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Comment by caycep | Hacker News Reader

Why winamp? my understanding is that it's long been surpassed by other apps, i.e. foobar, even VLC

I have used it for all these years because it "just works". I have 2 needs in a music player - play whatever I have locally, and stream me something different when I want to. Winamp did both of those, and I never had an issue with it.

It is hard to "surpass" something that meets my needs perfectly and has given me no issues for over 10 years.

Because it really whips the llama's ass.

Ah, Wesley Willis...

Rock over London! Rock on Chicago!

Winamp was better than Burger King.

Why is this not the top comment?

The main reason I use Winamp is because it has global keyboard shortcuts for controlling playback. I'm not sure if any other media players have that, if anyone knows of one that does I would love to know.

try foobar

TheSOB88, you are dead, my friend. Another casualty of a poor policy.

AHK (http://www.autohotkey.com/) -- Global keybindings for any app you want.

Wow I'd forgotten about AHK. Thanks for reminding me!

Out of curiosity: I use AHK to do basic testing automation for a windows application that I have literally zero ability to control programatically (to achieve actually good automated testing). Anyone have a better option for this kind of use case?

AutoIt is a popular choice:

http://www.autoitscript.com/

AHK is based on AutoIt v2.

I've used AHK for the same things - it's about the best free/open source thing I've found, besides just adding a scripting language to your program.

I wrote some software (http://www.mute.fm/) that controls playback for you automatically when you watch a video (it will pause/mute it and resume it afterward.) It also lets you set up global hotkeys.

foobar2000, Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Add/select appropriate entry and check "Global hotkey".

I have Ctrl-Pause bound to Play/Pause, Ctrl-PgUp to Previous and Ctrl-PgDn to Next.

NB if you have a media keyboard with the play/pause buttons etc then this is no necessary.

Foobar is OK but because it tries to give so many power user options it can become a pain to do simple things like play list management.

My strategy is to install Columns UI (http://yuo.be/columns.php) and ignore the power options to the best of my ability. So far it's working.

I tried this, but it was never quite great. I'm very happy with Clementine which is cross-platform for Windows, Mac and Linux.

In my experience VLC eats a lot more CPU for just playing the same songs. While I like VLC for movie-files, Winamp is nicer when it comes to music.

Yeah, I used to use VLC for playing video files, but man it takes a lot of memory and when it decides to "cache fonts" (or something like that) it takes literally hours to start.

Now I prefer smplayer for videos and foobar for music. Although I've been a heavy Rdio user for some time.

Try running obscure file formats, like chiptune. Winamp reliably supports all of these with a very low barrier to entry.

Try running less obscure (standard) file formats, like ogg/opus. Now you need to look for a plugin...

foobar is a bit... bare bones imho... and neither it or VLC have the shoutcast stream listing services... which will be an issue without winamp. :-(

foobar is very lightweight and barebones, but it's also easily extensible

and heavily extensible. You can basically clone Winamp 2, 3 and 5 with it. The community is really strong, as well.

Its the mutt of media players (mutt as in the email client)

I think it's just for good-old-day's memory. Just like Super Mario.

VLC can do many neat things but you can you easily rate an MP3 file nowadays?

VLC can do many neat things, but I never, ever saw it as a replacement for Winamp. It's more like a toolkit, or at least the multi-tool you fall back on to do a variety of things.

Who rates MP3 files?

I don't have any demographic information to share. But I personally attempt to rate my files. It gives a nice way to categorize by quality. That way I can have abjectly terrible music in my collection, but filter it out for the purposes of not ever wanting to listen to it.

foobar still can't do sound level balancing (ReplayGain) properly. Does winamp?

What do you mean? FB2K has had excellent ReplayGain support for as long as I can remember.

Because Winamp.

MilkDrop

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