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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is Winamp in name only. Even the site lacks all the whimsy and, dare I say, punk rock attitude of the original.

Winamp is for people who want to own their music. Those people no longer exist.

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You're underestimating Winamp and related own-your-music music players. I have real-world usage data on quite a lot of music players and websites, here's the top 30. The number is how many songs played in total on that website (I run something similar to last.fm scrobbling)

This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.

    1   YouTube                               14,244,087
    2   Spotify desktop                       2,751,012
    3   Monstercat                            1,171,321
    4   Pandora                               895,765
    5   VLC media player                      892,006
    6   iTunes                                854,311
    7   SoundCloud                            724,019
    8   YouTube Music                         640,801
    9   Deezer                                501,474
    10  Winamp                                289,216
    11  Foobar2000                            251,726
    12  Vk.com music                          134,319
    13  Aimp3                                 123,306
    14  Musicbee                              113,652
    15  Google play music                     89,827
    16  Epidemicsound                         87,573
    17  Spotify web player                    81,590
    18  Media monkey                          70,611
    19  Amazon Music                          55,691
    20  Clementine                            29,750
    21  Tunein radio                          24,413
    22  Google play music desktop (community) 22,910
    23  Media Player Classic Home Cinema      15,654
    24  Pot player                            11,348
    25  Plug.dj                               8,144
    26  Tidal web player                      7,770
    27  Jriver media center                   5,200
    28  Digitally Imported di.fm              4,636
    29  SiriusXM                              2,397
    30  Dubtrack.fm                           1,031

Pleasantly surprised to see Clementine in the list (though a bit disappointed with how low it is in the list).

Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D

I tend to add whatever users request. There have been music players in the past that were requested but I was never able to add support for.

The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.

Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.

I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that

There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.

It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)

Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place

For classical music nothing beat YouTube. Other I am not sure but I expect you are right.

Except perhaps in the audio quality department... I don't know how much things have changed, but I recall youtube doing a bit of compression on the imported audio.

If this data was captured by something like scrobbling, then this isn't an accurate representation of the landscape because it's opt-in only.

Opt-in does not mean the data is inaccurate. It could be wildly off, but most likely it is in the ballpark, and there is a chance it's completely indicative of the relative usages by various platforms.

If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.

It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere. I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.

> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally

Yes and this very same data shows that the top 4 most popular options are streaming platforms.

>It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere.

What evidence do you have for this?

> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.

Agreed. The above data has around 90% streaming. Why are you claiming it is wrong when it says what you claim is the truth?

Musicbee is such a great music player/library program. A pity it's not open source and available on Linux.

Absolutely! You can still run older version of Musicbee under WINE and it works without much issues. Now a days I use Guayadeque player and quite happy with it.

This is what’s typical of a saturated market. Top 98% are streaming services with the remaining 2% being battled over by thousands of niche apps

What’s #3 Monstercat? That seems to be a record label, not playback software.

monstercat.com has a music player, that's where the count comes from.

My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.

No MPD? I use it for over a decade. Looks like iam still a nerd.

I think that's mostly due to my target audience. This data comes from twitch streamers who want to have music playing during their streams.

I'm sure some of these people use MPD, but given what I've read after googling it seems like you need to be a technical person to set it up.

If you kind of familiar with linux its really not hard and works kind of of the box.

But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.

Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.

Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.

Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:

    # mpc search artist moloko | grep -i doctor | shuf | mpc add

1: https://icecast.org/

We still exist :-)

Though I'm using Clementine now. Winamp does not have builds for my OS, and they didn't manage to go open source unfortunately. Anyway, Clementine, if less charming and less appealing than Winamp, is actually a bit more ergonomic and powerful.

Same here but with Strawberry, a much more active fork afaik :)

> Those people no longer exist.

Sure they do, why else would bandcamp.com still be in business?

That said, I grew up with Winamp but never understood the adoration for it. As soon as I wasn’t quite so young anymore, I preferred functional and not whimsy.

I like winamp, and continue to like it, because it gets out of my way. All the essential controls were readily accessible, including an EQ which almost all players lack today. The generative, music responsive displays were whimsically cool too. And it didn't constantly bug me to set up a play list for everything.

What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.

I used to use quite a few plugins in Winamp, as well. In particular, I always needed a gapless playback plugin in 2.x. Been so long since I've regularly used Winamp, I don't recall what other kinds I used, but I do know I typically used several. I probably had several visualization plugins, as well, particularly back when I was in college and would have friends over in the dorm. Music on in the background, visualization full screen.

