Sure they do, why else would bandcamp.com still be in business?
That said, I grew up with Winamp but never understood the adoration for it. As soon as I wasn’t quite so young anymore, I preferred functional and not whimsy.
I probably would, but I found I preferred the library management aspects of MediaMonkey (Windows, proprietary), so that’s what I use today. But fb2k will always have a special place in my heart.
Winamp always felt to me to be the pinnacle of functional. I ended up turning to Winamp for a whole plethora of stuff outside of music playback, like:
- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast
- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)
- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.
The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.
I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.
I guess if you need those, that makes sense. I have never needed them, and when people talk about Winamp, they usually mention all the skins it had (it’s the same for MySpace and Geocities, 2 other projects I don’t miss).
Regarding the plugin system: They had a few different categories of plugins. You had input plugins that let it get audio from a wide variety of sources. A few I remember fondly were input plugins that were little emulators that ran playstation / n64 bytecode ripped from games to play their music. Then you could have your choice of DSP plugins applied after that, a visualization and then also an output. The output could play the music, but it could really do anything it wanted, like encoding it to ogg.
Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.
ShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
Winamp is from a different era of computing. MP3s were new, GUIs were starting to be experimental, "skinning" an application was novel, and of course, the 90s style of form over function had an influence.
Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.
Oh wow, I forgot about Sonique until your post. I even made some skins for it too. I used it at the time because it was a very flashy player, but Winamp was more powerful under the surface.
What wasn't functional about it? From what I vaguely recall, I remember v2.95 being able to service as well as any other player, and the media library was one of the few that seemed to understand the value of using stable sorts when re-sorting by a different column. And then there were all the plugins...
Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.
I like winamp, and continue to like it, because it gets out of my way. All the essential controls were readily accessible, including an EQ which almost all players lack today. The generative, music responsive displays were whimsically cool too. And it didn't constantly bug me to set up a play list for everything.
What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.
I used to use quite a few plugins in Winamp, as well. In particular, I always needed a gapless playback plugin in 2.x. Been so long since I've regularly used Winamp, I don't recall what other kinds I used, but I do know I typically used several. I probably had several visualization plugins, as well, particularly back when I was in college and would have friends over in the dorm. Music on in the background, visualization full screen.
Though I'm using Clementine now. Winamp does not have builds for my OS, and they didn't manage to go open source unfortunately. Anyway, Clementine, if less charming and less appealing than Winamp, is actually a bit more ergonomic and powerful.
There are some of us still out there! I started using Clementine Music Player[0] on my Linux desktop. Amarok inspires it, but it's a little less bloated. I'm not sure what more I could want from the player. Well, maybe some cool skins. :)
Foobar2000 is basically Winamp (though with, imo, some not-so-good defaults when it comes to UI bahavior) and still has a userbase. There are other examples like that. It's not just for the aspect you mention (owning music and deciding what gets played), but these players also support plugins via a fairly standard system, and some of them are pretty convenient.
I use and love Foobar2000, but I certainly agree that out of the box it lacks polish. There’s some great skins like this[1] that make it look amazing, but it can be a hassle to setup.
Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar.
I would love to theme my fb2k but most themes I came across were basically saying "here, download this zip file containing 10 massive unsigned dlls sourced from various people" and that doesnt sit right with me. Especially when its not even on the official website but some 20 star github repo.
When I started mixing and matching songs from different albums to create "mixtapes" (playlists really) for myself, I did a deep dive into ReplayGain (because songs from different albums won't have the same levels). While Winamp had decent ReplayGain functionality (adding RG tags as well as reading them), Foobar2000 was the best.
Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.
I wish macOS had a really solid Winamp/foobar2000 music player. Most now are all about managing a library (no thanks, I have a filesystem for that!) or integrating with cloud services.
I appreciate this perspective but I loathe using the filesystem to manage a music library. If a music player doesn't have a well designed and highly functional music library I most likely won't use it. Most are half-baked though, unfortunately.
You could try DeaDBeeF. It's Linux first but there are Mac OS builds. I've tried it, may be a little buggy on Macs but could be worth a check to see if it works for you.
