Winamp clone in Swift for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Winamp clone in Swift for macOS

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The best Winamp clone for macOS is still Re:AMP https://re-amp.ru/

If you want the original Winamp experience with full support of M3U playlist then don't go further than Re:AMP

latest release was 5 years ago

Don’t mess with perfection

what do you mean ? the last release was 22 years ago. This is just trying to be the perfect copy of that.

You joke. I still use an old winamp 2.81 on my windows machine.

About 15 years ago I came across some plugin dll files that added flac support.

The only issue I ever run into is some non ascii characters in ID3 tags make that file unplayable. But winamp is perfectly capable of editing them.

It's even pretty good in the high dpi monitors because Ctrl-D enables "Double size" mode on the main window and equaliser. And the playlist window has customisable font sizes.

Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.

milkdrop and project m, those were the days.

Why aren’t these really a thing anymore? Does anyone know any non-shit way to get nice visuals from apple music or spotify or whatever these days?

There are some visualizers in the Mac App Store. I'm using Ferromagnetic right now and like it well enough. There are still visualizers in Apple Music left over from the iTunes days but they're kind of lame.

I stumbled onto one years ago by accident, maybe an Easter egg or something. I came back to my computer (Mac) after several hours of iTunes playback to see a hitherto unknown visualization running, with fairly primitive-looking graphics by today's standards. It was not any of the visualizations available in iTunes at the time.

I filed a bug on it with Apple and they got back to me asking how the hell I had invoked this, because they'd never seen it before. Never did get to the bottom of it.

Intentional pun?

If you look at [1] you can see some derivations from Milkdrop/Project M.

There were a lot of other, good visual plugins and software. VJ software, specifically, but also Libvisual just abstracts input and output, therefore allowing you to use all of these (supported) visualization plugins on any supported media player. It isn't much developed anymore these days, but this is the correct way forward.

Looking at the actors in Livisual [3] G-Force is decent but also a couple may be missing from earlier Libvisual releases. You may also like Lemuria [4]. Winamp's AVS is also FOSS [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilkDrop

[2] https://github.com/Libvisual/libvisual

[3] https://github.com/Libvisual/libvisual/tree/master/libvisual...

[4] https://github.com/dr-ni/lemuria-2.1.1

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Visualization_Studio

ProjectM is on github too

https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

Also, I'm working on AVS still, from time to time: https://github.com/grandchild/vis_avs/tree/dev

Agreed. I would love Plex (or PlexAmp and then cast) to have some built in visualizations. And I have no idea why some of those streaming EDM channels on YouTube aren't doing music visualizations rather than ten second loops of video.

Milkdrop and Project M are both available as vis plugins for Foobar2k, on Windows at least: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_vis_milk2

Project M is still around. I use it to project visualisations at house parties.

Geiss source is available now. Maybe it should be ported :) https://github.com/geissomatik/geiss

I was pleasantly surprised to find Soulseek is still active

>Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.

You can still do that. Winamp runs just fine on Windows 10/11.

A winamp clone for os/x - interested in learning swift, and wanted a stable version of winamp for os/x - two itches scratched

Nice. Maybe next step can be integration with one of the music services

Apple Music would seem the obvious choice.

What was the most fun and least fun you had while learning Swift for this project?

I remember having trouble making a Swift UI for my C app because I forgot to disable sandboxing in Xcode project settings. Spent a frustrating two hours debugging

I was not a fan of WinAmp in its heyday because I thought all the "skins" sucked.

Wow, have times changed. I look at this screenshot now: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mgreenwood1001/winamp/refs...

and think about how usable this looks. Buttons are demarcated clearly. The scrub bar is big enough to grab. Everything is legible.

UI sucks now.

Meanwhile... seeing the lyrics in that shot makes me wonder if WinAmp supports karaoke playback...

I guess the original did through plug-ins. Hm, maybe I'll take a shot at adding it to this one.

I often see these 'clones' of winamp and for some reason they all use skins that look like shit.

As someone who still uses winamp (via Wacup) I can swear by the 'Bento' skin that is not a garish nightmare.

https://www.deviantart.com/unpopularpizza/art/Winamp-Big-Ben...

