I think it has more to do with the authors and their principles, and less with the times. There are plenty of counterexamples from that era: all major browsers, the Sonique audio player (which I loved for the UI novelty), Winamp itself, etc.
> any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?
mpv is in that league for me, and it's much more recent. Then, of course, there are very stable CLI and power user software that has existed for decades: Vim, Emacs, BSD and Linux coreutils, etc. Some of these are not necessarily simple under the hood, but I use them because they do one thing well (or in the case of Vim/Emacs as much as I want them to do :)), and I know that they're not going to disappear or drastically change as so many software does.
"simpler" is not how I remember foobar2000. I used to use it (±15 years ago) because of its extreme configurability (e.g. in terms of layout). Configuring foobar2000 felt kind of like building your own music player. YMMV
I started using it again recently and was struck by just how much config I had to do to get it back as I remembered it. It is both annoying and amazing
I remember installing some VERY pretty but very complicated setups from deviantart, and then having to fix the inevitable bugs in the panel layout scripts, every one of which was just one right-click away which was extremely cool.
IIRC, they were in a sort of PHP-looking scripting language? I had very little coding experience before then, so it was kind of a trip trying to debug why the lyrics panel would freak out under certain scenarios :D
Simple to use, with a smart editable layout configuration for those that chose to go down that rabbit hole.
I'm still using it to this day, with little more than an album tree, a playlist window, and an album art thumbnail that optionally all fold away.
I've been down the configuration | plugin trail, good fun for those of us that enjoy that kind of thing but it is | was simple and clean from a fresh install.
That's an interesting benchmark, but I am more interested in a cold start test on a much smaller file (think 2MP, not 1200MP), because that's my usual use case.
I agree. That is another problem with the benchmark- it gives the gold medal to ACDsee, which in my experience has the longest cold start of the three.
