get a equatable boost in attention.

Moral? Keep Skinnin!

Yeah, i am thinking you are making a point there bakerstreet, but there again, because winamp v. 3.0 supports .png files in his skins, its more atractive for people to skin it.
BUT, if there are more skins for a player people get "choesier"(or however you spell it)
If you are the only one who skin it people are greatfull, and download your skin very much times.

BTW, thanks for informing me of the fact that CoolPlayer does play OGG files. I always thought that Cool Player could only play MP3 files, but since it actually can play OGG files, I'll have to give CoolPlayer another shot.

I prefer WA 2.x over Coolplayer for general MP3 play, but I absoloutely love skinning Coolplayer. I'd love to see it get more developing work done to it, to cure some of the playlist irregularities, and also to add per-pixel support.
In fact, if I had my way, every skinnable app would have per-pixel.
There should be a new law......

bakerstreet...I stand corrected Nullsoft has obvioulsy made some changes since the last beta I tested. It does seem to use less resouces than it doesn't crash as often. I did not read your extensive/exhuastive comparison of the various players on all available systems. I was basing my statement on earlier beta versions (my fault).


BTW...Sorry about your 2" dong problem....

ooops..I does seem to use less resources than it did and it doesn't seem to crash as often....

ACK! waittaminute... Dong is currency, baby.

(cue: Barry White sountrack...)

Otherwise, you don't wanna tread into those statistical waters... I got r/t stytem 'resources' to spare...