Hacker News Reader

Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

Winamp is one of the few pieces of software I miss from my Windows days. Every time I open iTunes or any audio player (from VLC to Spotify) I fondly remember Winamp.

View on HN

Agreed. I posted a couple years ago:

  1999, WinAmp: type a couple characters of a song title and play it.
  2013, iTunes 11: Try finding a song forever, go "forget it", hit shuffle.

iTunes search bar is pretty good for that. However the search bar is in a silly location.

What is strange about the top right corner of the window? Almost all search bars are located there in OS X applications.

Winamp was primarily a Windows application. OS X GUI paradigms don't necessarily translate to Windows world.

Yeah the search works well now. When iTunes 11 just launched it was a disaster. (If I remember correctly it kept trying to 'group' searches by album instead of showing individual songs.)

If you're looking for a new audio player on Windows, you may want to try out foobar2000. I've been using it for several years and have really enjoyed it.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

I really love foobar's minimal approach, but I've had serious crash problems that lose my playlists rather frequently (and it doesn't automatically save them).

The foobar2000 library is a great example of why I and others still use Winamp. I haven't seen a single "modern" player whose library layout is anywhere near as useful as Winamp's.

I didn't use Winamps library feature much, at least I can't remember anything notable about it. What's special about it?

It was one of the main reasons I liked it. It was just really well laid out, and could do ID3 tag updates before it was a common feature.

I like it because it has clear separation from the Playlist. Something that most other players seem to lack. You start playing one song they go on playing everything else in your library. Other than that it had a nicely customizable display and as a sibling commenter said it had built-in tag editing.

foobar's layout is entirely customizable if you use the columns UI plugin[0] which I think should just be included in the default distribution. Everybody I've ever known who's stuck with foobar uses it. The plugin ecosystem is decent for foobar; I suggest checking them out and seeing what you might use. They have plugins for caching, transcoding, tagging, the works. In the past they tried to raise money to port to Android and iOS, but I wish they would raise money to port to OSX and Linux.

[0]: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_ui_columns

I still use foobar but stopped updating it. The developers went out of their way to discourage plugin development.

Without foobar2000 I would probably have switched to Linux quite a bit earlier. Linux had nothing even close, and I did try quite a few -- Amarok, Songbird, gmusicbrowser, can't even remember any more.

I've found my peace with Clementine, but sometimes I still miss foobar's superb collection management, vibrant community, and endless avenues for customisation.

Foobar runs great for me in Wine on OS X and Linux.

If I could access my online music subscription service via a Winamp-like interface, I would be very happy.

This is what's lost as everyone trips over themselves to race headlong into the cloud. The next Winamp may never be built because the easy interoperability files used to afford to every application by default isn't built into hosted services unless they invest in an API, something they may not do for ROI reasons or competitive reasons.

http://spotiamb.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com