i use winamp 2.81 - what's the point of upgrading? Is it gonna make my mp3s sound better or something?

yes, modern mp3 players support 3D sound and 4x sound-aliasing.

4x aliasing- that work with all mp3s? make a noticeable difference?

yes, creates a much smoother listening experience.

It's easiest to describe aliasing in terms of a visual sampling system we all know and love—movies. If you've ever watched a western and seen the wheel of a rolling wagon appear to be going backwards, you've witnessed aliasing. The movie's frame rate isn't adequate to describe the rotational frequency of the wheel, and our eyes are deceived by the misinformation!

The Nyquist Theorem tells us that we can successfully sample and play back frequency components up to one-half the sampling frequency. Aliasing is the term used to describe what happens when we try to record and play back frequencies higher than one-half the sampling rate.

Consider a digital audio system with a sample rate of 48 KHz, recording a steadily rising sine wave tone. At lower frequency, the tone is sampled with many points per cycle. As the tone rises in frequency, the cycles get shorter and fewer and fewer points are available to describe it. At a frequency of 24 KHz, only two sample points are available per cycle, and we are at the limit of what Nyquist says we can do. Still, those two points are adequate, in a theoretical world, to recreate the tone after conversion back to analog and low-pass filtering.

But, if the tone continues to rise, the number of samples per cycle is not adequate to describe the waveform, and the inadequate description is equivalent to one describing a lower frequency tone—this is aliasing.

In fact, the tone seems to reflect around the 24 KHz point. A 25 KHz tone becomes indistinguishable from a 23 KHz tone. A 30 KHz tone becomes an 18 KHz tone.

In music, with its many frequencies and harmonics, aliased components mix with the real frequencies to yield a particularly obnoxious form of distortion. And there's no way to undo the damage. That's why we take steps to avoid aliasing from the beginning.

Yes. Winamp5 is great. What else should I use? Foobar?

http://www.earlevel.com/Digital%20Audio/Aliasing.html

how would 4x aliasing fix a badly recorded sound source (note the last paragraph)

(i'm sensing possible sarcasm mjrpes )

I updated. I like every plugin that sparks my interest actually working and not crashing winamp.

You can use the oldie version tho.

Some people cant handle change, thats fine.

hey, btw julios... ever had an interest in hegel? last thursday i discovered an audio lecture series on the phenomenology of spirit and am finding it insanely interesting and can't stop listening...

http://www.bernsteintapes.com/hegellist.html

i always thought he was a dense and unreadable philosopher... but this lecture series has really been an eye opener of him.

ok nevermind. i talked him into parallels.

Thnx guys.

tx for the headsup - no never read hegel. I tried some heidegger but couldn't really get much out of him. I'm still very leery of the phenomenology approach, but that's largely due to my inability to understand it.

maybe this lecture series will shed some light...