Winamp 5.8 Release – First update in 5 years

Amazing. Right click on Milkdrop window, full-screen... I'm amazed this is a web app

I bet you learned a whole boatload.

This thing is really impressive. Never thought I'd see music visualizations (which seem to have gone the way of the dodo) running at 144Hz on my Linux box. I remember the first versions of this, you've made a lot of progress! Your visualizations are really interesting to look at, and they don't have the aliasing artifacts that most visualizations of the time had, I like it.

One thing that doesn't seem to work correctly is importing a whole album: The songs are added out of order, even if the file names sort in the correct order, and the tags are present.

I organize my music library at the file level rather than at the tag level (although I still tag my files, because I have a particular naming scheme I like for everything). This is because I have so much music that it's kept on an external HDD, and I wouldn't be able to properly tag everything to my liking if I spent a hundred years on it. So I've always resisted using the iTunes-like programs that try to organize all my music for me, both due to tagging issues and having the database explode if I disconnect the drive. My music is organized according to my own system, and it works for me.

In Winamp, when I wanted to play an album, I opened the directory containing my music, find the artist, right clicked on the album, and selected "Play/Enqueue in Winamp". Winamp would launch, I would immediately minimize it to the system tray, and it would be out of my way except occasionally popping up notifications on Play/Pause/Stop or when tracks changes. It was perfect for my needs.

Audacious is the app I found that comes closest to replicating that workflow. I select a folder, "Open With -> Audacious", it kicks off, I close (to tray), and it plays on with occasional notifications. That's all I want. It's also got MPRIS integration so I can control playback from the bar, so that's pretty sweet too.

I'm a big-time fan of QL as well, it's just so ridiculously configurable, and the library management is the best I've ever used. It lets you define your tags to the smallest detail, and use every single one of those tags for organizing it. You can do all sorts of highly specific searches and filters, I think even with full regex support.

It wouldn't surprise me if v6 were mostly a rewrite... Hopefully they target mutliplatform and get the visualizations, equalizer and a few other aspects the same, or very similar.

I really do miss the android version, and hope they update and bring it back.

This is exactly what I was asking. Thanks!

iTunes used to be extremely crappy and noxious on Windows, I wonder if it's changed.

I'm STILL using mainly Winamp. I've tried some alternatives but for my old MP3 collection it's unbeatable.

Spotify has a playback SDK[0]. It's meant for web use, but it could probably be used to create a custom native player. You'd just need to have a webview somewhere.

[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...

Apple Music also has a player SDK via MusicKit if I understand it correctly. Some people already build third party players and web interfaces.

I don’t think they have a problem with clients integrating support for Spotify Premium. Multiple different open source media players support Spotify Premium.

On the other hand I think they are very opposed to other clients supporting Spotify Free, which is understandable.

yeah -- its getting there. That last release was a result of me mentioning darkmode. It was easily the fastest 'can I post a bug somewhere?' to release I've ever seen. The total time was no more than a few minutes.

While the mac version is promising, its still missing the powerful organization features that I use the most.

Foobar2000 is probably my favorite and most-used piece of software.

You have 24GB, so we should squander it just for the convenience of developers who want to use the world's worst programming language?

Because its not a meme.

Look at Discord app. Look at Slack. Or any other Electron bloatware. The executable is .1GB big minimum, and eats memory because it first has to start a browser.

Oh, and none of these browsers share memory or anything, so you get X copies of the same thing.

Slightly off-topic here, but I'm fairly sure that if you think an Electron app takes only 80 MB of RAM, you're probably miscalculating how much does it really use.

Modern programs (or apps as they seem to be called now) are like gasses, they expand to fill the volume of their containers. Even if we keep getting more RAM, does that mean that it should take more memory to play music or edit text? Yes, being pragmatic maybe 503 MB out of 24 GB isn't a big deal, but it would be if you had 4 GB, which should be plenty to run an OS and a text editor. Then there's the question of how elegant it is to gobble up so much memory for the benefit of the programmers to use even more abstractions and virtual machines and frameworks. Programs are written once and run lots of times, it makes sense to optimize for the user, not the programmer.

HUGE MISTAKE, HUGE MISTAKE. I would like to retract, It's 503MB.

Still, I find that perfectly acceptable.

I went to Best Buy's website, and saw the best sold machines.

There's one that's really cheap ($229) and comes with 4GB's, definitively not a productivity machine.

Then there's an HP for $399 that comes with 8GB. Another for $100 more with 12GB.

I filtered out for laptops with more than 8GB, brand new (not refurbs), and you can get a 8GB complete machine for just $379.99, that's less than many popular phones out there (and I'm not talking about Apple products).

I get it, some people live in poor countries, I live in a relatively poor country (Portugal). And I know how this might sound like. But you are programming, you are not sheltering, feeding, or helping people. You are working for big $$$ corporations. Like any worker, you should ask for fees that at least cover your equipment costs.

Remember that 0.5GB is 6.25% of a modern computer's memory.

Back in the C64 days, you bought a 64KB machine for less $$$ in the 80's, than those computers today, and after boot up, and BASIC, and it only had 38911 bytes free out of the 65536 bytes. So, only 59% free.

Back when computers had 1MB of RAM (early 90's), anyone can point me, to an editor that only costed 62.5KB of RAM? I think I'm not going to find it... unless it's just notepad.exe.

Etc. etc. etc.

The problem is that people, for some reason, started to think they need a new phone, for leisure, every 2 years (in some richer countries, it's 12 months), and a new PC, a tool for work, only every 10 years. And that the phone can cost $1000 and it's okay, and the PC, cannot cost more than $500 or it's "overpriced". I think it's ridiculous.

It does do podcasts and video, and it can't be blamed for Apple locking it out of your iPod. No idea what other features you find it lacking, the best comparison I'm aware of[1] doesn't show a huge difference, but I've never seen the appeal of iTunes.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_player_sof...

>It can’t load songs into my iPod.

IIRC it used to be able to do that fine, before Apple locked that down, actually.

Nothing but iTunes can load songs into your iPhone, which is hardly the fault of other software.

It does videos as far as I’m aware, though it’s certainly no VLC.

I stopped using the Android version several years ago because it stops playback of Shoutcast streams when running in the background (or when the screen is off). Have you gotten around this somehow?

Yup, MacAmp was a thing for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAmp