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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I contend that Winamp is the best MP3 player to have ever existed. Nothing comes close to its speed, usability or extensibility, even 20 years later.

Foobar fans may disagree, but I stand my ground.

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Soo many good memories with Winamp!

But I always had a few major gripes with it:

- The tiny interface was hard to navigate.

- The queue was ephemeral and much too easy to clear. Any time there were more than one person controlling the music someone would by accident clear out all selected songs when all whey wanted to do was add their selection to the queue. With no way to restore it.

My personal vote is iTunes 4.5 with Winamp 2 a close second.

Tiny interface was quite nice, and not that small, considering it was built during the age of 800x600 or 1024x720 resolutions.

Yes, most of us had CRT:s back then. But it was still too small. Someone at my uni made a better skin to solve the problem (whose name and skin I have lost since).

You can change the double click action to "enqueue item" instead of "replace queue". You can also use the "Playlist Undo" extension.

Was that really possible with Winamp 2 back then? I remember _every single person_ on our local music irc channel griping about that problem. No one had found that setting in that case, we all would have loved it.

I don't know when it was added.

Shoutout for Foobar, which now installs from the Windows Store, so no faffing about with installers or finding the right download button that isn't an advert pretending to be a download button

for windows yes it's still true!! but in that 20 years I've also moved on from windows: nothing comes close on macos and on Linux I've been using audacious which i must say does sound amazing.

lack of cross platform options inspired me to start reAMP:

https://github.com/conceptualspace/reAMP

it's still very much an experiment but the end goal is an open source player made with the same love of music that inspired the original winamp. some of the features im working on:

- smart shuffle algorithm: no repeats until playlist exhausted; randomized between artists so artists with many songs do not monopolize the playlist

- studio quality audio analysis (VU meter, oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, full track waveform, displays for bitrate, samplerate, channels, format, encoder)

- controls to loop, change tempo

- remote control via mobile with queuing and adding youtube URLs ('party mode')

- logarithmic volume control

I was amazed to find out foobar2000 works great under Wine, including input & output plugins, so I just use it. Best ML management IMO. Can't recall if I ever got the Winamp AVS plugin to work though.

AVS works pretty well in Wine

I meant it on foobar2000 with its foo_vis_shpeck plugin, which is a wrapper for Winamp visualization plugins. I have run it successfully under Windows but I recall having trouble on Wine some 5 years ago.

Yes that's how I use it, shpeck is a little funky under Wine but it basically works correctly. I think it will crash in some cases if you stop the visualisation when it's attached to the main window or something, I forget. I run it in a separate f2k install that just has a single shpeck instance filling the whole window, and receives audio input from pulseaudio's loopback.

Example: https://streamable.com/nzy730

thank you for building such a nice player. Can this use jackd?; for low latency audio playback.

That looks great! I settled for foobar2000 after giving up on Winamp not long ago, but one thing I sorely miss is cue file support. That is, being able to add a cue file that points to a flac/mp3 file and have the songs show up in the playlist.

Though one thing from foobar2000 that I'd miss is Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP plugin, as I listen to music mostly via headphones. Does reAMP have something similar?

cue files definitely work fine in foobar2000. What doesn't work? You can even edit cue sheets as if they were normal tagged single-track files. There is also this plugin that makes them behave a bit more nicely:

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=117167.0

Oh lol. I've got the "register supported formats on startup", yet it hasn't registered cue files. So I just assumed it didn't support them...

Well then, cheers!

And it played everything! These days I’m not even sure what program to install if I want to listen to, say, tracker modules.

Try XMPlay on for size. Plays absolutely everything (zipped iso of chiptunes? No problem! FLAC? Of course. Obscure forgotten video game format ? Definitely.)

Skinnable, lightweight, portable.. free. Been my player for years.

I wish source music was still a thing. MP3 killed the idea.

> Foobar fans may disagree, but I stand my ground.

Why do you feel the need to taunt ?

It sounded more like a hat tip to the only other player that could possibly compete (Foobar user here).

Yep, that's how I meant it.

When I was on Windows in the early 2000 I loved Coolplayer for the same reasons. (And cherry on top : no install needed ! You could ship its exe along with the mp3 files) http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/

I use Qmmp on Linux (ported on Windows too). Fast, light, extensiblle through plugins, skinnable and so far pretty close to what Winamp was in the old days. https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index.php

SoundJam MP was better. Mac only, though.

It lives on in a heavily bastardized form as iTunes and now the macOS Music app.

Yeah; soundjam was like a slightly refined version of WinAmp, still had skins and visualizations, but it was limited to Mac only. iTunes original few SoundJam-based versions weren’t too bad, it started getting messy as tons of features besides music playback were jammed in.

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