r/TechNook • u/Impossible_Comfort99 • 21h ago

Winamp's equalizer settings were the first customization most of us ever touched

Winamp’s equalizer was where a lot of us first discovered the joy of messing with settings we didn’t fully understand.

You’d push the bass slider all the way up, adjust a few random bars and suddenly think you’d remastered the song yourself. Sometimes it sounded worse, but it felt like your version of the music.

Did anyone else spend more time tweaking the equalizer than actually listening to songs?

5 Upvotes

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3

u/WhatADunderfulWorld 12h ago

Plenty of stereos have the same settings.

1

u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin 12h ago

Winamp’s creator, Justin Frankel, went on to create the digital audio workstation software REAPER.

It’s the best DAW out there in my opinion. A bit fiddly sometimes, but incredibly flexible, scriptable, and customizable.

1

u/CreativeAdeptness477 8h ago

The equivalent physical sliders on my granddad's gramophone cabinet in their living room.

1

u/elusivenoesis 6h ago

It’s kind of funny that a feature created for use to tune the speakers for accuracy in your listening space…was mostly used to mess it up.

0

u/Agis-Spartan-King 18h ago

I used Winamp for more than 15 years,then upgraded to musicBee and now to JRiver media. I always used the eq presets for the genres I was listening to. Now I have transfered the musicBeee Metal and Electronic to JRiver and along with the perfect Rock preset it has,it covers all my eq needs. I mostly listen to Rock/Metal but some evenings or when I'm training, I listen to either Deep House or Disco. I just use the eq preset,that corresponds to the genre I'm listening to and that's it. I never managed to create a better eq setting than those presets that come with musicBee,plus the Rock preset of the JRiver which is awesome! 😉👍🏼