Whatever happened to Winamp?
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The UI is much nicer than Foobar - but could definitely use a little tweaking (but not a lot!).
I also used to really enjoy the skins, although these days the skinning scene is practically dead, and the default skin with Winamp Classic colours is pretty OK.
Oh how I hope active development can resume once again, and that it doesn't screw with the player too much.
I think they should at least split the video functionality into a "TV" app, as they have started to do on iOS.
- I find it a little difficult to organize and keep track of my podcasts, new episodes, etc. I'm sure I could improve this with updating podcast-related settings but I find the settings a bit confusing in terms of subscription, retention, etc. of episodes.
- I find the navigation between the store and my library to be a bit strange sometimes, although it seems like Apple has made some recent improvements as I'm finding that I am now able to better move between my library and the store while browsing for music and referencing back to my own library.
I do not have any performance gripes with iTunes. It rarely crashes on me. The audio quality is good. AirPlay is brilliant. It's easy to organize my library and playlists. I love the fact that I can buy music in the same app that organizes and plays the music so that I'm not manually importing things. I don't know of any alternative on Mac that even comes close to doing what iTunes does for me in such a well-integrated way.
I jumped on the Spotify train at one point but basically felt like I had to abandon my curated iTunes library because there is (was?) no way for me to import anything.
Apple could certainly split iTunes into two apps for TV and Music but I'm not sure that would alleviate any of the complaints that I see about it in regard to supposed bloat.
You can drag and drop songs from your library into the queue, but can't when browsing Apple Music. When in the (obvious) WebViews, you have to press those ellipsis buttons as if you're using a touch screen.
• Photos.app: Syncs photos and personal videos with iOS/iCloud and manages the photo library that other apps can access.
• Books.app: Syncs books with iOS/iCloud, shows the iBookStore, and it should also manage a books and PDF library for other apps to access.
• Music.app: Should sync music and other audio files with iOS/iCloud, show the iTunes music store, and manage the music library for other apps (as iTunes now does).
• TV.app: Should sync TV shows, movies, and other video files with iOS, and show the iTunes video store.
• Sync.app: To handle syncing and backups of your iOS devices, accessing the photos/video/books libraries that are managed by the other apps. It could be called Backup.app, or even just be made part of the Time Machine Preferences panel.
• iTunes.app could become a thin launcher stub that just provides a menu for the Photos/Music/TV/Books/Sync apps.
EDIT: To be fair most of the slowness could be perhaps be attributed to slow network requests as well.
It even supports skins (just drag the .zip/.wsz file over the player).
Is this a wrapper around the browser's default audio API?
Any plans to get the playlist to work ?
Much of he UI works, (lots of subtle problems solved, like window snapping, tiling of individial sprites from the sprite sheets, etc) but updating the media component to work with multiple files will probably require a non-trivial amount of work. If anyone wants to help out, let me know. Otherwise, slow and steady wins the race
Part of this longevity has no doubt to do with Windows' lasting APIs.
For the most part Winamp is able to do so as not much has changed when it comes to music listening on computers. For example audio cards are fundamentally the same devices they used to be decades ago and basic I/O workflow has not changed either. Same goes for the majority of music file formats with which Winamp is natively compatible.
What I do miss is Winamp's vast library of plugins (visualisation, tools, file format compatibility and countless others). To my knowledge the ability to source plugins today has gotten harder as the library hasn't carried over to the new website/owners. For me this is where Foobar2000 closes the gap. Unfortunately Archive.org is not the remedy in such situations where Winamp.com/robots.txt disallowed fetching of the plugin binaries. Example: http://web.archive.org/web/20120505234347/http://download.nu...
Check out Sonique's shaped skins, not just squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)#/media/...
I posted to my Facebook asking "does anyone still use this thing?" and a whole pile of people enthusiastically responded that they're still on Winamp 20 years later. Amazing the goodwill software can generate just by not sucking ...
Winamp radically not sucked by being basically the only piece of software in that space that didn't try to turn your computer and your love of music against you while you were using it. It doubled down on that pile of win by being highly competent at what it set out to do as well. That rightfully earned much love.
A lesson a great many web service companies could learn from today.
That said, Real's open-source version, Helix Media Player, was not awful (and didn't have the same tentacular behaviour).
Picky point: Apple opened the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003. The iPod came first.
That is with almost absolute certainly this track by Susumu Hirasawa, one of the few musicians to have produced truly unique music (and who's still at it):
The actual look of the application doesn't bother me, since usually I'll be working on something else that needs the screen space.
Also, I think that effort was before the modern Windows desktop "bridge" and it would be interesting to see an attempt at a "best of all worlds" version for the Windows 10 Store that supported all of the Desktop features and all of the "Mobile" features (such as Windows 8+ background audio controls).
Winamp introduced me to SHOUTcast, and I spent many hours listening to SomaFM's Groove Salad :)
Thank you, Nullsoft!
When I called them out on this on the forums (this was still a fairly new and egregious thing back then) the devs told me to put up with it or go use something else. So I did.
Currently he is developing an DAW named Reaper. It's one of the cheapest DAW out there.
ftfy
The full version is a nine megabyte download. It has pretty much all the same features of Cubase, Pro Tools, Logic etc. and is way ahead in terms of customizability.
REAPER must be some of the most well-written and likeable software out there currently. It's just refreshing to see such thought and care being put into a program. It's very affordable, too. I recommend it wholeheartedly whenever someone asks me about how to start recording music with a PC.
(Recording. Mastering is rather fine.)
"song name" "artist" !yt
Takes you right to the YouTube results.
Fun fact: The developer that made it (Ludvig Strigeus) is the same developer that made µTorrent and ScummVM.
