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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to make it run out of the browser like an electron app?

Sorry for suggesting electron but it could be the ultimate multi-platform winamp clone.

> Sorry for suggesting electron but it could be the ultimate multi-platform winamp clone.

That however would defeat best Winamp's feature: being light and fast, which is the number one reason why I kept using the classic one ignoring all following versions until my last day on Windows. Today I use qmmp under Linux, which is close enough (has been ported to Windows too).

https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/

Thanks for the tip, will try this out as it seems to have waveform support (a must for me).

I've been using Nulloy for a while, also pretty nice and minimal https://github.com/nulloy/nulloy/

As a novelty, we actually already tried that: https://desktop.webamp.org/

Note: Nobody thinks this is actually a good idea, but it's kidna fun.

Chromium Edge reports this download as unsafe with the message:

This app might harm your device Microsoft Defender SmartScreen reported that this app is not commonly downloaded; you should only open files you trust.

Name: webamp-desktop-web-setup-0.3.0.exe Publisher: Unknown

Probably good advice

It's fine, that's what Windows Sandbox is for!

You could just download and install Winamp, couldn't you? I know for a fact that it runs in Wine.

winamp 2 had at least one exploit that I got burned by a few times. Which is why I finally upgraded to 3, back whenever that was.

Yep, MP3's contain a lot potential places to launch exploits from. No reason to use a vulnerable player.

Have you tried re:AMP? https://re-amp.ru/

I'm not a desktop or a ui engineer by trade so I don't understand the contention with Electron. I know slack uses it and _seems_ to work fine but I have heard similar phrasing around "sorry for suggesting electron" and I'm curious to learn more about the cons of electron.

The reason a lot of people groan when we hear Electron is that it requires modern-ish hardware to do the same exact things that worked fine on hardware from 25 years ago.

The reason a bunch of people use it anyway is because they have to be cross platform, and target the web.

And because UI toolkits are generally not that good. Especially the cross platform ones

That accusation is quite the stone to be throwing around in the glasshouse that is the web technology stack. A portable version of Win32 would be infinitely better and more accessible than anything the web can come up with.

Many Electron apps are sluggish and use more resources than necessary for the problem they're trying to solve.

For example, IRC was doing most of the things Slack (desktop client in Electron) does, but 20+ years ago when computers were a thousandth (or less) as powerful. IRC clients were snappy to load and interact with, didn't use a gigabyte of RAM, and didn't eat a CPU core.

From https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/:

> Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has a userland driver for the Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3D graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera.

Also, before Slack there was Jabber and MSN/AIM, and with Kopete you could do the same you can do today in slack but by using 1/10 of resources.

Simple: you're running an entire web browser and all its requirements like network support, image decoding and other support features to interpret a javascript program for the task of playing an mp3 that should be way lighter than running a browser.

Also, there's a lot of overhead compared to running a new tab in a browser. It's basically an entire browser for a single tab.

Pros: you run your web app as a local app without reprogramming your app.

Cons: you are literally running a web app in a browser and not a native app.

Multiple executables ALL running their own version of the chrome browser - absolutely no resource/code sharing ?

Teams, Slack, VsCode, Adobe products, Vscode, Signal, The normal chrome browser, Microsoft edge browser

Providing a better user experience than "normal" desktop apps ? Really?

No but you can try this it works great on my machine! https://getwacup.com/

You can use Audacious https://audacious-media-player.org

There's a related project that forks and wraps it as an electron app.

The source code shows it's pretty much just a react app, but slick!

Unless this includes Winamp's modularity and plugin architecture then it would not be a Winamp clone

You can use XMMS, it supports old Winamp skins.

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