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Comment by bstar77 | Hacker News Reader

I tried Winamp a few months ago and was disappointed to find that it's evolved into a media center more than a player. I was hoping just for a simple player where I can easily drop files in a running playlist, like VLC does. There were also some issues I experienced (that I don't remember), but I'm guessing they have been ironed out since win 10 is officially supported now.

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I just want a simple player as well, so I've been using foobar2000: https://www.foobar2000.org/

It doesn't get much more basic...

I think you might be able to run mplayer in wsl if you want to go one step further in your quest for basic listening experience.

foobar2000 is deceptively complex, it's probably the most complex and featureful music player. It's not bloated with stuff like online service integrations or whatever, but it is not basic, especially when you consider its plugin ecosystem.

So... why not use VLC since it already supports what you want? :-P

Theoretical purity aside (being an everything player, transcoder, etc instead of just an audio player) it is simple to use and lightweight enough (e.g. just opened an mp3 file and VLC's memory usage was ~25MB), at least for modern PCs.

Winamp at its core IS a simple media player. If you install it and don't include all the addon modules, you end up with a small, light player and not much else.

> I tried Winamp a few months ago and was disappointed to find that it's evolved into a media center more than a player.

Really? Winamp looks the same to me as it did 20 odd years ago.

Maybe there are different versions? I have 5.65 released in 2013. It's exactly what you describe as wanting.

Try Musicbee, its "just works" no need for complex setup or plugins.

https://getmusicbee.com/

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