
Whatever happened to Winamp? - davidgerard
https://rocknerd.co.uk/2017/02/05/whatever-happened-to-winamp-which-you-can-still-download-by-the-way/
======
spronkey
Still use it. You can pry it from my cold dead hands. The dual media library /
playlist workflow is much nicer to use than iTunes (not to mention the latter
becoming a bloated horrible piece of utter crap). It plays much nicer with
network shares and other 'get out of the way and just let me point you at a
directory of music' situations.

The UI is much nicer than Foobar - but could definitely use a little tweaking
(but not a lot!).

I also used to really enjoy the skins, although these days the skinning scene
is practically dead, and the default skin with Winamp Classic colours is
pretty OK.

Oh how I hope active development can resume once again, and that it doesn't
screw with the player too much.

~~~
roystonvassey
iTunes has got to be the worst piece of software shipped by Apple. The bloat
has gotten worse over the years, takes ages to load and I have no clue how
anything works with its utterly non-intuitive UI. They should have just kept
it as a simple music player and put the purchases/radio/everythingelse options
on a different app.

~~~
Razengan
Am I the only one who finds iTunes just fine on macOS? Of course it could use
being split into 2-3 apps (like they did with iBooks) but it's hardly as bad
as the echo chamber makes it out to be. On Windows, sure.

I think they should at least split the video functionality into a "TV" app, as
they have started to do on iOS.

~~~
Synaesthesia
It's far superior on MacOS, performance is way better and it's integrated into
the OS.

~~~
diamondo25
Yea, just in a way there's no easy way to assign the play button to launch
Spotify instead.

------
captbaritone
For those looking for a quick dose of nostalgia, I wrote a reimplementation of
Winamp 2.9, which you can load in your browser:
[https://jordaneldredge.com/projects/winamp2-js/](https://jordaneldredge.com/projects/winamp2-js/)

It even supports skins (just drag the .zip/.wsz file over the player).

~~~
TorKlingberg
Nice! I wish you had a button to show it in 2X or 4X size. Winamp looks tiny
now, but back in 2000 everyone had low resolution screens, so Winamp had to be
tiny or it would fill up the whole screen.

~~~
captbaritone
It does! Winamp had a "double" mode, and I've reproduced it faithfully. Try
clicking the tiny "D" to the left of the visualization area.

------
sengork
Winamp has seemingly reached its final version and it still does the job just
as well as for the past 20 odd years. Even more so than its defunct competotor
Sonique
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_\(media_player\))

Part of this longevity has no doubt to do with Windows' lasting APIs.

For the most part Winamp is able to do so as not much has changed when it
comes to music listening on computers. For example audio cards are
fundamentally the same devices they used to be decades ago and basic I/O
workflow has not changed either. Same goes for the majority of music file
formats with which Winamp is natively compatible.

What I do miss is Winamp's vast library of plugins (visualisation, tools, file
format compatibility and countless others). To my knowledge the ability to
source plugins today has gotten harder as the library hasn't carried over to
the new website/owners. For me this is where Foobar2000 closes the gap.
Unfortunately Archive.org is not the remedy in such situations where
Winamp.com/robots.txt disallowed fetching of the plugin binaries. Example:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120505234347/http://download.nu...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120505234347/http://download.nullsoft.com/customize/component/2009/3/6/P/_WideSound_DSP_plugin_2.exe)

~~~
aembleton
Sonique - that brings back a flood of memories. Winamp though is one of the
first apps I install on a fresh copy of Windows.

Check out Sonique's shaped skins, not just squares:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_\(media_player\)#/media/File:Media_player_sonique-1.95.png)

~~~
sengork
Yes the shaped skins with the notion of "big" "medium" and "small" window
sizes are quite unique notion to Sonique. Personally I have not seen this 3
way size concept in other applications (it was very handy utility at the time
when screen space was small).

------
davidgerard
OP here. Inspired by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415)
\- I thought a short subjective history would be useful and interesting.
(Sources all linked inline.)