Ah, memories of the dorm, winamp playing music, visuals in the background. good times. (:

Winamp is from a different era of computing. MP3s were new, GUIs were starting to be experimental, "skinning" an application was novel, and of course, the 90s style of form over function had an influence.

Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.

Oh wow, I forgot about Sonique until your post. I even made some skins for it too. I used it at the time because it was a very flashy player, but Winamp was more powerful under the surface.

Winamp always felt to me to be the pinnacle of functional. I ended up turning to Winamp for a whole plethora of stuff outside of music playback, like:

- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast

- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)

- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.

The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.

I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.

Regarding the plugin system: They had a few different categories of plugins. You had input plugins that let it get audio from a wide variety of sources. A few I remember fondly were input plugins that were little emulators that ran playstation / n64 bytecode ripped from games to play their music. Then you could have your choice of DSP plugins applied after that, a visualization and then also an output. The output could play the music, but it could really do anything it wanted, like encoding it to ogg.

Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.

ShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car.

Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.

Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.

I guess if you need those, that makes sense. I have never needed them, and when people talk about Winamp, they usually mention all the skins it had (it’s the same for MySpace and Geocities, 2 other projects I don’t miss).

Same. As soon as I discovered foobar2000 I never looked back. Still using it today.

I probably would, but I found I preferred the library management aspects of MediaMonkey (Windows, proprietary), so that’s what I use today. But fb2k will always have a special place in my heart.

I had to use foobar2000 because Winamp was too heavyweight to smoothly play MP3s on a 486 machine.

What wasn't functional about it? From what I vaguely recall, I remember v2.95 being able to service as well as any other player, and the media library was one of the few that seemed to understand the value of using stable sorts when re-sorting by a different column. And then there were all the plugins...

Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.

VLC users beg to differ. Once Winamp was sold to AOL, the name was dead, I'm surprised anyone was willing to pay money for it after that.

Why would one pay any money when 2.95 still works perfectly?

If its proprietary there's probably bugs in the binaries (even DLLs) which can be exploited. But IIRC Winamp was FOSS'ed at some point.

I meant pay for the name. Did other owners of the name actually try to make it a paid-for product? Now that I think about it, was the original free?

Unicode

> Winamp is for people who want to own their music. Those people no longer exist.

Sad. Well, I am here for one.

And yeah, I remember Winamp from my childhood. I had badass skins! :D

Foobar2000 is basically Winamp (though with, imo, some not-so-good defaults when it comes to UI bahavior) and still has a userbase. There are other examples like that. It's not just for the aspect you mention (owning music and deciding what gets played), but these players also support plugins via a fairly standard system, and some of them are pretty convenient.

I use and love Foobar2000, but I certainly agree that out of the box it lacks polish. There’s some great skins like this[1] that make it look amazing, but it can be a hassle to setup.

Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar.

But anyway, get Foobar2000 it’s great overall :)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/foobar2000/comments/nn57ov/georgiar...

I would love to theme my fb2k but most themes I came across were basically saying "here, download this zip file containing 10 massive unsigned dlls sourced from various people" and that doesnt sit right with me. Especially when its not even on the official website but some 20 star github repo.

I wish macOS had a really solid Winamp/foobar2000 music player. Most now are all about managing a library (no thanks, I have a filesystem for that!) or integrating with cloud services.

I appreciate this perspective but I loathe using the filesystem to manage a music library. If a music player doesn't have a well designed and highly functional music library I most likely won't use it. Most are half-baked though, unfortunately.

You could try DeaDBeeF. It's Linux first but there are Mac OS builds. I've tried it, may be a little buggy on Macs but could be worth a check to see if it works for you.

I'm curious what your objection for organizing music in the filesystem is. Even music players packed with library management features need the files to exist somewhere, so organizing things intuitively on the filesystem seems a good starting point. The alternative, I guess, would be importing them into some non-navigable structure like a binary blob? I would think maintaining a persistent index of all the metadata is all you need beyond the individual files.

I keep my files well organized on disk, but I am also particular about how names are both shown and sorted, and rely on careful and comprehensive tagging instead. For example, I will not name folders "National, The" or "Beatles, The", or "Petty, Tom", but when I'm looking at my music I want The National to be filed under N, the Beatles under B, and Tom Petty under P like I would arrange on physical shelves. The compromise is that all the "Thes" land together in the filesystem, but are shown the way I like them when I go to play music.

I also want albums to be sorted by (original) release year but don't want to put the year in the folder or file names. Similarly, I want to be able to search, and with classical music it is nice to be able to show by composer or conductor or soloist, etc. Tagging and a robust music library make these things easy. Using the file system does not.

