Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anjc | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if this is how Winamp was meant to be used (I suspect it wasn't) but its default behaviour from its launch - with all of your music in a big giant list which you could muddle around, and a randomize play-order button - almost invited me to explore music in a way that I haven't seen since. It seems like ever since then the UIs try their best to force you to dig down into a specific album. If a track's id3 tags are incorrect then they're effectively lost in that UI because you don't know where to look for them.

Yeah you can randomize play in iTunes or Zune, but you have to make arbitrary playlists explicitly. You can drag tracks around in VLC but the UI isn't helpful.

I would say I knew 90% of the songs in my music collection then and probably know 10% now despite it being about the same size, purely because of a few 'helpful' UI constraints.

People sort of suggest that music changed when MP3s and Napster bloomed, but the 'end of an era' in my mind, the time when my experience of music definitely changed, is when I was obligated to stop using Winamp and start using iTunes etc in the mid 2000s.

A master playlist of all songs in your library exists in iTunes (and as far as I know, always has).

I used WinAmp the same way you did, one big list of everything I had. I use iTunes the same way. I only create playlists to transfer music to my phone because it can't hold the whole library.

What a glorious time it was with that master playlist and the excellent keyboard shortcuts. I used to put it on shuffle and play a game where I'd press Next and then Pause immediately and try to impress friends by knowing what song it was within the first half-second.

You could also just conjure up any song with the "J" keyboard shortcut that would search the entire path as well as the ID3 tags. It was so good that one weekend night in high-school, my friend and I decided to put an old desktop in the back of my Jeep on foam and power it with an inverter. We ran aux wires to the stereo and I literally just had a full-on keyboard that I could pull up while driving and get any song in my library with a few slaps of one hand without looking down even once (I knew one-handed typing skills would be useful someday). (I even tried voice command with Dragon Naturally Speaking but it only worked when the engine was off.) To this day, I haven't had such an agile interface to my music. I just use a phone now but it has a fraction of my old library and searching for things while driving is dangerous, illegal, slow, and miserable.

Ha wow, now that's dedication.

At least now your car can have bluetooth and Siri integration...which lets you play music from Spotify...when you have reception...or tracks from your $500 16gb iPhone which can store a few albums...ugh.

You could probably re-make that project pretty handy these days, with Raspberry Pi's and hard-drives being cheap and so on

If you reencode to lower bitrates you can likely store just as much on the iPhone as you did in the winamp days; when I was using winamp, I bought the largest drive I could afford for video encoding; it was 6GB.

Good point. 128kbps was more than enough for me in those days. 160 was hedonistic.

Half my original MP3 collection was 96kbps 128kbps was "high quality".

I actually use Foobar2000 mostly in "All Music" mode, too -- and now that you mention it, I think I got the habit from Winamp. :)

iTunes has had a list view of all tracks for as long as I have used it, and it is still they main way I play music: https://files.nytsoi.net/l5cR.png

If I'm not mistaken, you can't drag tracks around though. Whereas in Winamp I often found myself creating 'mini playlists' within the master list, which morphed as my tastes changed.

Zune? What year is this?

I went through a whole heap of players on Windows 10 trying to get consistent playback from my Onedrive collection, and only Zune worked consistently for some reason. I don't know why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com