I posted to my Facebook asking "does anyone still use this thing?" and a whole
pile of people enthusiastically responded that they're still on Winamp 20
years later. Amazing the goodwill software can generate just by _not sucking_
...

~~~
noonespecial
It did more than not suck. Lots of software sucked by just not being good at
what it was supposed to do. That got ignored.

Winamp _radically not sucked_ by being basically the only piece of software in
that space that didn't try to turn your computer and your love of music
against you while you were using it. It doubled down on that pile of win by
being highly competent at what it set out to do as well. That rightfully
earned _much_ love.

A lesson a great many web service companies could learn from today.

~~~
davidgerard
oh God, RealPlayer. I'd suppressed the memories.

That said, Real's open-source version, Helix Media Player, was _not awful_
(and didn't have the same tentacular behaviour).

~~~
dethswatch
Remember why they made is virtually impossible to download directly from their
side, for reasons I can't recall? That was awesome.

------
Mithaldu
> I first played an MP3 in late 2000. Some J-Pop thing called “Forces”, I
> forget who by, that I didn’t think much of (though it was catchy enough I
> can still remember the chorus).

That is with almost absolute certainly this track by Susumu Hirasawa, one of
the few musicians to have produced truly unique music (and who's still at it):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYYYew8CUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYYYew8CUI)

~~~
davidgerard
Yep, that's the one!

~~~
kaybe
What the heck, this really is incredibly catchy. It's already been lodged in
my head for 3 days.

~~~
davidgerard
it was lodged in my head for 16 years, count yourself lucky

~~~
kaybe
Let's see in 16 years..

------
thepiwo
I wonder why foobar2000 isn't mentioned more often. It's a great and
customizable player. It replaced winamp for me (~2010).

~~~
thirdsun
Foobar is mentioned everywhere. While it's not my player of choice, it has
been considered one of the best, most lightweight and customizable players for
a long time in pretty much any discussion about audio players for Windows.

~~~
daemin
Yeah I use it now, I just wish it was updated one more time to add some OS-
level polish to it (like getting taskbar integration on Windows 7 an above
without a plugin).

The actual look of the application doesn't bother me, since usually I'll be
working on something else that needs the screen space.

~~~
WorldMaker
There has been some interesting work on the Foobar 2000 "Mobile App",
including a version of Foobar 2000 in the Windows 10 Store. It's interesting
to see the work done on that version. Supposedly there was going to be a
Patreon or Kickstarter to push that work even further but I don't recall what
happened there or didn't follow it well enough.

Also, I think that effort was before the modern Windows desktop "bridge" and
it would be interesting to see an attempt at a "best of all worlds" version
for the Windows 10 Store that supported all of the Desktop features and all of
the "Mobile" features (such as Windows 8+ background audio controls).

~~~
bigbugbag
according to wikipedia there are a windows phone, ios and android versions out
right now.

------
booleandilemma
I loved Winamp back in the day. It might be the only software that I get
nostalgic over (thus far).

Winamp introduced me to SHOUTcast, and I spent many hours listening to
SomaFM's Groove Salad :)

Thank you, Nullsoft!

------
yakult
I remember the exact moment when it died for me. It was when they added phone-
home functionality and unique player ID when it moved from 2.x to 3.0.

When I called them out on this on the forums (this was still a fairly new and
egregious thing back then) the devs told me to put up with it or go use
something else. So I did.

------
iamcreasy
Here is a 3 min video of Justin Frankel(the creator of winamp)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj6qaVoDIZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj6qaVoDIZg)

Currently he is developing an DAW named Reaper. It's one of the cheapest DAW
out there.

~~~
einr
REAPER is such amazing quality software. In my makeshift studio/music room
there is a spare machine with an 8-in/8-out sound card, just to record some
drum tracks and so forth. The machine is an _Athlon Thunderbird 1400 with 512
MB of RAM and Windows 2000._ REAPER runs flawlessly, rock stable, fast as any
other DAW you'd care to name on a modern system. It's a recent version; I see
now that the very latest one doesn't support Windows 2000 anymore but it did
as late as maybe a year ago.

The full version is a nine megabyte download. It has pretty much all the same
features of Cubase, Pro Tools, Logic etc. and is way ahead in terms of
customizability.