I'm curious what your objection for organizing music in the filesystem is. Even music players packed with library management features need the files to exist somewhere, so organizing things intuitively on the filesystem seems a good starting point. The alternative, I guess, would be importing them into some non-navigable structure like a binary blob? I would think maintaining a persistent index of all the metadata is all you need beyond the individual files.
I keep my files well organized on disk, but I am also particular about how names are both shown and sorted, and rely on careful and comprehensive tagging instead. For example, I will not name folders "National, The" or "Beatles, The", or "Petty, Tom", but when I'm looking at my music I want The National to be filed under N, the Beatles under B, and Tom Petty under P like I would arrange on physical shelves. The compromise is that all the "Thes" land together in the filesystem, but are shown the way I like them when I go to play music.
I also want albums to be sorted by (original) release year but don't want to put the year in the folder or file names. Similarly, I want to be able to search, and with classical music it is nice to be able to show by composer or conductor or soloist, etc. Tagging and a robust music library make these things easy. Using the file system does not.
I always kept mine under {first letter}/{artist}/{album}/ Where "first letter" in, say, "the Beatles" would be "B", not "T". I had a separate folder where artists that started with a digit would go. Another folder for the occasional glyph. e.g. µ-Ziq.
Plex isn't perfect. But since my songs are on my drive, there is nothing locking me in to Plex should I choose to switch. That's the most important thing.
In the meantime, Plex is doing great work. Plexamp has been a joy to use.
FIIO https://www.fiio.com/m17 and many others make high quality players for people who have a collection.
But honestly, streaming services allow discovery and exploration. I listen to hundreds of artists now that I didn't even know existed when I bought CDs and ripped them myself.
This is still how I discover most of the music I've learned about in the past several years. Human-curated stations, accessible anywhere with an internet connection. Get a set of bookmarks in your desktop or mobile app of choice and you've got your own personal radio dial with stations that never go out of range. Plus you can see the currently playing artist and title at any time. I frequently screenshot them on my phone when something comes on that I want to look up later.
Cheeky shoutout for my side project https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ which lets you find where to buy a digital album the cheapest online. You can track your favourite artists and it will email you when they release a new album too. Feedback welcome!
Thank you! There isn’t a way to submit directly, rather it searches via the vendors. The base data is via the iTunes Search API[0] which is surprisingly accessible. Then it tries to grab more data from the other vendors.
Originally, I built it so all access was programmatic, it never stored anything but rather just triggered API calls, a bit of scraping and a matching algorithm.
But it does have database backed models now so you could technically add releases directly. Although deduping might be a bit of a nightmare.
This is very nice. It found a song I was looking for. It takes me to iTunes for purchase. And boom. They don't seem to be selling the song in India. I hate such policies by various stores.
You're underestimating Winamp and related own-your-music music players. I have real-world usage data on quite a lot of music players and websites, here's the top 30. The number is how many songs played in total on that website (I run something similar to last.fm scrobbling)
This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.
1 YouTube 14,244,087
2 Spotify desktop 2,751,012
3 Monstercat 1,171,321
4 Pandora 895,765
5 VLC media player 892,006
6 iTunes 854,311
7 SoundCloud 724,019
8 YouTube Music 640,801
9 Deezer 501,474
10 Winamp 289,216
11 Foobar2000 251,726
12 Vk.com music 134,319
13 Aimp3 123,306
14 Musicbee 113,652
15 Google play music 89,827
16 Epidemicsound 87,573
17 Spotify web player 81,590
18 Media monkey 70,611
19 Amazon Music 55,691
20 Clementine 29,750
21 Tunein radio 24,413
22 Google play music desktop (community) 22,910
23 Media Player Classic Home Cinema 15,654
24 Pot player 11,348
25 Plug.dj 8,144
26 Tidal web player 7,770
27 Jriver media center 5,200
28 Digitally Imported di.fm 4,636
29 SiriusXM 2,397
30 Dubtrack.fm 1,031
Pleasantly surprised to see Clementine in the list (though a bit disappointed with how low it is in the list).
Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D
I tend to add whatever users request. There have been music players in the past that were requested but I was never able to add support for.
The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.
Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.
I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that
There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.