The skin I saw most often back in the day had some dumb non-rectangular shape with a "texture" on it and the controls scattered all over the place. Right in line with the "skinning" fad of the early 2000s, which defeated the intuitiveness of GUIs and decades of their evolution.

Then came the even-dumber "transparent-UI" fad.

Fortunately both those died. Oh but wait: Here comes Apple, exhuming one of them in 2025! But Apple has always hated customization, so they probably won't be resurrecting "skins" too.

I’m in the minority who thinks that having a “skin” in the first place already goes against good UI. Hence foobar2000 all the way.

We may be in the minority, or we may simply be in the minority who can identify the problem and articulate it.

I think that is actually the truth behind a lot of the design regression we see today (and a lot of other regression).

Been running Foobar 2000 for macOS for a year, but this is pretty in a retro way, I guess.

https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

<- the least bollocks-infested media player on macOS since about, oh, September 2000.

vlc..?

it's a good player but it's always been clunky and oddly buggy

maybe it's less so on mac but on linux i get random long pauses on video playlist playback that often end with it just stopping

I am a big fan of VLC, and I just wrote an article about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/12/vlc_guru_gong/

But VLC is a multi-function tool that can play audio and video.

Foobar is, as far as I can tell, just an audio player. It's more focussed and consequently smaller and simpler. That's what I like about it.

I keep both on my machines and I use both... but I use VLC for video, and Foobar for just listening to music.

foobar2000 was released for macOS in around 2017, and I'm pretty sure it's still not really at parity with the Windows version. Not that it's bad, but just saying.

Ah I miss the days when my own music felt like something valuable (now it feels like a mess). When I’d turn on music via the computer (using xmms or Amarok hooked up to the amplifier. I feel a bit like Sonos and iOS/Android and Spotify are a trap. And I fell for it. I’m getting old.

Obvious difference with the real Winamp, bugs etc:

- Can't copy/paste a folder

- EQ and Playlist are not detachable / moveable

- No library

- Does not restore the playlist at launch

- Crashes when playing a flac file

- Does it needs to auto play the winamp mp3 at launch?

Re your last point: Duh!

The only reason to use a Winamp clone is nostalgia.

Native app!!! It is not a trashpile of javascript plus a huge copy of V8. Warms my heart! Thank you!

Missed a chance to call this swiftamp instead and avoid namespace collision.

machamp

Isn't that a Pokeman?

Seems fishy

Or swamp to be shorter

404 error? Matt Greenwood's page is still there, but the winamp repository is gone. (Not all that surprising, as I expect "winamp" is trademarked, although there are still some other Github "winamp" repositories.)

Great project, I am using Audacious from homebrew with an XMMS skin to recreate the experience - but it struggles with HiRes displays amongst other things.

You should, however, change the name. I am pretty sure the name Winamp is trademarked and you can get into legal trouble.

This def needs skins next: https://skins.webamp.org/

https://archive.org/details/winampskins_major_tom_v5_1 was a true work of art

It feels like making a UI with skins is a lot easier. Just draw the bitmap onto the window, and set some areas to be clickable (and change the bitmap of that area to "button is being pushed" when the user is holding the mouse down)...

[MacAMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAmp) was real and official, directly from Nullsoft, a million years ago.

Fun and easy to reskin as well!

There was also “Winamp:Mac” 0.71 alpha version official from Nullsoft: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/winampmac

Its awkward name was because “MacAMP” dev became third-party: https://macintoshgarden.org/author/subband-software

I may not use this but I just had a pleasant five minutes reading through some of the source code. Off topic, but: I currently think Swift is the most interesting non-Lisp language. I tried Rust and didn’t particularly like it and I have given up using Haskell on anything but small fun projects.

Great to see useful open source projects. I now pay for YouTube Music but I still have an enormous library of MP3 music files that I have purchased over the years so I probably will build and run this player, at least for a few days.

EDIT: I just tried it, nice!

This is awesome and I wish I could use it. Like a lot of people, I don’t have a music folder, just Apple Music.

I have a few things scattered across my Dropbox account I could collect. (Unless it could somehow use downloaded songs from Apple Music.)

