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Comment by washedup | Hacker News Reader

Brings up a great question: What are the alternatives to Winamp? (No iTunes please)

I'm surprised MPD[1] isn't favored a bit more on HN. I primarily use ncmpcpp on desktop, but fall back to ario when using gnome, and MPDroid from android.

The simplicity is great. I have a single NAS containing my entire collection connected to some speakers. In another room I have a rasp pi connected to a different set of speakers which streams the music being played via Icecast2. I can control the music in either room using pretty much any device connected to the network (PC, laptop, pi, tablet, phone), and also stream my collection when not at home.

I don't know of any particular client that's similar to winamp or itunes, but there's a lot to chose from[2], although many of those are a bit dated.

[1]:http://www.musicpd.org/ [2]:http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

I do enjoy my MPD/ncmpcpp setup as well.

however, I also use plex connected to my roku for other media needs. But, I often find when on the go I will use plex on my phone primarily for music...or a superior remote for the roku...

This one is a little esoteric, but Billy is a cool, incredibly minimalist audio player:

http://sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html

Unfortunately, it looks like the site's downloads are unavailable right now (suffering from nostalgia overload?), but it's definitely worth checking out:

    * tiny -- like, 500K
    * gapless playback
    * 100% controllable by keyboard

Glad you mentioned this. This is my favorite, out of the way player. All I want is to just listen to the music and Billy does it.

Clementine is a great multi-platform open-source clone of Amarok 1.4.x. A little different from the old Winamp/XMMS "tape deck" feel, but very responsive and light with many modern features.

Another vote for Clementine. Nice, clean audio player, with the right number of features.

That's my favourite too. Only thing missing for me is mpd support but that is maybe not an everyday requirement.

Clementine is great, but I sometimes wish they could implement some scripting/plugin mechanism somehow .

I use to love Amarok back in the 1.4.x days, but after Amarok messed everything up with 2.0, I swore it off and wrote my own XMMS2 client. Clementine wasn't out yet and I decided that the only way to get something that I wouldn't hate would be to write it myself.

These days I just use zsh and mplayer though. Apparently all of my use-cases sum up to "play one or more albums, perhaps shuffling them first". I've given Clementine a shot, and it is quite like Amarok use to be, but now it all seems like clutter.

On Windows, MusicBee is pretty good with lot of possibilites. http://getmusicbee.com/

+1 on MusicBee, can't praise it enough

MusicBee is awesome!

Having used Winamp for over a decade, I switched to MusicBee and never looked back. The level of customization, fluidity and smoothness were all I was looking in a media player. While it's not as lightweight as foobar it feels a lot more polished.

Sad to see the old folk go though.

MediaMonkey http://www.mediamonkey.com/

I loved WinAmp - now I'm using Vox on Mac. It is much more basic but it's very polished and is the best of the players I tried http://coppertino.com/vox/

I've had pretty good experience with AIMP. Very similar to WinAmp in most regards. (http://www.aimp.ru/)

http://gmusicbrowser.org/ is the most similar open source music player, in my experience.

XMMS - http://www.xmms.org/

Indeed. I still use the 100% perfect XMMS 1.

Audacity and XMMS 2 both were a lot worse for some reason (like slower, weird bugs, needlessly unneeded server/client model, ...)

In XMMS 1, you can have 10000s of songs in the playlist (i.e. your whole harddisk), and jump to any of them immediately by just pressing the "j" key and typing part of its name, and it remains blazing fast.

Not sure how Winamp was these days. I remember it was good at version 2, then starting from version 5 ("2 + 3"), it became bloated.

I also use XMMS as my primary media player. It "just works" and I don't need a lot of fancy stuff in a music player. XMMS for music, and VLC for video, that's pretty much all I need.

XMMS is great! I like mplayer better for video though, it's much easier to control and understand.

I like VLC more myself. Seems to support more videos, and easier UI to access its massive amount of options and features.

I think you mean audacious [1] not audacity [2] although both are useful tools (If you're not familiar, audacious is a media player that supports XMMS plugins and Winamp2 skins). But WRT Audacious vs XMMS, I've also noticed that audacious doesn't seem to scale as well as XMMS with a lot of songs in your playlist.

[1] http://audacious-media-player.org/ [2] http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Tomahawk. http://www.tomahawk-player.org/

Foobar2k. http://www.foobar2000.org/

Thanks for the Tomahawk recommendation - it was very nearly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately it does not support the Mac Play/Pause/etc keys. I'm staggered that such an otherwise well put together application lacks such basic functionality.

Support for this was added a couple years ago: https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk/commit/5cd9e4962...

I think you ought to file a bug, because it's supposed to work.

foobar2000 is great for Windows.

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