It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)
Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place
Except perhaps in the audio quality department... I don't know how much things have changed, but I recall youtube doing a bit of compression on the imported audio.
Opt-in does not mean the data is inaccurate. It could be wildly off, but most likely it is in the ballpark, and there is a chance it's completely indicative of the relative usages by various platforms.
If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.
It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere. I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.
monstercat.com has a music player, that's where the count comes from.
My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.
Absolutely! You can still run older version of Musicbee under WINE and it works without much issues. Now a days I use Guayadeque player and quite happy with it.
If you kind of familiar with linux its really not hard and works kind of of the box.
But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.
Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.
Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.
Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:
# mpc search artist moloko | grep -i doctor | shuf | mpc add
Eh, I'm happy to rent my music from Spotify. Available instantly, much cheaper, don't have to worry about storage on cds/hdd/cloud. Definitely the dream for me.
Exactly, I’d love to see WinAmp, or Audacious be able to at least just grab a playlist from Spotify or Youtube Music. All the streaming services are basically the same music, with their own terrible player, which adds nothing.
I just want to be able to stream music, without using 1.5GB of memory to run a browser.
I exist, and I badly want a solid modern music app that's made for people who own music.
There's some evidence there's a critical mass of people who want to own their music. You can see it at the merch booths at concerts and the sudden surge in vinyl sales. Is it a majority of people? No, but they love music and they're willing to spend money on it.
A name looking for a problem to solve, long since solved.
You'll be dearly remembered as my mp3 player of choice from 95 to around 2001, so long and thanks for all the fish.
I have to scroll my scroll-wheel way too many times just to get to the next section, I couldn't even drag their little scroll indicator to move between them.
Not only you and not only this issue: On my Fennec browser on Android it was also impossible to scroll because rendering seemed really slow. So I think they overdid that revamping a bit.
The site brought my S10+ to a screeching halt. I had to force-kill Harmonic, the HN client I use on my phone, just to get out of it. Site preloading via an in-app webview is nice until you happen upon a site like this.
I only clicked because I was hoping the page would be a cool relic from the 90s but instead I was visually assaulted by four full screen autoplay videos and a cookie pop up obstructing 75% of the laggy page. Would not visit again.
Whoever is Winamp today, what they want to revive is not their old cool audio player, but just ride on the name and sell some modern piece of crap that has nothing to do with classic Winamp.
I do both: stream and play offline stuff. For the former, I use YouTube Music, which is incredibly awful, but at least it does work.
The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.
For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.
Let's be serious, you're not the target market. Anyone who is using minimalist software is not the target market for any corporate software. The fact it would drive you away is a feature and not bug.
Winamp was never a minimalistic player, it was one of the feature rich players. It allowed for all the UX/UI hacking you could get wayback then. It's just compared to today it was really simple.
You don't have to be minimalist to perform well. Like most other software from the era of 32MB-of-memory Windows desktops with two-digit-Mhz single-core processors, it had to be lean or everyone would hate it. That doesn't mean lacking features.
It wasn't lean in comparison to other MP3 players at the time. This is the thing I think people are forgetting. It was in comparison pretty much what that website is promising.
What MP3 players? Windows Media Player with the MP3 codec installed on your system? I don't recall there being a lot of options for Windows, at the time.
There were a few options. Napster for one. It's just the reason we don't remember is because we all installed Winamp and forgot about the rest. I spent more time looking for skins for Winamp that I did a replacement for it.
https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.
As someone who at the time had a Pentium processor at 100Mhz and 32Mb of RAM, I feel confident enough to say that Winamp was lean as hell.
Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.
If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.
There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.
The OS got in my way, rather than the player, trying to use 486 machines as mp3 "jukeboxes" back in the day—"the day" being when high-hundreds Mhz single-core machines were the norm, and 486s could be had at garage sales and such practically for free.
MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.
It was featureful but it was also high-performance. It was originally popular because it could play MP3s on systems where other players couldn't keep up.
...and the target audience has probably never even used or heard of Winamp, so if they're trying to ride on the name with that audience, it's going to be another fail.
Lots of people who originally used Winamp way back when are using Spotify, Deezer, etc. The target audience isn't an age group but people who want that style of music app.