Streaming music services are a blessing and a curse. I could never afford or collect the vast number of albums in my library. So lack of ownership isn’t a problem for me. The only downside is I have to use their app, which they have zero incentive to improve. :(

It's a shame this too doesn't play/pause with space bar.. like Spotify, drives me nuts.

It's MIT licensed, so you can add it. they might even take a patch. I agree it's pretty lame when the space bar doesn't play/pause media in players though.

It is supposed to in Mac Spotify, it’s just a bug that apparently isn’t important enough to fix.

You can hit Tab then Space, and it works normally (yes this is fucking awful).

https://webamp.org/

Great job! I'm sure it was a lot of fun to produce.

Memories from over 20 years ago, but later I switched to foobar. I prefer foobar's simple interface. Does anyone still remember foobar?

I do! I also went from Winamp to Foobar 2000 for a few years.

Then I discovered an actively maintained modern patch for the final Winamp called WACUP, and now I'm back to daily driving that instead. :)

https://getwacup.com/

>remember foobar

It's still being actively developed

>Does anyone still remember foobar?

I remember foobar. I also seem to recall that it does not really whip the llama's ass.

Still, in the year 2025, the only offline player that stays in menu bar and doesn't clutter the dock is Vox.

URL dead, 404 ...

Nice! Speaking of Winamp - are you using any alternative music player for iOS that you would recommend?

I started using https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor a while ago.

Though design is more akin to the default Apple Music app than WinAmp.

Interesting! Will be checking it out.

I've wanted a music player like the early versions of iTunes for a while, and this looks like it might fit the bill.

Those who've only known Music.app and later iTunes versions might be surprised to learn that there was a time when iTunes actually had a clean, intuitive UI: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app

Beautiful. I remember running iTunes 5 on my Powerbook G4, incredible how things have changed.

Can't go wrong with FB2k: https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

It now has a last.fm plugin, so let's get scrobbling!

sweet! Thx!

Corrected link for iOS (TIL!): https://www.foobar2000.org/ios

I like Swinsian (assuming you mean MacOS)

I really liked this too, but balked at the license fee and ended up not paying.

Swinsian was the only Mac music player I could find that could come close to replicating my old MusicBee setup. The license fee was annoying but I paid it anyway and have no regrets.

Decoupled: <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/decoupled/id1382409837>

100% offline-only. Open in Finder, drag&drop music, enjoy the untethered experience.

That's exactly what I like, airplane mode-friendly. Thanks!

I love Decoupled, but the lack of updates and Apple's tendency to delist unmaintained iOS apps makes me nervous. I swapped over to VLC last year.

I’ve been using Jewelcase for a while. https://apps.apple.com/in/app/jewelcase/id6642683626

Excellent, I like offline players best.

Who even has mp3s and music files lying around locally anyway. I miss Winamp and want to run it again, but since I mostly use streaming services I can’t anymore

Also worth checking out: https://re-amp.ru

No source "freeware", would you trust a binary from a random Russian developer to not contain/deliver a trojan?

Would you trust a binary from a random developer to not contain/deliver a trojan? Russianness has nothing to do with it.

These days executing random code is standard and if you don't do it you're wierd. Case 1: browsers automatically execute code from random sources. Case 2: People tell you to curl someurl.whatever | sh to install compilers (ie, the only way to use the rust rustc on non-rolling distros). And it goes on and on. It's not really an exception to standard practice to install applications. The only difference here is that it is from an actual human person instead of a corporation. They are at least somewhat trustable, unlike corporations which always have their profit motive to sell you.

Also, if you only run programs that have been approved by a third party organization first you're really restricting yourself.

1. Browsers aggressively sandbox the code they run.

2. If you’re running curl | sh on random urls you don’t trust, you’re asking for trouble.

Running random executables you find online is a good way to get spyware and ransomware installed. I’m not saying that’s the case for re:Amp, but it’s absolutely still valid to tell people not to run random programs they find online.

>Running random executables you find online

Ie. the Windows School of Software Distribution.

No source freeware from Russia was the norm back in the 90s.

I use Vox which is pretty close https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

They also have cloud syncing for your Flac audio files, that part costs $$ but it's nice if you have lots of lossless rips/torrents.

iOS version? Considering ditching Spotify for local files.

