Zinf (thing)

Zinf (Zinf Is Not Freeamp) is the continuation of the Freeamp project after the end of sponsorship by EMusic.com. The name change is precipitated by the AMP trademark for computer music players. Being derived from the Freeamp code, Zinf is a full-featured playlist-based audio player. It is available for both Windows and Linux, and is released as free software under the GNU GPL.

The standout feature of Zinf is its playlist management. Like Winamp 3 and iTunes, and unlike xmms and Winamp 2, Zinf builds a 'music library' from the MP3 and Ogg files you specify, and then allows you to search through the library to build playlists. It categorises the music by artist and album in the music library, and allows playlists to be easily sorted by most any attribute concievable, including length and comment. One particularly convenient feature is that when it cannot find a registered file it asks whether the file has been renamed or moved rather than just skipping it. The playlist manager is simpler to use than Winamp's, though it falls short of iTunes's lovely unified interface. The player window is skinnable, with many skins that make it positively miniscule, but the playlist window uses only plain native controls.

On the playback side of things, Zinf supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and CD audio, including streaming MP3 and Vorbis. It is not plugin based, with no plans to add plugins in the future, so no crazy mutations such as those for Winamp and xmms are possible. There is no WMA support, but the authors don't care about it and think you shouldn't, either. No visualisations are supported, but there is an equaliser equivalent to that in Winamp. The lack of such features does make it very lightweight, although the difference in size from Winamp 2 is probably not noticeable on any reasonably modern system.

The current stable version is 2.2.5, and it is available from www.zinf.org