Hacker News Reader

Comment by habeebtc | Hacker News Reader

The current Windows Media Player is a bloated mess with unnecessary features. Not unlike iTunes.

The original WMP was pretty good! But you really can no longer get anything like it. ETA: at least under active development. WMP Classic was a suitable replacement I used to use: https://mpc-hc.org/

Full disclosure: for music I still run Winamp 2.95, and for video it is a mix of Kodi for set top boxes and VLC for PC/Mobile.

View on HN

I'd recommend checking out foobar2000. It feels old in a good way and you can use a lot of the Winamp plugins if you want them for whatever reason. No fancy nonsense, just a music player. There are also plugins to integrate with streaming services, youtube, etc for when you want something outside of your library.

Foobar2000 is good example of what a productive snappy user experience should be. It plays music, what else do you want it to do?

In addition to playing I use Foobar2000 for tagging, ripping, managing and converting.

I resort to VLC media player for music for the same reason.

>Not unlike iTunes

iTunes is dead although its replacements aren't much better.

https://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/

Is it REALLY possible for a media player to be "bloated" to the point that it matters (for playing music), when even the cheapest new PC has 8GB of RAM, 4 cores, and an SSD?

I can appreciate the performance aspect of your perspective here. But, if it takes up way too much screen real estate, it matters. If I spend extra time navigating a bad UI, it matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com