IOS vlc is pretty good, it lets you open a fs directory

finally.. good software

reAmp (https://re-amp.ru/) is a faithful recreation as well, but no updates since 2020 (and not OSS)

I liked winamp when I was using windows.

I think any winamp clone should run on OSX Windows and Linux.

I understand that cross-platform code may be annoying, but we really need applications that work on the three main operating systems.

I’m not entirely sure we need a Winamp clone on MacOS anyway. It seems unreasonable to expect that everyone who ever builds consumer software should make it work on every machine, though.

Why not also insist that it should work on iOS and Android? Those are undoubtedly the most commonly-used OSes at this point.

> It seems unreasonable to expect that everyone who ever builds consumer software should make it work on every machine, though

It’s not. Stop supporting vendor lock-in toolkits and you’re golden.

QMMP should run under OSx.

Does not use the macOS standard toolkit or comply with Apple user interface guidelines.

One MacWorld mouse out of five.

The original likely infringed all Windows design principles.

Yet they pulled off one of the most usable media player.

Windows users don’t care about Windows design principles because there basically aren’t any.

At the time there were. Between 1995 and 2001 or so most Windows applications had largely consistent interfaces (yes i can think of exceptions, like WinAMP :-P and even Microsoft's own Office didn't always follow the rest of the OS, but in general at the time following the OS style was considered desirable).

Would you expect a WinAmp clone to comply with Apple's user interface guidelines?

Minor point: I read this as OS/2. The author may want to correct that. macOS naming and versioning is confusing enough.

macOS was never known as OS/X. It was formerly known as OS X and Mac OS X.

As a former OS/2 user, it really threw me off for a second.

Also, you're using a trademark ("Winamp") in the name. So, expect a C&D from Llama Group or whomever.

Aside from that, it looks really nice and well-designed! And it's in Swift and not some janky Electron app. Good job on those fronts!

Same, actually... I'd probably just say "for macOS" at this point, since it is the current term from what I understand.

Aside: the project seems interesting enough, didn't see support for (icecast) streaming listed in the project though, which although less common today still exists.

100%! I first read as OS/2 as well, and was like interesting.

That's how I read it, too! I got excited! "Finally," I thought "I can run WinAmp on my OS/2 Machine". Then I clicked to the repo and saw it was just a Mac thing.

The page itself has a more accurate description (Winamp *clone* in swift for OS/X) than the headline here.

Since the actual Winamp had a questionable source code release, it could feasibly have been ported to other platforms, so we need to know that it is in fact a clone, and not a port of the real Winamp.

Ok, we've changed the title now. (Submitted title was "Winamp for OS/X")

Pretty misleading headline. This isn't actually Winamp. It's someone's attempt at a clone.

It's a clone with a stolen name, and given that it's not been abandoned it's likely they'll come down on this like a bag of hammers.

Seems like Mr. Greenwood may be too green to know what's coming!

Ok, we've cloned the title above.

(Submitted title was "Winamp for OS/X")

Thanks, Dang. You're the bestest.

Why does the title call it OS/X? It's macOS and it's described that way on the repo.

Unfortunately his is just a recreation rather than an actual port, since the license for the source that was released prevents derivative works.

Foobar2000 is the spiritual successor to Winamp and it runs on Windows and macOS as well as mobile.

The "About" section on that page says "Winamp clone in swift for OS/X" but their description says "Winamp macOS [...] A native macOS application..." Not sure I understand what OS/X is--I thought it said OS/2 for a second.

Oh, I originally missed it on the side I only looked in the README.

I don't think it was ever called OS/X? It's been called OS X and Mac OS X but never OS/X.

Foobar2000… now there's an app I haven't heard of in (checks calendar) nearly 20 years. Glad it's still kicking.

It's still a wonderful piece of software and actively supported.

If it doesn't run on Windows, how can it call itself Winamp? Macosamp makes more sense.

OS/Xamp perhaps.

Joking aside, there's Audacious[1], which is an excellent and cross-platform player, with support for Winamp skins. Also check out WebAmp[2] and the skin museum[3].

[1] <https://audacious-media-player.org> [2] <https://webamp.org> [3] <https://skins.webamp.org>

OS/Xamp, pronounced Oh-sex-amp :o)

It really slaps the llama’s ass!

