Forgot my daily driver, its on every computer I own and I use it daily. Its an audio file player called Winamp, and it really whips the Dali Lama's Donkey. Version 5.8 is the one you want and don't take the upgrade it will keep asking you about, Cause Justin had nothing to do with it and it breaks stuff. Great player, lots of plugins and skins to acomadate ever taste and need.

https://archive.org/details/winamp-standard-5-8_202206

I mostly love it because of Window shade mode, where it only takes a couple of lines of screen space and can be tucked in a corner till needed. Also go to for creating .m3u playlists for vlc or whatever.

if u need vu meters on your mp3 player



or not..

 

https://winfindr.com/#download

 

The last v5.9.2 has several improved features over 5.8, including the improved sound reproduction.
The Window Shade Mode makes Winamp work as a background program, with quality loss due to Windows' default automatic lower priority of background programs.

 

if i'm listening to mp3 on my computer, i'm not really expecting a hi fidelity experience. I have audio gear for that.
but thanks for the tip, with all the ambient noise in my living room, I haven't really noticed the lack of fidelity on winamp..

 

R2R

 

It's good to know, if you want a better sound from the same configuration. The mp3s would sound better too when Winamp (or any other player) is not minimized.

P.S. Whether Winamp is minimized to the tray or placed in window shade mode, it continues to operate as a background program.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 3, 2023

when its in windowshade mode I can leave it above my browser and easily mute it if i want to play a video in my browser. It also nice to have the other controls right there so I can raise the volume, skip a tune etc, without having to open a window.Its what separates it from all the other media players that want to hog the screen real estate which is at a premium on a laptop..
I can raise or lower its task priority and affinity in process explorer which is always running in my taskbar..
i can't real tell a difference in fidelity using mp3's, most of my podcast are encoded at 128kb, the music is between 256k and 320k, if I were using Ogg or Flac, it might make a difference, but for my use case, the convienience far out weighs any miniscule loss of fidelity.

 

http://malich.ru/duplicate_searcher#download
Duplicate Files Search & Link (Duplicate Searcher) is an application for searching duplicate files (clones) and NTFS hard links as well symbolic links to the same file. It searches duplicate file contents regardless of file name (byte-by-byte comparison is used). This application allows not only to delete duplicate files or to move them to another location, but to replace duplicates with NTFS hard links or symbolic links as well (unique!).
Identify directory entries that already share a single linked file (hard or symbolic link) on Windows NTFS partitions.
*Starting from version 6 also supports hard or symbolic links on Linux EXT2, EXT3, EXT4 partitions (tested only with EXT-partitions mounted with Ext2Fsd-driver for Windows).
Identify audio, video and JPG files that contain identical media content but have different metadata information. (Unique and new in version 7!)
Replace files with hard or symbolic links. (unique!)
Replacing files with hard link means to link multiple directory entries (file names) to a single file on the same logical drive (aka volume/partition).

 

So you can remove duplicated audio samples safely cause the projects will open them anyway even if you remove the one that was in use. That's gold.

 

That's interesting, I now use (free) Clonespy, a powerful sw to do the same task, but I'll check if this one is more useful.

 

most of the IObit free software is quite good and very useful I've used their Uninstaller, Unlocker and Driver Booster for many years never had any issues.

 

Tinywall a perfect free windows firewall based eh firewall
Fastcopy, a file and folder copy and move and sync utility that is blazing fast (as fast as your drives) and does not endlessly ask for confirmations, like explorer

 

Does it have function to learn and make rules from your responses?

 

Yes but not with popups. You can set it to learn mode and it will learn to allow what you are doing at that time. But I prefer to manually allow the few thing I want to allow. But I do use that sometimes for for example learning a VPN. Start learn mode. Start the VPN, connect and then disable learn mode. It is very easy to install and just as easy to remove. Basicly it blocks everything and does not warn you about that, which is what I want. There is a settings tab where you can set specific windows services, like time, update, sharing, dns etc. Also what I like is you can unblock your local network with one click.

 

OK, I see. Thank you for your explanation.

 

Been using TinyWall for years and I love that it blocks everything by default. Some people prefer firewalls that notify you everytime a new application wants to connect but I think that's for noobs. If you've been using Windows for a while, you will know exactly what you want to allow and what to block, so the notifications are more annoying than anything. My philosphy is unless an application absolutely needs an internet connection to function (like a web browser), there's no reason to allow it internet access. So I leave almost everything blocked. (Honestly hope there's something similar to TinyWall on Linux because Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows that I'm willing to use voluntarily)

 

Connected to my previous post - if you are interested in finding all of your hard links, you can use AllDup.

https://www.alldup.info/

 

I quote you because you seem to know about these tools. But ofc this goes for everyone that could help.

I have a specific need sometimes that I've yet to find the answer. Sometimes I need to know the latest version. So this only applies to exe's and dll's. The version is something you can see when you right-click and go to the details tab of the windows file explorer. Funnily enough all R2R's keygens show their versions once you close them.

For several reasons the latest date doesn't work, because that changes once you extract from a zip, rar, you copy or move, etc.

 

I wonder if it can find duplicates of similar files of different size (such as images and videos of different dimensions and format, audio files of different lossless format...) ?

 

I'm not sure if this will help you in this particular case, but you can try ExeProperties.
https://www.extrabit.com/exeproperties#:~:text=EXE files contain the program,code or 64-bit code.
xtended properties shown
Type Shows whether the executable code in the file is 32 or 64 bits.
Min. Windows Version Shows the minimum version of Windows required to run the executable code.
Built With Shows the version of Microsoft Visual Studio used to build the file. Note: only a version number for the build tool is stored in the file, so the version of Visual Studio used is inferred from this. If the version number is not valid for Visual Studio (most likely because the code was not built with Visual Studio), then only the version number is shown.
Subsystem The subsystem the file is built for. The most common values are Windows GUI for a normal Windows application, or Windows Console for a file that should be run from the command line.
Timestamp The date/time that the file was built.
Large Address Aware Indicates whether the file supports an address range greater than 2GB. For most 32-bit applications this will be No and for most 64-bit applications this will be Yes.
File Types Supported
Although the most common types of file that ExeProperties will be used with are EXE and DLLs, this is the full range of file types supported:
.exe Executable file
.dll Dynamic-Link Library
.ocx Active-X Control
.cpl Control Panel Item
.drv Driver file
.scr Screen Saver file
.sys Windows System file