Jess

After many years experimenting with music, trying to get the ‘right’ sound out of digital equipment, when I truely enjoy the sound of vinyl, I have discovered the plug-ins and preferences I prefer, and would like to share them with you.

My media player of choice is Winamp v5.65

Firstly, I enable “Replay Gain”, in Playback Preferences.

Then I load Multiple DSP, and enable iZotope Ozone as the first plugin in the list, followed by iZotope Vinyl and finally Compressor & Wider, all at 100% strength.

In iZotope Ozone, the first page displayed is EQ.The first two markers I leave where they are. The 3rd I put at +0.8dB at 1242hz, and q set at 0.3. The 4th I move to -7.5dB at 20,000hz with q set at 0.5.

On the Room Simulation page, I set room size to 0.47, damping to 0.10, Dry/Wet Mix to 8.3%, room width to 1.65, speaker widening to 0.71 and cutoff to 220hz.

On the first panel of the Tube Amplifier is Bass Compression. I click advanced, set cut off to 153.8hz, Gain to 8.1, threshold to -30dB and ratio to 25.0. The next panel is Tube Limiter which I set Threshold to -3.8dB, margin to -3.8dB and release to 101.4ms. The final tab, Tube Saturation, I set the amount to 9.3dB, cutoff to 10339hz and mix to 68.6%.

Finally, I set output gain to 3.3dB

Next, I setup iZotope Vinyl (which does not save settings between Winamp reloads, so you may want to disable it). I set mechanical noise to -13.7dB, wear to 0%, electrical noise to -30dB, Dust to 6.7dB, Scratch to -60dB, warp depth to 0%, dust amount to 40%, year to 2000 and RPM to 45. I leave input gain and output gain set at 0, and the stereo flip switch on.

The final plugin in my chain is Compressor and Wider, which I set Stereo width to normal, treble enhance to 0, Max amplification to 10.0x, amp raise to 5665ms, amp reduce to 3.8ms and threshold to -0.1dB.

These settings are subtle, but quite effective for most types of music, but feel free to tweak and find your own settings that you like. I hope this has proved useful 🙂

With AOL’s announcement of discontinuing Winamp, I thought I’d upgrade to their last version 5.66. However, it appears a new company has overtaken development, but I thought I’d compile a list of known working (and useful plugins with this version)

After installing the new version, I reinstalled my plugins and Winamp wouldn’t start. It would crash launching the Setup Wizard for configuring how you’d like Winamp setup on your user account.

After going through and removing every single plugin I could find, I eventually got Winamp to start up, and play a .sid file. I thought I’d fixed it, but just to make sure, I closed it down and started it up again. Same problem.

After much tweaking, uninstalling and clearing the junk in my registry, I thought I’d try a version that I’ve downloaded in the past, in this case, Winamp 5.65, the version released just before the final version.

I installed my plugins, and so far have not had a single problem. The following is a list of plugins I have found to be compatible with v5.65

Download Links
 Winamp 5.65 (Pro Version)
 Chipamp 1.1 - Plays various chiptune formats.
 Compressor & Wider for Winamp v1.1 - Compressor/Limiter
 CDG Plugin - Karaoke Plugin
 Winamp Essentials v5.65 - Essential Winamp Plugins (Time Restore/WavPack+Additional Formats)
 iZotope Ozone for Winamp - Music Enhancer / Compressor / EQ / Analogue Modeling
 Multiple DSP Stacker v1.6 - Load multiple DSP plugins at once
 Winamp Colour Themes v2.3 - Extra colour schemes for Modern and Bento skins.
 Winamp Icon Pack v2.3.4 - Higher resolution file icons
 iZotope Vinyl v1.0 - Vinyl Modelling / Audio Destruction

If you are the developer of any of these downloads, I have just uploaded them unmodified. If you would like me to take them down, send me a message through the “Contact” page. If you would like to add your plugin here, also message me (as long as it is compatible with v5.65)

I also have hosted a mirror of the original AOL Winamp website here.

If you are curious as to how I have these plugins setup, see my specially written article “How I Listen To Music“