I've never seen os x written like that. I assumed it was a version of os/2 I had never heard of.

Not only that but it hasn't been called OS/X for nearly a decade.

was it ever called OS/X?

It was called OS X and/or Mac OS X.

But now, not only is it not branded OS X, but it’s literally not at version 10 anymore. (The X was a roman numeral.)

It was a rhetorical question. Yes, I'm well aware it was OS X and that it was never referred to as OS/X

It was never called "OS/X"[1]. I've never even seen it called that colloquially until today.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS

I wondered initially if this was a winamp port for older macs.

It requires macOS 13.0 (High Sierra, 2017) or later, which is several releases after it stopped being called OS X. 10.11 (El Capitan, 2015) was the last OS X.

The repo only goes back a week. I just think OP hasn't kept up with Apple's naming conventions.

Careful! High Sierra is actually macOS 10.13.

By contrast, macOS 13 is Ventura, from 2022.

(I personally would accept someone referring to High Sierra as “OS X” because it’s still version 10 of the Macintosh OS, even if Apple dropped that branding a few years earlier.)

As an occasional enjoyer of OS X 10.5 on PowerPC, I can recommend... iTunes. It is actually really decent, as is most of Jobs-era stuff.

I don't have anything to play FLAC or Vorbis, but the machine has more urgent problems... <https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/>

Not taking anything away from the project, which looks very cool, but it also probably doesn’t compile on OS X. Looks like minimum macOS version is 13.

IBM won the long game. They secretly acquired Apple, but you weren't meant to know that yet. Not even Tim Cook knows. Big Blue's lawyers will be writing politely to the author of this project, and teaming up with the gutted remains of Nullsoft to sue them for copyright infringement.

Of course they mean OS/X Warp, the Apple x IBM OS collaboration the world forgot.

I know this was in jest, but had some of Apple’s and IBM’s 1990s plans came to fruition, we could’ve ended up with an operating system capable of running both OS/2 and Taligent (the original planned successor to the classic Mac OS) applications on PowerPC hardware (one of the few parts of the Apple/IBM collaboration that was realized):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS

OS/X Warp sounds a lot cooler than Workplace OS.

Every single time something like this comes up I feel compelled to mention Audacious.

See my previous comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32779590

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965620

Like most days, I am using it right now on macOS.

Supports old Winamp skins too, which is the whole point!

Why do people insist on still calling macOS "OS X" (or "OS/X" for that matter)?

Why do people insist on calling “X” “Twitter”?

When something has a name for 15 years, it tends to be pretty sticky.

“OS/X”, though, that’s just someone messed up and jumbled two names together.

I mean, muscle memory & fatigue may be part of it. I used MacOS for a number of years, then I used Mac OS X for 8 years, then OS X for 5 years, and now macOS for 9 years.

During that time I also used Windows and Linux from time to time. Their names didn't change in a way where just calling them that was perceived as incorrect.

Rebellion against meaningless name changes. Why does Apple insist on calling Mac OS an OS X, Mac OS X, macOS?

Not everyone cares about the marketing departments feelings

Had Apple given their OS a proper name, I assure you people would use it. You shouldn't use the "OS" moniker as part an OS's name. It's redundant, like naming your child "Human Child Jimmy". Obviously people will take all sorts of shortcuts around it, which you will not have control over, leading to weird "HC/Jim" and the likes.

It's a bit like "U.S.A." not being a proper country's _name_. I mean, would you name you children "Coherent-Enough Assemblage of Bodyparts"? You keep that long-form stuff for the _description_ field! Somebody fucked up when they filled out the form, ain't no fixing it now.

Indeed. We in "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" made an even bigger fuckup filling out our form, particularly when the Short Name field is populated with the generic-sounding "United Kingdom" instead of a proper name.

Does it whip the llama’s ass?

Llamas are cute, do not hurt them please

Whips the vicuña's ass.

That vicuña's a wizard!

Personal opinion: Alpacas are cute, llamas are mostly huge and menacing.

it really does

Or does it lick it?

#misheardLyrics

#demolitionManReference

This is not for OS X, this is for macOS 13.0 or later.

OS X is macOS 10. This application does not open on macOS 10.14.6.

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