A bit of a cross between exceptionalism and the ever increasing feature scope of browsers. We're delivering fully fledged 3D video games and video streaming apps via the web, pretty much anything is possible, and marketing/design/product development teams can see that and want to leverage it.
I much prefer simple text/css websites, but here we are in 2021, where the web browser is the most ubiquitous software delivery platform on the planet.
Doubt it to be honest, if they're rebuilding Winamp from scratch then maybe. Otherwise, I'd expect it to be built on top of the existing Winamp source code which is all C++ and not extremely over designed CSS and Javascript
The webpage gives me exactly zero expectation that this will be in any way based on the original Winamp.
Furthermore, the original Winamp was Windows-only. For anything like this to be successful today it needs to be a webapp and/or a mobile app, which more than likely means starting from scratch.
My comment was tongue in cheek, but the site did lock up my browser and ran at < 5 frames per second when it did load, I couldn't scroll to actually see the full site, so not exactly hyperbole.
To be fair, you get a different experience on mobile than desktop. Turning on responsive mode and I can scroll the site, with it off, I have no idea what it;s doing but it eventually scrolled to the bottom, although Im not sure what that white bar was trying to represent ... just kinda randomly moved
Not only that, but during some sections, the scroll indicator bounces around. I think they're trying to evoke the impression of a volume meter, and doing so incredibly poorly. They also broke keyboard navigation, so I can't even page-up/page-down past it.
My browser full on _freezed_ for a couple of seconds while loading this page. And indeed, I have to scroll multiple times to make anything happen on the page.
Yeah it's pretty dark. The scrolling appears to be time-based. After you spend x milliseconds on a section, it'll let you move onto the next with any scroll event.
What? I had no idea you could scroll.. I can only see the background+heading+paragraph.. nothing happens when I scroll.. Guess Firefox ESR is too outdated for the "new winamp".
Can't wait for the new "app" requiring a few gigs of ram and the latest OS...
New Star Wars and Star Trek properties are developed by people who don't understand (or even like) the original Star Wars or Star Trek properties. As always, when rebooting or remaking something from the 1990's, they're hoping they can get a payday from:
1. Curious young people who missed out on the original, and will check it out because those poor souls have no pop culture of their own and have grown accustomed to remakes.
2. Crusty old farts who complain about everything, but a lot of time still check it out anyway out of nostalgia.
They usually DO make enough of a payday to justify the model.
Do they love Star Trek, or are they just skilled at poking fun at the silly previously unacknowledged parts of the Star Trek universe? For example, the holodeck cum filters joke.
I like the show so-so, but I feel like the non-humorous writing is a bit lazy.
Tangential:
Have you noticed in the new Star Wars movies, where a character will quote a line from a previous movie in an attempted nod to fans who eat up that sort of stuff. For me, it elicits an eye-roll, like when my dad keeps recycling the same corny jokes.
Picard and Discovery are...pretty bad, but Lower Decks has a lot of people that truly love Star Trek on it and it shines through in the sheer attention to detail and jokes delivered in every episode
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's also the only of the four most recent Treks (I'm counting The Orville) that's decent.
The trailers made it look terrible, but it's actually pretty OK.
The Orville's the second-best—holy crap, alien cultures with values that aren't what humans want to see and who don't immediately drop them when confronted with a starship captain! If only real Trek could be so bold, more often—but the mostly-bad attempts at humor drag it down and MacFarlane probably shouldn't have starred.
It's not exactly clear what this is. Is it a music player, or a new streaming service? They make a big deal about their history, but then also talk about fair revenue for creators.
I have a vague fear that it's going to try and do something like Brave's "BAT" but for music that you have locally -- which I guess could work if you distribute your music for free (as I do for much of mine), but doesn't make sense if you purchase your music. I certainly can't see myself wanting to pay for the same music twice -- once for the physical or digital copy, and then again for "Winamp Attention Tokens".
Much more likely though that it's just another music streaming service.
>If it was fair then they wouldn't have to label it as such.
This doesn't compute. It is recognized that compensation to artists is a sticking point with several streaming platforms. If a new one comes along and says "we're different", what is wrong with advertising a competitive advantage?