REAPER must be some of the most well-written and likeable software out there
currently. It's just refreshing to see such thought and care being put into a
program. It's very affordable, too. I recommend it wholeheartedly whenever
someone asks me about how to start recording music with a PC.

~~~
AstralStorm
Could use slightly more streamlined UI though. A lot of important
functionality is hidden behind manual.

(Recording. Mastering is rather fine.)

------
gdulli
I canceled a $10/month Spotify subscription because their player wasn't close
to parity with players like WinAmp and wasn't even moving in that direction.

~~~
davidgerard
I am a happy Spotify user and ... it's still easier to find a song quickly by
Googling "song name" "artist" site:youtube.com .

~~~
themodelplumber
If you do that multiple times a day, give DuckDuckGo a shot:

"song name" "artist" !yt

Takes you right to the YouTube results.

~~~
Houshalter
Chrome is smart. If I just type "y" and then tab, it automatically goes to
youtube search.

~~~
LindenRyuujin
You can do similar things on firefox with search engine keywords. I have mine
setup for video so "video <search terms>" in the address bar will go to
youtube. But you could bind it to just y if you wanted.

------
mattbgates
Still whippin' that llama's ass?

~~~
bbcbasic
Poor llama

------
StillBored
Since no one else mentioned Quintessential media player, I'm here to name it..
Its one of the dozens of winamp clones, but IMHO, the only one that actually
ended up slightly better (although the default skin is miserable). Its still
around [http://www.quinnware.com/](http://www.quinnware.com/) but hasn't had a
release in 8 years now, although it does run on recent versions of windows
(hello win32!, still kicking!) although its one of those apps that windows
tries to manage by moving its plugins/etc into the users directory because its
trying to write into "Program Files".

Anyway, if the author is hanging out on hacker news... Isn't it about time for
a new release, even if its only to put the source code on github so those of
us still using it can update it a bit?

------
sritrisna
As of 2017, I'm using Winamp v5.66 on my Windows 10 box and am scrobbling
songs since 2004 through Last FM's plugin for Winamp. Both do a great job for
me!

------
AdmiralAsshat
Winamp is still happily running on my Win7 laptop. I've always resisted
iTunes-like software that tries to organize my music collection for me,
primarily because I've already organized it myself and most apps fail to do it
properly due to misread or incomplete tags. Winamp lets me do the following,
which is all that I really want:

-1) Pull up the folder with the album I want to listen to.

-2) Right-click "Play in Winamp"

-3) Winamp starts, minimized, in my system tray so that it's out of my way

-4) I can control playback via media keys and get notifications with the Artist and Title whenever tracks switch, pause, end, etc.

That's really all I want, and Winamp still does it properly.

I painstakingly tried to keep Winamp when I moved to Linux, but my laptop's
QHD+ screen was just too much for the non-DPI app in Wine. I eventually found
Audacious ([http://audacious-media-player.org/](http://audacious-media-
player.org/)), which lets me do everything I used to do in Winamp, and even
has a Winamp 2.X skin.

~~~
bigbugbag
Funny you would say that , I first grew miscontent with winamp when it made
steps towards taking over my music collection with its winamp agent. Later
left for no nonsense foobar2000 without any regrets.

------
trm42
Nowadays there's Vox music player for Mac which more or less mimics Winamp
somewhat. There's not that much of selection for Mac outside of Spotify and
iTunes so this is awesome:)

[https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player](https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player)

I'm not affiliated to Vox in any way but it's nice :)

------
Bahamut
Winamp still remains my favorite media player of choice - the UI is minimal
enough but isn't too minimal (Foobar), but isn't terrible (iTunes). It
supports all the formats I care about and then some, and it is fast.

It's unfortunate that we haven't had a great alternative since then.

------
nopcode
Darren Owen, DrO, after 14-ish years, is still actively working on Winamp.

The project is called Wimamp Community Update Pack or WACUP and its in beta
here: [https://getwacup.com/](https://getwacup.com/)

------
ChrisNorstrom
What AOL did to Winamp, Lycos did to Sonique. Paid a lot of money for it and
abandoned it. Althought Sonique was never that advanced.

Winamp was bought by a company in Berlin I believe. It will forever be
remembered as the MP3 player that: \- Introduced several generations to
shoutcast online radio. \- Was one of the only players that handled your
5,000+ song MP3 collection.

Still use it to this day and it works amazingly well with searching,
filtering, and building playlists for massive collections. It's stable, not
dead, and still in use by many. But because it's not releasing new versions
every year the average music junkie might believe it to be dead.

