Winamp: A fast, flexible, high-fidelity music player for Windows (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Winamp: A fast, flexible, high-fidelity music player for Windows (1998)

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44 pointsmarcodiego32 comments

Switched to foobar long long ago and never looked back https://www.foobar2000.org/

WinAmp, it really whips the llama's ass :) What was your favorite skin on Winamp?

Nothing specific. Usually it was sci-fi interface stuff with high contrast buttons so the skin didn't obscure the function.

No skin. My internet was too slow and paid per minute to browse for skins :(

- vanilla - ported v3 skin - some deluxe hifi brand (pioneer, Denon forgot)

Strange times where skeumorphism reigned supreme.

Speaking of skeuomorphism, before MP3 was a thing and Winamp I played many a MIDI and wav file in addition to actual CD's on Audiostation: https://www.audiostation.org/

Reminds me of SoundBlaster music player too :)

one customized by me from a gray plain (I think it was a macosx like)

i lost a lot of hours instead of studying for that skin, somewhere in the Ark-HDs I should still have it (I hope)

I remember playing with skins for a while, but since I mostly used Winamp without looking at it, I stopped caring about skins and appreciated the stock 2.x look. Who knew that a modular, black/gray aesthetic reminiscent of high end audio equipment would be timeless?

I've tried to use other players (Foobar, VLC) with Winamp skins, but they never looked or functioned right, so I kept coming back to the original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_(software) supports Winamp 2 skins well, including the default Winamp look.

Major Tom: https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Major_Tom_v5

You just detonated a nostalgia cobalt bomb, this was my favourite as well. So well crafted in it’s thoughtful details.

Fallout: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgJZbFAWAAEelSb.png

I like colors https://skins.webamp.org/skin/9bddbdeb502cdd6703b602789d1675...

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/d3191256028abba38e1bf89a07fd7f...

Works OK in my Winamp 5.666.

These iddy-biddy pixel-perfect UIs are a lost art. Most of the UI's these days look like something from a Fisher-Price toy.

Don't miss https://webamp.org

I can recommend https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-Player/deadbeef

Still using Winamp here. It works, it looks good, and it doesn't take half my screen space.

For macOS people out there,

re:AMP https://re-amp.ru https://www.producthunt.com/posts/re-amp

This is almost great. Looks a bit abandoned though.

I wish the source was available so I could build it on Apple Silicon and perhaps make a few customizations.

Also notable:

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

* https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

I'm using clementine from the first version. I kept using Amarok 1.4 after KDE reimagined it in 2.0, and Clementine keeps all the good stuff from the old Amarok.

This aesthetic bugs me. I don't know why so many open source apps look like this. I think they are extremely unattractive looking apps.

In some cases, they're very skinnable and the ugly theme is just the default. Both Winamp and Foobar2000 were extremely popular in the desktop customization community when it was at its height around 2004-2006ish for that reason.

It's also because most of these projects don't have dedicated designers working on them. So you end up with the "designed by developers" aesthetic and let's be honest: we developers generally suck at designing UIs.

Does anyone know how the media library scanning was implemented in Winamp, I remember it was orders of magnitude faster than any (even modern) music players for very large music collections.

The first "useful" tool I ever wrote in the 90s (in VB 5 if I am not mistaken) was a M3U to HTML converter for MP3 playlists. Winamp added the feature a bit later.

A successor that wasn't mentioned yet but is much more similar in goals is AIMP.

xmms - has quite crispy clean sound - and look of winamp https://www.xmms.org/

I mostly miss the programmable visualisations.

You might be looking for ProjectM [1]. Reimplements WinAmp’s Milkdrop visualizer plugin to run standalone on practically every modern platform.

[1] https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectM

We have those working at https://webamp.org

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