Dogwaffle's been around for a while & a community's built up around it, but it's still a niche product or project. If you like it cool, but while the developer has spent a lot of time on it I'm sure, my complaint with it is that the coding is not near current. I'm not a big fan of .NET or VB [Visual Basic] & Howler uses both, but the part that bugs me is Howler uses the ancient VB version 5, resetting Windows to use that rather than VB 6, which is rather old itself.
I don't feel .NET is a problem itself, but rather it's often a PITA that adds a Lot of complications to a piece of software, so if 2 apps do pretty much the same things, & only one uses .NET, I'll obviously choose the one without. I feel the same way about VB... Microsoft's tried unsuccessfully to kill it -- they weren't unsuccessful because VB is so remarkably good, but because some coders have refused to move on & learn something else, re-writing any re-used code using current tools & methods, which have advanced a lot in the years since Microsoft gave up on VB. I have a harder time imagining why anyone would stick with VB 5, to the point that I find the thought of the full version of Howler using GPU assist a bit scary -- it's something that personally I'd want to spend a good deal of time testing to make sure I didn't risk the functioning of the stuff I rely on now.
Long story short, if I have a chance later I'll do whatever research to see if it's worth playing with, considering I'd need to reverse all the registry changes that revert VB 6 to 5, then test to make sure all the Howler .ocx [Active X] files still work with version 6. It's a shame, as Howler seems to be a cute app I'd enjoy playing with, & I might even find some stuff that I'd consider essential in the future, but regardless it's not worth it if it breaks a dozen other VB apps I use now, or won't work with VB version 6. And it's definitely something I'd have to do after a fresh backup of win7 or using TimeFreeze.
To reinstall VB 6, Google on "Visual Basic 6 runtime" [w/out quotes], choosing one of the links to download & install.
In win7:
The installation performed the following activity:
2092 files added
61 files deleted
23 files updated
5327 registry entries added
876 registry entries deleted
84 registry entries updated