Switching to Winamp ASIO Output because of Auto-Tag

Previously i’ve wrote about using FFDShow with Winamp to improve your MP3 sound quality (or any other audio format as long as it is supported by FFDShow), but since that method have one drawback (you can’t edit the ID3 Tag of your audio file), i’ve decided to temporarily switch into using ASIO Output Plugin for Winamp by Otachan. (because it still gives you clearer sound although i still prefer the FFDShow output)

The reason for this temporary switch is … well because the current version of Winamp (5.52) when i wrote this, there’s a known bug that if you tag many files at once it’ll crash Winamp (as reported by other Winamp users) and constantly restarting Winamp to disable / re-enable winamp to use FFDShow after tagging some of my mp3 files really bothering me

Back then i’m fine with my mp3 files collection being displayed as Unknown Artist or Unknown Title because i don’t know who’s the artist or what is the song title, but since the recent version of Winamp (Winamp 5.5) have a built-in AutoTagging Feature that is able to fetch various song information from Gracenote (which is useful btw, because you can automatically tag many of your audio files at once), i guess it’s better for me to temporarily switch into using ASIO for a while until all of my mp3 / ogg / mp4 files has been properly tagged

and here’s a screenshot of how the audio files list displayed after it has been automatically tagged :

And just in case you didn’t know, to use the auto tag feature in Winamp 5.5 all you have to do is just press ALT+3 to bring up the File Information window and then press Auto-tag to fetch the song information

or if you want to auto-tag many files at once, you can choose send to Auto-Tag

Related Links:

http://www.winamp.com – Winamp
http://otachan.com – Winamp ASIO Output Plugin (Make sure your soundcard support ASIO before using this plugin)

Update: Because i received hate email message from someone who’s basically upset because he can’t read anything on Otachan website. I’ll just tell you this, I CAN’T READ Japanese text too, but i can find the download link without problem (just use common sense) because he put Winamp 5 text clearly so i can guess the ASIO Plugin can be downloaded from below that text. And it comes in two flavours, the first one is DLL version while the other one is standalone EXE version (i choose to use this)

And lastly, if your soundcard doesn’t support ASIO (well my Audigy 2 card finally dead, and i switched to Realtek HD Audio 882Onboard Soundcard), you can always use ASIO4ALL from http://www.asio4all.com