~~~
bigbugbag
This happens all the time, big players buy smaller ones and let them die or
kill them. google does that all the time.

------
t3ra
Foobar2000 is an awesome alternate to winAMP. There are a few winamp skins for
it if you want a dose of nostalgia

~~~
digi_owl
I found that i have no interest in skins. I usually ran Winamp with its
default look, and enjoyed Foobar2k with its default Win32 appearance.

But these days i have moved to Linux, where Deadbeef do the job quite well.

~~~
bigbugbag
I moved from winamp to foobar2000 to deadbeef and I would not say deadbeef
does the job quite well, it plays music sure but it's no foobar2000.

------
reethaxor
Thanks for this! I wrote a music visualization plug-in for Winamp, and that
side project helped me land my first job in the games industry. I love Winamp
and still use when I want to play local mp3s.

------
NeutronBoy
I would still use Winamp! It was a great piece of software...

... if I didn't stream all my music now.

------
vijucat
Still a happy user of Winamp 5.666 (released Dec 2013). I love the keyboard
shortcuts.

------
madarco
Still using winamp 5.0 with MEXP plugin: the best music library out there:
[http://www.mexp.dk/](http://www.mexp.dk/)

------
nodesocket
I haven't used WinAmp since I was in high school, but honestly how does it
stack up against VLC? I can't imagine it is actually better than VLC these
days.

~~~
themodelplumber
Do you find that VLC stacks up as a daily driver audio player? Last I used it
with playlists, etc. I felt like I was attempting to drive to the grocery
store in an SR-71.

I haven't used Winamp in a while (does it have Wine support for "new "skins
yet?) but I enjoy using qmmp as a comfy little player.

~~~
zeta0134
I don't for an audio quality reason. VLC is designed to play back video first
and foremost, which means it has an actually quite excellent feature: it time
stretches the audio to synchronize with whatever's playing.

I'm a musician, so I can hear this happening; music played through VLC sounds
like it's going in and out of tune, like an old cassette deck but more subtle.
(This is worse on Windows for whatever reason, Linux is much less audible.)

On Windows, I still run Media Player out of pure habit. It works, requires no
installation, and generally sounds fine. I remember the good old days of
Winamp though, that was my go-to player back in the day. Great media players
seem harder to find now that the focus in the market is on internet streaming
and less on local music.

~~~
davidgerard
> I'm a musician, so I can hear this happening; music played through VLC
> sounds like it's going in and out of tune, like an old cassette deck but
> more subtle. (This is worse on Windows for whatever reason, Linux is much
> less audible.)

I occasionally hear this on MP3s or Oggs (never FLACs) on the Android version
(my phone media player of choice), but _never_ on the Desktop version. It's
pretty obviously a bug, though I can't get it to happen with any
reproducibility.

------
BuildTheRobots
When I started moving to linux full time a few years ago, I was using XMSS [0]
as a native winamp replacement - thought I'd mention it as no one else seems
to have done yet.

[0] [http://www.xmms.org/](http://www.xmms.org/)

~~~
stuaxo
Audacious is basically the successor to this.

The lineage of forks is:

(Xmms -> Beep Media Player -> Audacious)

~~~
BuildTheRobots
Thank you. Audacious I also used quite a lot, but it's been so long I
completely forgot the name :)

------
greencore
Finally found alternative - Clementine player for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and
even RaspberryPI

------
iask
Winamp is still my goto player since version 1. I could never find an
alternative. During my days of ripping I used:

Audiograbber, Xing MP3 encoder, Winamp

When Winamp announced they were wrapping up I downloaded multiple copies and
stashed all over the place, yard, garage and all.

------
KON_Air
Nobody even remembers Sonique...

~~~
doubleplusgood
I do, but I think it didn't support all the nifty Winamp visualization I
really liked.

