When Winamp doesn’t detect portable devices

After some time of consideration I decided that a Sony NWZ-S765 is going to replace my broken mp3 player. One main aspect was that the player supports playlists which can be managed with audio software like Winamp so I could use my regular audio player.

The problem

On my laptop managing playlists with Winamp worked as expected. Everything fine so far. But when I wanted to configure the player from the Winamp installation on my desktop PC it simply didn’t recognize the player and even updating Winamp changed nothing.

The solution

After I checked that the versions of Winamp on my laptop and PC were the same I had a look at the installed plug-ins. For whatever reason there were some plug-ins missing in the portable devices category on my PC although they belong to the default installation of the current release. So I simply copied the missing plug-ins from the Plugins subdirectory of Winamp’s installation directory from my laptop and finally everything worked fine.

If you have no working installation

For those who cannot simply copy missing files from another working installation may use this way:

• Download the latest Winamp release
• Extract the downloaded EXE-File, e.g. using 7-Zip
• Navigate into the extracted folder and open the Plugins directory
• Copy pmp_p4s.dll to the Plugins directory of your Winamp installation
• For other devices also pmp_njb.dll or pmp_usb.dll could be the required ones

1