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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, as someone who actually used Winamp back in ~2004: why would you want to use it now?

I have some nostalgia for it, sure, but what exactly does it actually offer you that something like VLC doesn't? It seems like it plays my music and videos competently enough, and I don't know anyone who actually uses Shoutcast anymore.

This isn't a passive aggressive dig or anything, I would actually like to know.

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Not quite an answer, but I used to have my whole library loaded up in one list and could search any part of it, including the path, using the "j" key to instantly play basically any song in it from the keyboard.

It was so good that I literally put an old desktop computer in the trunk of my car in 2000 (with eggshell foam bungee-corded around the hard drives for shock absorption) and ran a long keyboard wire to the drivers seat and I could queue up any song at all while driving with one hand without taking eyes off the road or hands off the wheel. When the computer booted, it loaded winamp with the full playlist and so the only user interaction was pressing the power button (mounted in my dash) and pressing 'j' to search and play.

I've never found this capability in e.g. VLC or anything else (maybe for the best ;). Am I missing it?

clementine (formerly amarok) is better than winamp and has all those nice playlist features.

damn what a DIY project!

please tell me it had some way of playing the "llama's ass" mp3 when you booted the computer/car, or at least a hotkey on the keyboard

Haha that would have been cool. I had the Jurassic park theme song for a while during boot, but switched back to just a normal CHIMES.WAV eventually

It's basically a perfect music player. Lightweight, fast, runs on every version of Windows 95+, great playlist manager, skins, and has extensive plugins which support any music file format.

Why continue the search for perfection once it's been found?

Winamp has a plugin for Orchestra 80/85/90 files, which to the best of my knowledge, VLC does not. Wouldn't be surprised if this were the case for many 8-bit era music formats. The time period in which Winamp came to prominence was when there were still lots of people with a foot in the 90s (and 80s) without it necessarily being retro nostalgia.

I use it because I never stopped using it. I love the classic gray on black modular UI (it looks like high end stereo equipment). Winamp has all the features I want, and nothing has come along that compelled me to stop using Winamp altogether. Since it's the same old Winamp, it's incredibly light and fast.

I'll use Foobar2000 and VLC from time to time (Foobar's conversion and bulk tagging are great). I've tried using them full-time instead of Winamp, but they just don't feel right.

EDIT: I love how there's an 'active playlist' of what's playing now, and additional saved playlists in the library, and can move/copy entries between them. It's probably accidental design of adding a library later, but I haven't found another player that shows multiple playlists side-by-side without customizing it into something else.

I still use it daily due to one killer feature it has: the Nullsoft Signal Processing Studio DSP plugin that it comes with. I have my own preset in there that I use on all of my music. The preset combines:

1. Playback rate control, affecting both speed and pitch (like in a record player) 2. A bs2b transform 3. My own custom overdrive effect

I could skip the 3rd one, but the first two already greatly narrows down what I can use.

foobar2000's library features kind of suck IMO.

Clementine/Strawberry have issues with large libraries or just skip tracks

Spotify is cloud, automatically eliminated there

VLC Player gets used for porn and videos

Winamp quietly Just Works(tm), it scans all my songs, plays them, and is great for tag grooming and setting ReplayGain levels

What else is there?

Really though, what else is there? Besides what is left of WinAmp.. Foobar is too basic for me (not good for managing larger libraries). iTunes used to work well for me, but I don't use Apple.

Is there any other alternative I can try?

musicbee is pretty good

Why does VLC Player getting used for porn and videos eliminate it? You mean you want to watch porn and listen to music at the same time and dont want to launch multiple instances?

Perhaps they are worried about mixing the content up? Like if they have some friends over and want to play some music...

Mainly that. Plus you can configure VLC to always start with the volume down, kind of annoying for listening to music

For me, Winamp still offers two things that most other players don't:

1) Global hotkeys to navigate through my playlists, enqueue songs, control playback etc. Also the global pop-up window (Ctrl+Alt+J) with my current playlist has a really fast search function as I type. Only 'Everything' has faster search. Otherwise modern apps have very slow searches.

2) Milkdrop 2. I have a very large curated collection of visualization presets for Milkdrop 2. This is not something I use when I'm behind the computer, but it's awesome to have running on some screens during a party as the visualizations are in sync with the music.

I like to be able to pause my music, watch a video file, and resume the music, so a unified player is not ideal.

> I don't know anyone who actually uses Shoutcast anymore.

I don't know you, but I use a shoutcast based premium streaming service. Free tier has to use the official apps or the web. Winamp is still perfect for this; it loads quickly, my playlist has the couple of stations I want to listen to, etc. Foobar2000 works pretty well too, but llamas. VLC could work, but I don't think it starts as fast, and there are so many updates to install.

Fair enough! I haven't used it since I was a teenager to watch bootleg episodes of Love Hina and Aqua Teen Hunger Force (and other things that might appeal to a 15 year old boy), but I didn't mean to imply it was "dead" or anything.

As it was written for an era of much slower hardware (I remember using it on a 100MHz machine) - it might be a good fit for something where that matters.

I actively use both. VLC is "for videos" for me. More: for random one-off things. WinAmp (2.x) keeps a playlist loaded, across launches, and is music only. (Opening a one-off video in VLC would destroy the playlist/state.)

VLC doesn't have gapless audio playback.

I was simple and focused on playing mp3's and managing playlists and nothing else.

Every music player now has some shitty cloud integration that I have to ignore.

The playlist manager was top notch. 10 times better than itunes.

Maybe it's just familiarity but I always come back for the active playlist features and IMO very good browse/search workflow.

Literally never needs updated, until this leak at least...

To add to all of the beep boop I am a computer person here is a feature table responses, Winamp was just damn fun. The silly llama intro, the skins, that miniature UI with fun EQ. Sure, you _can_ use VLC, or Foobar, but those are just tools that do a job.

I can force mono with Winamp. That's the sole player I know that has that option.

For Linux there are various command-line players, e.g. mpg123, with this option and with any other imaginable options.

I want a full working application with the equivalent of global hotkeys. I use deadbeef on GNU/Linux, but I still haven't find a way to force mono.

Out of curiosity, why do you want mono? Just a preference?

Yes. And especially when listening with headphone, some artists find it fun to have a moving song from one side to the other, in that case I turn my head thinking that there is something near me, absolutely annoying. With mono the sound is always located in the middle of my brain.

Ah, so you essentially take the existing stereo mix -> force it to mono -> play the new mono feed in both ears? That's an interesting idea...

I feel like this should be relatively easy to replicate with VAC (https://vb-audio.com/Cable/) and Audacity, if the player doesn't support it natively.

Why would I need to do that? Winamp does it perfectly.

Beatles is the reason.

In foobar2000 it's kinda easy, Preferences -> Playback -> DSP Manager -> Downmix channels to mono [+]. (picture: https://i.imgur.com/FDhxh3j.png)

I would use Winamp, but at some point in the last decade I switched to Foobar2000 because its simple and has great FLAC support. At the time getting Winamp to do FLAC involved some weird add on.

Winamp has a media library feature, it can keep track of what you're listening to and builds playlists of your most listened and top rated tracks. Quite handy.

It also had grace note integration that used to fill the id3 info and rename files.. very useful back in the days of cd ripping.

It's small, does the job I need, it can be made to look good, and extended via plugins. What else do I need? VLC seems like overkill for music.

It works great.

It looks great.

What else do you need? :)

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