Winamp 5.5 lite vs. XMPlay Memory Management

Posted by Martin in Music and Video, Operating Systems, Tools, Windows, software  Tags: , , , , , , ,

15

Sep



A new beta version of Winamp 5.5 has just been released as usual in a full, pro and lite version. Winamp lite is basically a music player supporting many different audio formats while the other Winamp editions support video playback, cd ripping and an integrated browser to browse sites like Shoutcast.

I never quite understood why someone would use Winamp to play videos because this functionality was introduced into Winamp when several other great software video players like VLC, Mplayer or BSPlayer were already in existence. I therefor decided to compare the lite version of Winamp 5.5 against my favorite music player XMPlay.

The Winamp executable has a file size of roughly 2.2 Megabytes while XMPlay one of 340 Kilobytes. The XMPlay folder has a size of 1.9 Megabytes after installation while Winamp’s folder one of 6.6 Megabytes. The first noticeable difference can be found if you open both players without a song and take a look at the Windows task manager.

XMPlay uses roughly 550 Kilobytes of memory in idle state while Winamp lite uses 1.37 Megabytes. I decided to load a seven Megabyte mp3 file into both players. XMPlay was using 2.52 Megabytes afterwards while Winamp 5.5 lite was using 3.88 Megabytes. The difference between both players rose from roughly 800 Kilobyte in idle state to 1.3 Megabytes in idle state with a 7 Megabyte file in the playlist.

xmplay

I pressed the play button in both players and switched back to the task manager. Winamp 5.5 lite was now using 6.24 Megabytes of memory while XMPlay was using 3.84. The difference rose to 2.4 Megabytes.

Last but not least I decided to see how both players would do when playing Internet radio streams. XMplay was using 3.53 Megabytes while playing a 128 Kbit stream while Winamp used 7.66 Megabytes.

winamp 5.5 lite

The conclusion is that XMPlay has a far better memory management than Winamp. The real important state is of course when playing music files in the music player and this is where XMPlay really excels. This means, if you really want a “lite” player you should switch to XMPlay instead of Winamp 5.5 lite.

Read More:

XMPlay Homepage
Winamp 5.5 beta download


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11 Users Commented In This Post

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yair says, September 15th, 2007   

and i though foobar200 was lean… thanks martin. great content

HED854K says, September 15th, 2007   

Great article.
I switched from Winamp to Xmplay since ages, but I didn’t know about the memory things.

Joose Haverinen says, September 15th, 2007   

When having 2gb of RAM (which a lot of people nowadays do), people prefer looks over lite. For example foobar2000 has skins which both look good and are fluent to use.

http://dawxxx666.deviantart.com/art/AvA-1-4-on-Vista-63667544

This one is my current favorite. Waiting for the next version.

Enigma says, September 15th, 2007   

I know the feeling, i prefer foobar2000 especially with this config

http://www.fooblog2000.com/2007-06/fofr-version-09

Martin says, September 15th, 2007   

Well I got 2 Gigabyte of Ram and prefer it as light as possible. Must be a relict from the past ;)

Thinker says, September 15th, 2007   

Does that few MB really matters?
You have 3MB more free ram, but for example Firefox consumes more than 100. One FF plugin can consume few MB.
Of course lite programs are better, but only if they dont slow down computer in the long run.

Winamp 5.5 lite对XMPlay » Ghacks CN says, September 16th, 2007   

[...] 原文链接。 I hope you enjoyed reading this post. You may now subscribe to my RSS Feed, scroll down to 留下评论 or get back to the homepage.   I recommend Giganews, the ultimate P2P alternative: Read here why [...]

Mosey says, September 17th, 2007   

I’m personally a fan of Winamp for music (love the skin availability) which I find isn’t readily available for Foobar or XMPlay. As Thinker mentioned, when Firefox (love, dislike relationship :P) is taking up tonnes more memory, 2-3 MB extra from Winamp isn’t really going to hurt. It would be nice (one day) if I could find a current Winamp version that *didn’t* support video play-back, since as Ghacks has already pointed out - it video functionality is rubbish - and VLC or MPC are far better alternatives.

Top aplicaciones para reproducir multimedia » By arturogoga » article » arturogoga.com says, September 18th, 2007   

[...] es la primera vez que mencionamos a XMPlay.  Lo probé debido a las buenas recomendaciones de Martin al respecto, y hasta ahora no me ha [...]

unruled says, July 23rd, 2008   

@thinker: even if you have 50gb of ram, why use an inefficient program if you have a more efficient one?

That is the policy I follow, and it doesnt have to sacrifice on looks: xmplay has really nice skins. For me its also not only memory usage, but how snappy and fast the program feels. This is strongly ocrrelated to memory usage ofcourse, but not solely.

Winamp Auto Tagger says, August 3rd, 2008   

[...] a new operating system. This has changed in the last two years because I did switch from Winamp to XMPlay which is only using half of the resources that Winamp Lite is using when playing music. (4 MB vs. [...]

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