Yeah, I can see this improving my listening experience or whatever, absolutely. It will be totally rad, yo. I hope I can slap all the 300 V2 skins from my collection onto this, plus dsp_audiostocker—otherwise no deal, going to fb2k instead.
> Solo performer, band or label? Register now for updates on the new Winamp, and how to release your music to a brand new audience.
So it's a platform like Spotify and Apple Music now, not a media player.
As someone who grew up with Winamp on my secondhand Pentium II laptop in the 90's, I don't care. This doesn't appeal to me. The original Winamp died a long time ago.
Winamp, as it's intended to be, lives on in the WACUP project. It's compiled for modern systems and is just as configurable, if not moreso, than the original Winamp. This is what I use for my local needs and I'm completely satisfied with it. I run it on a 4K display in double (2x) scale mode and a modified classic theme. It's perfect. :)
Shout out for WACUP. Just found out about it recently and was pleasantly surprised to see Doctor.O was behind it. Now there's a name I still remember from the old winamp forums. He was a developer for Winamp until the end of the AOL days.
I'm conditioned on Winamp classic skin for my oldschool mp3 listening the way I suppose audiophiles want the ritual of dropping the arm on the LP. Since as early as I can remember I have downloaded some obsolete version of Winamp due to bloat and desperate re-branding/re-appropriation. A re-imagined Winamp is a paradox, but then again it was more or less always abandonware.
Windows desktop audio players (which is still a very valid use case thank you) long moved on from the void Winamp left. My two favourites are AIMP (more aimed for single-file playing), and Foobar (more suited for large collections). Both are compatible with Winamp's DSP plugins, and can be even used with AVS ones, along with Winamp-like themes.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadWinamp is for people who want to own their music. Those people no longer exist.
Sad. Well, I am here for one.
And yeah, I remember Winamp from my childhood. I had badass skins! :D
Sure they do, why else would bandcamp.com still be in business?
That said, I grew up with Winamp but never understood the adoration for it. As soon as I wasn’t quite so young anymore, I preferred functional and not whimsy.
- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast
- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)
- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.
The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.
I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.
Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.
Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.
What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.
Though I'm using Clementine now. Winamp does not have builds for my OS, and they didn't manage to go open source unfortunately. Anyway, Clementine, if less charming and less appealing than Winamp, is actually a bit more ergonomic and powerful.
0: https://www.clementine-player.org/
Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar.
But anyway, get Foobar2000 it’s great overall :)
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/foobar2000/comments/nn57ov/georgiar...
Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.
You could try DeaDBeeF. It's Linux first but there are Mac OS builds. I've tried it, may be a little buggy on Macs but could be worth a check to see if it works for you.
I also want albums to be sorted by (original) release year but don't want to put the year in the folder or file names. Similarly, I want to be able to search, and with classical music it is nice to be able to show by composer or conductor or soloist, etc. Tagging and a robust music library make these things easy. Using the file system does not.
I guarantee you, people with local libraries still exist. Another fun fact: streaming services and local libraries can coexist.
I do so with Apple Music. The desktop apps UI is hot garbage, I miss iTunes.
That's a bold claim, and I'm young enough to barely remember the Winamp era.
Jellyfin is the open source counterpart.
In the meantime, Plex is doing great work. Plexamp has been a joy to use.
But honestly, streaming services allow discovery and exploration. I listen to hundreds of artists now that I didn't even know existed when I bought CDs and ripped them myself.
Cheeky shoutout for my side project https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ which lets you find where to buy a digital album the cheapest online. You can track your favourite artists and it will email you when they release a new album too. Feedback welcome!
Originally, I built it so all access was programmatic, it never stored anything but rather just triggered API calls, a bit of scraping and a matching algorithm.
But it does have database backed models now so you could technically add releases directly. Although deduping might be a bit of a nightmare.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...
[1] - https://github.com/ampache/ampache
[2] - https://ampache.org/
This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.
Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D
The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.
Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.
I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that
There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.
It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)
Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place
If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.
Yes and this very same data shows that the top 4 most popular options are streaming platforms.
What evidence do you have for this?
> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.
Agreed. The above data has around 90% streaming. Why are you claiming it is wrong when it says what you claim is the truth?
