Comment by natesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by natesm | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, it's mostly just an ugly version of iTunes.

* Visuals aside, the UI is basically iTunes. It has the exact same elements in the exact same places, except Winamp looks like a tacky GTK+ theme.

* I couldn't figure out how to hide "Genre", which I strongly dislike, and "Year", which I don't care about.

* No fullscreen on Lion - this takes, literally, 5 minutes to add. I guess they would have to spend some time drawing a completely custom button.

* The largest UI element is the number of seconds that have elapsed in the current song. Is this really something that people care about?

* Sorting by artist seems to be broken - if I sort by artist, it should logically order each artist's albums alphabetically as well. I'm not sure what secondary ordering its actually using - it's not alphabetical by track or ordered by track number (all 1, all 2, ...). iTunes calls the manner of sorting that I suggest "album by artist".

* Scrolling is broken (not smooth). This is also an issue in Spotify.

* For some reason there is a prominent button to show the "About" dialog.

Good things:

* When the track changes, this list doesn't snap back to the new song. This is one of the most annoying features in iTunes.

* When the track changes, if you have searched for something, it doesn't just stop like iTunes. In iTunes, if you start playing a Beatles song, then search for "The Clash", if that Beatles song ends, it will not go to the next Beatles song, because the original song is no longer visible.

* Watch folders, which, if it wasn't ugly, would be reason enough to use it.

> Sorting by artist seems to be broken - if I sort by artist, it should logically order each artist's albums alphabetically as well. I'm not sure what secondary ordering its actually using - it's not alphabetical by track or ordered by track number (all 1, all 2, ...). iTunes calls the manner of sorting that I suggest "album by artist".

It appears to be a stable sort, preserving the existing order of tracks that share the same album name. So to sort by 'album by artist' first sort by album then by artist. IIRC that's how it also works on windows, and is a feature I quite like.

Also:

- The options for playlist viewing/filtering are limited. There's no equivalent to iTunes' "column browser", so the only way to (for instance) play a single album is to search for its name!

- There is no tag editor at all. What.

- While you can create playlists, I can't find any way to add tracks to them or reorder them, making them pretty much useless.

- The (light-gray-background) scrollbars look completely out of place on the black background. (This kind of falls under your point of "ugly", but it's sufficiently broken that it's worth calling out.)

I actually don't think the tag editor is a big deal. The only "tag editing" program I use is Picard, and it's just once for each file, which gets it perfectly tagged, renamed, and placed in the proper directory.

Oh, here is another one that I didn't notice at first. Bottom right corner resizing on Lion. Wrong.

Uglier than iTunes...now that is something I have got to see....

Yeah, but does it play FLAC?

That would seal it for me.

I use Fidelia at the moment, but the library is appalling and loading and scanning is just broken on large collections.

If WinAmp only provides scanning of large collections, a basic library and FLAC support I'm going to be happy.

what about cog[1]?

[1]: http://cogx.org/

No good with large collections.

All I want is it to load meta-data for 85,000 FLAC files, and allow me to search in a split-second, and then play an album. Oh, and it has to support 24bit FLAC too.

I don't use playlists, I don't care about UI so much.

At home I use a Squeezebox Transporter. Works brilliantly. But in a desktop player WinAmp is the only thing I've found that can scan and handle the collection, and than search it fast. So I run that in a VM.

I realise I'm an edge case, but WinAmp for Mac looks like it fits my need.

mpd/mpc then?

what about clementine ? http://www.clementine-player.org/

WinAmp for Mac is crap (as of today).

It cannot scan a large collection, it imported only 65 tracks every time I fired off the import. Each time taking a few minutes to do it.

That's not going to work for 85,000 files. Fidelia at least imports a couple of thousand files before crashing.

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