Re:Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
by amlib on Friday January 22, 2021 @09:32PM
(#25878999)
To corroborate your point, I loved fiddling with the Enhancer plugin:
https://i.imgur.com/DuxpATX.gif
It's what started my desire for better sound quality, pursuing better equipment and assembling my own crazy dsp stacks in order to... well, enhance sound quality, which I do to this day!
Dealing with equalizers, dynamics processors, crossover, convolvers/IR, applying hrtf/hrir found on the net, using room eq wizard to try and improve speaker/room response, buying a damn binaural microphone so I could make my own ears impulse responses... I ended up learning a lot about the subject, form such a tiny "seed"
Well, yes and no. Remember, Windows Media player used to be this:
https://www.windows-media-player.com/wp-content/uploads/2019...
and without system-installed codecs, which were hard to come by for something like MP3 files, it was basically useless; you could play MIDI files through your shitty OPL-3 FM synth and that's about it.
Winamp came with a remarkable set of capabilities: - A bunch of useful codecs out of the box - An extensible plugin system, with input, output, general, and visualization plugins - Skinnable UI
The secret sauce was the extensibility, really. You could kill hours just tweaking your Winamp, installing crazy audio effect plugins, and so forth. It was really a new breed of application for most users who were used to really business-like apps.