Two pieces of amazing software. Good job, that man.
Anyway, if the author is hanging out on hacker news... Isn't it about time for a new release, even if its only to put the source code on github so those of us still using it can update it a bit?
-1) Pull up the folder with the album I want to listen to.
-2) Right-click "Play in Winamp"
-3) Winamp starts, minimized, in my system tray so that it's out of my way
-4) I can control playback via media keys and get notifications with the Artist and Title whenever tracks switch, pause, end, etc.
That's really all I want, and Winamp still does it properly.
I painstakingly tried to keep Winamp when I moved to Linux, but my laptop's QHD+ screen was just too much for the non-DPI app in Wine. I eventually found Audacious (http://audacious-media-player.org/), which lets me do everything I used to do in Winamp, and even has a Winamp 2.X skin.
https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player
I'm not affiliated to Vox in any way but it's nice :)
It's unfortunate that we haven't had a great alternative since then.
The project is called Wimamp Community Update Pack or WACUP and its in beta here: https://getwacup.com/
Winamp was bought by a company in Berlin I believe. It will forever be remembered as the MP3 player that: - Introduced several generations to shoutcast online radio. - Was one of the only players that handled your 5,000+ song MP3 collection.
Still use it to this day and it works amazingly well with searching, filtering, and building playlists for massive collections. It's stable, not dead, and still in use by many. But because it's not releasing new versions every year the average music junkie might believe it to be dead.
Belgium, according to the article, and apparently they're still involved in some kind of legal dispute over the deal.
But these days i have moved to Linux, where Deadbeef do the job quite well.
... if I didn't stream all my music now.
:)
I haven't used Winamp in a while (does it have Wine support for "new "skins yet?) but I enjoy using qmmp as a comfy little player.
I'm a musician, so I can hear this happening; music played through VLC sounds like it's going in and out of tune, like an old cassette deck but more subtle. (This is worse on Windows for whatever reason, Linux is much less audible.)
On Windows, I still run Media Player out of pure habit. It works, requires no installation, and generally sounds fine. I remember the good old days of Winamp though, that was my go-to player back in the day. Great media players seem harder to find now that the focus in the market is on internet streaming and less on local music.
I occasionally hear this on MP3s or Oggs (never FLACs) on the Android version (my phone media player of choice), but never on the Desktop version. It's pretty obviously a bug, though I can't get it to happen with any reproducibility.
If you're serious about audio and managing your music library: Have you tried Roon? Yes, it's expensive, but I have tried them all and Roon ist the most complete package and a joy to use.
It's not overly bloated, IMHO, but not exactly lightweight, either.
Use whatever suits you most.
The lineage of forks is:
(Xmms -> Beep Media Player -> Audacious)
Audiograbber, Xing MP3 encoder, Winamp
When Winamp announced they were wrapping up I downloaded multiple copies and stashed all over the place, yard, garage and all.
For example: !oldapps windows 7 winamp
"When was the last time you downloaded an mp3?" I download MP3s all the time.
I use WinAmp and I love using WinAmp. Just wanted to add a different perspective.
So for me, Spotify is a hot mess with regards to what is there and what is not and what versions of the albums are available. Also, it wastes bandwidth which is a luxury for me (I live in the countryside and have only a 4G connection with a 100G data cap) and the kicker: it rips off artists by paying out rounding errors -- for most artists, orders of magnitudes less than they used to make from the conventional record industry, which itself was a total ripoff.
So when possible, I buy CD's directly from the artist/label and rip them, or I buy MP3's from Bandcamp. Then I play them in WinAmp.
This isn't exactly Spotify's fault. There are a lot of good remasters. It depends.
> So for me, Spotify is a hot mess with regards to what is there and what is not and what versions of the albums are available.
Very true. All that stuff that isn't available for streaming would leave huge gaps in my collection. And for people that rely on streaming exclusively, it might be getting worse: Licensing deals end, favorite albums might disappear suddenly. Then you paid all those years and might end up with very little to show for it. Just remember how Netflix' catalog started to shrink. Is Spotify going to produce originals when that happens? Renting music is a bad idea.
> So when possible, I buy CD's directly from the artist/label and rip them, or I buy MP3's from Bandcamp. Then I play them in WinAmp.
Great. However if you're already buying from bandcamp, why would you opt for the lossy MP3 versions of those releases?
Point is, it doesn't let me choose. It arbitrarily selects one version of an album which is not necessarily the one I want.
Great. However if you're already buying from bandcamp, why would you opt for the lossy MP13 versions of those releases?
I can't hear the difference :) However, if I were to burn them out to CD-R, which I've done a couple of times, I would use the lossless version. I'm happy that I have the option.
True.
> I can't hear the difference.
That's ok. However a lossless version allows you to switch formats in the future, create lossless and lossy copies. Building a library with lossy audio is a choice you might regret at some point.
The vast majority of my library is actual physical CD's, so I'm good there at least :)
This is not spotify's fault btw. Some bands have original record and the remastered version available. It is decided by the label/band.
Some bands think the original version is flawed, hence why they remastered it. Others might have been forced a remaster on them by label, or simply know that fans value both versions.
* You like to own your own music files
* You like to listen to music in without depending on an internet connection
* You don't like to waste bandwidth
* You don't like to depend on an external service / walled garden.
I think that streaming services like spotify are kind of like american cable television. It brings music to the masses. But I bet they are going to slowely diminish in popularity, making way for the next mass consumer revolution. In the mean time real music lovers have all their CD's and records ripped and stored on their hard-drives (or SSDs; or whatever). And are going keep on listening that way when someone else makes a similar statement about streaming services as you made about locally stored music files.
FLAC, but every time I get something from Bandcamp.