------
voycey
Honestly I miss Milkdrop more than Winamp, there are other libraries out there
that apparently have the same presets that Winamp had for it but they just
arent the same :(

------
rootw0rm
MPC-HC for just listening to my playlists, MediaMonkey for library management
of TBs.

------
stanislavb
One thing - I just miss it. So much of nostalgia.

------
masscontrol
I recently learned on Duck Go Bang:
[http://duckgobang.com/](http://duckgobang.com/) that with the !oldapps bang
you can find all sorts of old and archived software.

For example: !oldapps windows 7 winamp

------
winteriscoming
I have moved on to non-Windows OS for almost a decade now. But, Winamp is one
of those rare softwares that I won't mind switching to Windows OS, just to use
it.

------
cowardlydragon
You can only kick the llama so many times before it kicks back.

------
aphextron
Winamp was (and still is) great software, but it's usefulness has run out.
When was the last time you downloaded an mp3? For streaming video and podcasts
I stick to VLC, but for music I've switched entirely to streaming apps like
Spotify.

~~~
nanch
"usefulness has run out." It's usefulness hasn't run out for me. I use
constantly every day.

"When was the last time you downloaded an mp3?" I download MP3s all the time.

I use WinAmp and I love using WinAmp. Just wanted to add a different
perspective.

~~~
einr
Seconded. I have an MP3 library of about 1000 ripped CD's, and also I
occasionally buy MP3's on Bandcamp. A lot of this music is obscure and not
available on any streaming service, and when it is, often it's a
remastered/reissued/weird version I don't want. I care about getting the
original CD master when possible because usually the "24-BIT DIGITAL
REMASTERS" that Spotify have are ruined in terms of dynamic range.

So for me, Spotify is a hot mess with regards to what is there and what is not
and what versions of the albums are available. Also, it wastes bandwidth which
is a luxury for me (I live in the countryside and have only a 4G connection
with a 100G data cap) and the kicker: it rips off artists by paying out
rounding errors -- for most artists, orders of magnitudes less than they used
to make from the conventional record industry, which itself was a total
ripoff.

So when possible, I buy CD's directly from the artist/label and rip them, or I
buy MP3's from Bandcamp. Then I play them in WinAmp.

~~~
thirdsun
> I care about getting the original CD master when possible because usually
> the "24-BIT DIGITAL REMASTERS" that Spotify have are ruined in terms of
> dynamic range.

This isn't exactly Spotify's fault. There are a lot of good remasters. It
depends.

> So for me, Spotify is a hot mess with regards to what is there and what is
> not and what versions of the albums are available.

Very true. All that stuff that isn't available for streaming would leave huge
gaps in my collection. And for people that rely on streaming exclusively, it
might be getting worse: Licensing deals end, favorite albums might disappear
suddenly. Then you paid all those years and might end up with very little to
show for it. Just remember how Netflix' catalog started to shrink. Is Spotify
going to produce originals when that happens? Renting music is a bad idea.

> So when possible, I buy CD's directly from the artist/label and rip them, or
> I buy MP3's from Bandcamp. Then I play them in WinAmp.

Great. However if you're already buying from bandcamp, why would you opt for
the lossy MP3 versions of those releases?

~~~
einr
_This isn 't exactly Spotify's fault. There are a lot of good remasters. It
depends._

Point is, it doesn't let me choose. It arbitrarily selects one version of an
album which is not necessarily the one I want.

 _Great. However if you 're already buying from bandcamp, why would you opt
for the lossy MP13 versions of those releases?_

I can't hear the difference :) However, if I were to burn them out to CD-R,
which I've done a couple of times, I would use the lossless version. I'm happy
that I have the option.

~~~
werid
> Point is, it doesn't let me choose. It arbitrarily selects one version of an
> album which is not necessarily the one I want.

This is not spotify's fault btw. Some bands have original record and the
remastered version available. It is decided by the label/band.

Some bands think the original version is flawed, hence why they remastered it.
Others might have been forced a remaster on them by label, or simply know that
fans value both versions.

~~~
kedean
He acknowledged that this may not be spotify's fault. Where the blame lies is
completely orthogonal to whether or not it makes him not want to use the
service.