I always kept mine under {first letter}/{artist}/{album}/ Where "first letter" in, say, "the Beatles" would be "B", not "T". I had a separate folder where artists that started with a digit would go. Another folder for the occasional glyph. e.g. µ-Ziq.

yes. i use vox but its still not as great as the windows options

When I started mixing and matching songs from different albums to create "mixtapes" (playlists really) for myself, I did a deep dive into ReplayGain (because songs from different albums won't have the same levels). While Winamp had decent ReplayGain functionality (adding RG tags as well as reading them), Foobar2000 was the best.

Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.

We do exist :)

Cheeky shoutout for my side project https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ which lets you find where to buy a digital album the cheapest online. You can track your favourite artists and it will email you when they release a new album too. Feedback welcome!

Awesome site. Is there a way to submit releases or does it search them out through different vendors?

Thank you! There isn’t a way to submit directly, rather it searches via the vendors. The base data is via the iTunes Search API[0] which is surprisingly accessible. Then it tries to grab more data from the other vendors.

Originally, I built it so all access was programmatic, it never stored anything but rather just triggered API calls, a bit of scraping and a matching algorithm.

But it does have database backed models now so you could technically add releases directly. Although deduping might be a bit of a nightmare.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...

This is very nice. It found a song I was looking for. It takes me to iTunes for purchase. And boom. They don't seem to be selling the song in India. I hate such policies by various stores.

I think audacious on Linux can be considered very similar to Winamp - it also works with most Winamp skins

Well, it's derived from XMMS.

Which started off as x11amp - that's the player I first used on linux (having upgrade from winamp/windows)

> Those people no longer exist.

That's a bold claim, and I'm young enough to barely remember the Winamp era.

FIIO https://www.fiio.com/m17 and many others make high quality players for people who have a collection.

But honestly, streaming services allow discovery and exploration. I listen to hundreds of artists now that I didn't even know existed when I bought CDs and ripped them myself.

So did listening to streaming radio stations on Shoutcast.

This is still how I discover most of the music I've learned about in the past several years. Human-curated stations, accessible anywhere with an internet connection. Get a set of bookmarks in your desktop or mobile app of choice and you've got your own personal radio dial with stations that never go out of range. Plus you can see the currently playing artist and title at any time. I frequently screenshot them on my phone when something comes on that I want to look up later.

There are some of us still out there! I started using Clementine Music Player[0] on my Linux desktop. Amarok inspires it, but it's a little less bloated. I'm not sure what more I could want from the player. Well, maybe some cool skins. :)

0: https://www.clementine-player.org/

Exaile had a great Dynamic Mode that automatically generated playlists based on previous selections. It worked really well. I miss Exaile in Linux.

Happy Plex user checking in, we still exist!

Plex is a good example how a player should not be.

Jellyfin is the open source counterpart.

Plex isn't perfect. But since my songs are on my drive, there is nothing locking me in to Plex should I choose to switch. That's the most important thing.

In the meantime, Plex is doing great work. Plexamp has been a joy to use.

We do exist. Using Bandcamp and VLC.

> Those people no longer exist.

I guarantee you, people with local libraries still exist. Another fun fact: streaming services and local libraries can coexist.

> streaming services and local libraries can coexist

I do so with Apple Music. The desktop apps UI is hot garbage, I miss iTunes.

> Those people no longer exist.

I exist, and I badly want a solid modern music app that's made for people who own music.

There's some evidence there's a critical mass of people who want to own their music. You can see it at the merch booths at concerts and the sudden surge in vinyl sales. Is it a majority of people? No, but they love music and they're willing to spend money on it.

What is it that you want in a "modern" music app for music owners, which doesn't already exist?

I'm wondering about this too.

Still here. I use Ampache [1][2] which is a PHP application for my music collection.

[1] - https://github.com/ampache/ampache

[2] - https://ampache.org/

Eh, I'm happy to rent my music from Spotify. Available instantly, much cheaper, don't have to worry about storage on cds/hdd/cloud. Definitely the dream for me.

Also, yes. Bad site, old Winamp was cool, etc.

I wish Spotify would separate the player from the service. As a service, Spotify is amazing. As a player, I would like to use something like Winamp.

Exactly, I’d love to see WinAmp, or Audacious be able to at least just grab a playlist from Spotify or Youtube Music. All the streaming services are basically the same music, with their own terrible player, which adds nothing.

I just want to be able to stream music, without using 1.5GB of memory to run a browser.

I've had stuff disappear from my Spotify playlists enough that I no longer trust them.

Storage is cheap, nowadays.

I still use Winamp on Windows PCs.

Those people definitely exist.For me the only concern is whether winamp will only take privacy seriously.That's about all

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