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.
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.
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.
I have a couple of minor nitpicks with iTunes (on macOS) including:
- I find it a little difficult to organize and keep track of my podcasts, new episodes, etc. I'm sure I could improve this with updating podcast-related settings but I find the settings a bit confusing in terms of subscription, retention, etc. of episodes.
- I find the navigation between the store and my library to be a bit strange sometimes, although it seems like Apple has made some recent improvements as I'm finding that I am now able to better move between my library and the store while browsing for music and referencing back to my own library.
I do not have any performance gripes with iTunes. It rarely crashes on me. The audio quality is good. AirPlay is brilliant. It's easy to organize my library and playlists. I love the fact that I can buy music in the same app that organizes and plays the music so that I'm not manually importing things. I don't know of any alternative on Mac that even comes close to doing what iTunes does for me in such a well-integrated way.
I jumped on the Spotify train at one point but basically felt like I had to abandon my curated iTunes library because there is (was?) no way for me to import anything.
Apple could certainly split iTunes into two apps for TV and Music but I'm not sure that would alleviate any of the complaints that I see about it in regard to supposed bloat.
To continue, iTunes' biggest problem is simply that it tries/has to do too many things. I definitely think the best solution would be to break it up into separate apps, continuing the trend that Apple has already established:
• Photos.app: Syncs photos and personal videos with iOS/iCloud and manages the photo library that other apps can access.
• Books.app: Syncs books with iOS/iCloud, shows the iBookStore, and it should also manage a books and PDF library for other apps to access.
• Music.app: Should sync music and other audio files with iOS/iCloud, show the iTunes music store, and manage the music library for other apps (as iTunes now does).
• TV.app: Should sync TV shows, movies, and other video files with iOS, and show the iTunes video store.
• Sync.app: To handle syncing and backups of your iOS devices, accessing the photos/video/books libraries that are managed by the other apps. It could be called Backup.app, or even just be made part of the Time Machine Preferences panel.
• iTunes.app could become a thin launcher stub that just provides a menu for the Photos/Music/TV/Books/Sync apps.
It's much better on macOS, but still the UI quirks are there.
You can drag and drop songs from your library into the queue, but can't when browsing Apple Music. When in the (obvious) WebViews, you have to press those ellipsis buttons as if you're using a touch screen.
I avoid iTunes as much as I can on my mac as well, it's horrible. In terms of performance I think the App Store they ship is even worse, it's a travesty of an application and I couldn't understand how Apple would ship something so unpolished and... non-native feeling. I might be wrong but it feels like it's web wrapped in a native shell and it's performing horribly compared to Electron apps.
EDIT: To be fair most of the slowness could be perhaps be attributed to slow network requests as well.
I never understand how Apple allows its stores to remain so slow (iTunes Music, Mac App Store, iOS App Store). I'm trying to give them money. If it takes 30 seconds to search and navigate to the product I'm vaguely interested in, with a multi-second pause for each request to complete, I'll give up and not spend the money.
I use iTunes for syncing my iPods on my windows machine, and then I close iTunes and open Winamp. I find the EQ settings and the overall sound quality I can get from Winamp to be far superior than anything iTunes can provide.
I stopped using Winamp since '04 or later after discovered foobar2000. I prefer the outlook of foobar2000 than Winamp, especially its text-based layout, and it has more audio codecs (FLAC, APE, ...).
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.
Much of he UI works, (lots of subtle problems solved, like window snapping, tiling of individial sprites from the sprite sheets, etc) but updating the media component to work with multiple files will probably require a non-trivial amount of work. If anyone wants to help out, let me know. Otherwise, slow and steady wins the race
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)
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...
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).
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 ...
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.
Funny little Winamp anecdote. We were going to be reinstalling Windows on a box, 17 or so years ago. (Now remembering the days of reinstalling the OS as just a routine action.) anyhow, before we did we decided to see what would happen if we just deleted the entire registry. The only application that continued to run was Winamp. Deleting the registry even broke some graphic components so it looked awful, but it just kept working.
> 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):
I think it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek reference. Plus, the chorus is literally two yells and one word, kind of hard not to be catchy ;) . And yeah, Hirasawa is amazing.
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.
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.
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).
foobar2000 might be customisable, but it comes with terrible defaults in comparison to WinAmp UI-wise. I've tried foobar2000 a few times, but I never have the energy to make it work nicely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At one point some folks within Spotify released a very impressive Spotify client which exactly mimicked the old Winamp 2 user interface. However it Seems to have silently vanished from the internet. https://news.spotify.com/us/2013/12/20/spotiamp-long-live-th...
IIRC, it was bought by the BitTorrent team itself and there eventually was little difference between the spyware of the "main" BitTorrent client and uTorrent.
Yeah, Spotify's ridiculous addition of gapless playback with no knob to turn it off made me quit them a few months ago. WinAmp still works great for my Windows machine; VLC works pretty good for my BSD machine.
I tried that. It did not work. It's too late, I deleted the app three months ago, and anyway now I have a dumb phone. I don't miss Spotify at all. Sometimes I miss maps, though.
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/ 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?
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!
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/), which lets me do everything I used to do in Winamp, and even has a Winamp 2.X skin.
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.
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:)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Great media players seem harder to find now that the focus in the market is on internet streaming and less on local music.
If you're serious about audio and managing your music library: Have you tried Roon? Yes, it's expensive, but I have tried them all and Roon ist the most complete package and a joy to use.
I can recommend Clementine (https://clementine-player.org/) - it's a fork (or clone?) of Amarok 1.4. It has a very nice playlist management and also supports various ways of streaming music as well as subscribing to Podcasts.
It's not overly bloated, IMHO, but not exactly lightweight, either.
Winamp is designed to play music in a convenient manner, vlc has not such specific design and still offers a convoluted playlist experience that is not for the weak.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
* You like to listen to music in without depending on an internet connection
* You don't like to waste bandwidth
* You don't like to depend on an external service / walled garden.
I think that streaming services like spotify are kind of like american cable television. It brings music to the masses. But I bet they are going to slowely diminish in popularity, making way for the next mass consumer revolution. In the mean time real music lovers have all their CD's and records ripped and stored on their hard-drives (or SSDs; or whatever). And are going keep on listening that way when someone else makes a similar statement about streaming services as you made about locally stored music files.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> Point is, it doesn't let me choose. It arbitrarily selects one version of an album which is not necessarily the one I want.
True.
> I can't hear the difference.
That's ok. However a lossless version allows you to switch formats in the future, create lossless and lossy copies. Building a library with lossy audio is a choice you might regret at some point.
That's ok. However a lossless version allows you to switch formats in the future, create lossless and lossy copies. Building a library with lossy audio is a choice you might regret at some point.
The vast majority of my library is actual physical CD's, so I'm good there at least :)
Every single day I play MP3's. They don't chew up my limited mobile data and I don't have to deal with latency between clicking next and the song starting.
Its possible to use something like 4k downloader to rip whole youtube channels to mp3. Great for offline listening with winamp, or for putting on your phone, car or whatever
If you're downloading music from youtube you should really leave it in it's native AAC, Vorbis, or Opus format (and remux the container if necessary). This saves further quality loss caused by another iteration of lossy to lossy transcoding.
#/media/File:Media_player_sonique-1.95.png){kind=link}
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.