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Comment by ahmed_ds | Hacker News Reader

Few weeks ago I actually installed WinAmp because I needed that nostalgia dopamine hit of Milkdrop visualizer and those sweet skins. I downloaded some mp3 files from a YouTube playlist using FFMPEG. Unfortunately none of the mp3 worked. I think it was an encoding issue. Then I remembered the last time I faced a media file encoding problem was close to a decade ago.

We take granted how good VLC or MPC-HC as software are.

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For anyone wanting to dip back into the nostalgia of Winamp and Milkdrop without installing any software, I made https://webamp.org for that exact purpose.

It can render real Milkdrop presets and real classic winamp skins directly in the browser.

Also, it’s open source: https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

That’s awesome!

I actually still use Winamp 2 on a daily basis. The visualizations were my favorite part and is one of the major avenues which drove me get into software optimization. It would be fair to say my entire life might be very different if it weren’t for that influence.

Cool site!

One note: On Brave mobile, the seek slider doesn't actually work. It moves and says 'seek to:' but doesn't.

For the visualizations - Milkdrop is alive and well as projectM (which sometimes comes bundled with VLC, sometimes not?): https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

Which has a ridiculous level of cross-platform compatibility. I can throw up 3 copies of projectM-pulseaudio on my big 3-monitor work machine and have it listen to any audio sink, I've got it installed on my Android TV and it happily responds to whatever audio's being played, so works with streaming apps and whatnot.

There's also thousands and thousands of presets you can add which the community has been adding to since way back when it was still milkdrop, and people have made curated lists like this person's NestDrop: https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-coll...

My issue now is that there is no way to stream my music and make these visualizations come up on people’s screens

I want something as simple as spotify over chromecast, that shows these visualizations on the fly

The metric is: can I do this in a hotel room that happens to have a smart tv?

Because it has to pass that bar, not the bar of plugging in a computer to my own tv’s hdmi port

Bit late answering this, but projectM for Android does have the chromecast feature! It streams whatever audio is playing on the device along with the visualizations. iirc it does require you leave the phone/whatever open on that though otherwise casting loses the audio, that might be different with newer android APIs though..

Then there's all the other screen casting things like miracast or whatever, depending on what the smart TV supports (if it supports any).

Smart TVs themselves are so inconsistent and jank though, I think I'd prefer to bypass all the broken bullshit and just use a HDMI cable.

VLC was the reason I stopped caring about "codec packs". If I ever hit a problem along those lines, or some media format that won't play for any other reason, instead of installing codecs or whatever, I install VLC.

Due to some quirks that I've forgotten, I've switched to using smplayer as my main video player, and winamp for audio on windows.

I wish I could remember why I switched away from VLC for everything.

>We take granted how good VLC or MPC-HC as software are.

Yeah but neither VLC nor MPC-HC really whips the llama's ass.

I don't know about the visualizer, but Audacious lets you install Winamp skins. Source: rocking Bento Classified uninterrupted since 1999.

>rocking Bento Classified

https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Bento_Classified

Audacious makes a great minimal streaming (icecast/shoutcast) desktop player once you futz with the UI a little to get it how you like for that purpose. Like you, years of trying out a lot of gui players but I go back to Audacious every time.

they were probably opus files, not mp3

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