My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.
I'm sure some of these people use MPD, but given what I've read after googling it seems like you need to be a technical person to set it up.
But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.
Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.
Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.
Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:
1: https://icecast.org/Also, yes. Bad site, old Winamp was cool, etc.
Storage is cheap, nowadays.
I just want to be able to stream music, without using 1.5GB of memory to run a browser.
I exist, and I badly want a solid modern music app that's made for people who own music.
There's some evidence there's a critical mass of people who want to own their music. You can see it at the merch booths at concerts and the sudden surge in vinyl sales. Is it a majority of people? No, but they love music and they're willing to spend money on it.
I have to scroll my scroll-wheel way too many times just to get to the next section, I couldn't even drag their little scroll indicator to move between them.
1) Explains nothing: "something big is happening."
2) Hides the scrollbar
3) Spikes the CPU usage
I closed the tab after this but I'm sure there is more :/
The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.
For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.
https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.
Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.
If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.
There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.
MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.
I much prefer simple text/css websites, but here we are in 2021, where the web browser is the most ubiquitous software delivery platform on the planet.
What am I accepting or declining? Does it even matter at this point?
Furthermore, the original Winamp was Windows-only. For anything like this to be successful today it needs to be a webapp and/or a mobile app, which more than likely means starting from scratch.
We'll see
Can't wait for the new "app" requiring a few gigs of ram and the latest OS...
1. Curious young people who missed out on the original, and will check it out because those poor souls have no pop culture of their own and have grown accustomed to remakes.
2. Crusty old farts who complain about everything, but a lot of time still check it out anyway out of nostalgia.
They usually DO make enough of a payday to justify the model.
I like the show so-so, but I feel like the non-humorous writing is a bit lazy.
Tangential: Have you noticed in the new Star Wars movies, where a character will quote a line from a previous movie in an attempted nod to fans who eat up that sort of stuff. For me, it elicits an eye-roll, like when my dad keeps recycling the same corny jokes.
Picard and Discovery are...pretty bad, but Lower Decks has a lot of people that truly love Star Trek on it and it shines through in the sheer attention to detail and jokes delivered in every episode
I will defend this hill to the death.
The trailers made it look terrible, but it's actually pretty OK.
The Orville's the second-best—holy crap, alien cultures with values that aren't what humans want to see and who don't immediately drop them when confronted with a starship captain! If only real Trek could be so bold, more often—but the mostly-bad attempts at humor drag it down and MacFarlane probably shouldn't have starred.
I have a vague fear that it's going to try and do something like Brave's "BAT" but for music that you have locally -- which I guess could work if you distribute your music for free (as I do for much of mine), but doesn't make sense if you purchase your music. I certainly can't see myself wanting to pay for the same music twice -- once for the physical or digital copy, and then again for "Winamp Attention Tokens".
Much more likely though that it's just another music streaming service.
If it was fair then they wouldn't have to label it as such... or if this is a classic PR language then you must ask fair to whom?
This doesn't compute. It is recognized that compensation to artists is a sticking point with several streaming platforms. If a new one comes along and says "we're different", what is wrong with advertising a competitive advantage?
https://www.askvg.com/download-winamp-2-classic-skin-for-vlc...
This sounds dubious and/or outdated: https://www.hacktrix.com/how-to-apply-winamp-skins-on-vlc-me...
Perhaps images can be replaced in the skins that work, the oldschool way.
https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/features.php
I have a good (imo) tagline for this:
> Apropos of nothing, the webservice
https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/14/aol-sells-winamp-and-shout...
Such a refreshing modern^Wsober take on UI: http://forums.winamp.com
So it's a platform like Spotify and Apple Music now, not a media player.
As someone who grew up with Winamp on my secondhand Pentium II laptop in the 90's, I don't care. This doesn't appeal to me. The original Winamp died a long time ago.
Winamp, as it's intended to be, lives on in the WACUP project. It's compiled for modern systems and is just as configurable, if not moreso, than the original Winamp. This is what I use for my local needs and I'm completely satisfied with it. I run it on a 4K display in double (2x) scale mode and a modified classic theme. It's perfect. :)
https://getwacup.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.winamp.com/