14 ms·

Whatever happened to Winamp?

164 points by davidgerard 10y ago

sritrisna 10y ago
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!
spronkey 10y ago
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.
- metaobject 10y ago
  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.
  - donatj 10y ago
    Back before I moved to Mac there was a plugin I used in Winamp for syncing iPads. I'm not sure you could find it these days though.
  - ukyrgf 10y ago
    http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/ http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/
- roystonvassey 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      It's far superior on MacOS, performance is way better and it's integrated into the OS.
      - diamondo25 10y ago
        Yea, just in a way there's no easy way to assign the play button to launch Spotify instead.
    - mih 10y ago
      Bad on Windows? Steve Jobs had a different opinion - https://youtu.be/iwxnWuG_Ruw?t=1m4s https://youtu.be/iwxnWuG_Ruw?t=1m4s
    - brandon272 10y ago
      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.
- fileoffset 10y ago
  AIMP3! it's the closest thing to Winamp I've found which is actually good.
- a012 10y ago
  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, ...).
  - provemewrong 10y ago
    Exactly, foobar2000 killed Winamp, for power users at least.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
davidgerard 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Remember why they made is virtually impossible to download directly from their side, for reasons I can't recall? That was awesome.
  - Asooka 10y ago
    Winamp is basically what a music player by the people behind http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/ would be.
- mudetroit 10y ago
  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.
mattbgates 10y ago
Still whippin' that llama's ass?
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Poor llama
NeutronBoy 10y ago
I would still use Winamp! It was a great piece of software... ... if I didn't stream all my music now.
gdulli 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    If you do that multiple times a day, give DuckDuckGo a shot: "song name" "artist" !yt Takes you right to the YouTube results.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      Chrome is smart. If I just type "y" and then tab, it automatically goes to youtube search.
      - imesh 10y ago
        I just typed 'y' the other day and it just got what I was going to want in 10 seconds...
      - LindenRyuujin 10y ago
        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.
      - bigbugbag 10y ago
        looks like chrome copied an old opera feature ;)
- sverige 10y ago
nodesocket 10y ago
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.
- herbst 10y ago
  Did you just compare a blown up video player with a playlist function to a extendible music focused player
  - grogenaut 10y ago
    did you just get angry about someone asking a question about a music player and a video player that also plays music perfectly fine. :)
    - herbst 10y ago
      No. Just wondering in a angry tone ;)
    - stan_rogers 10y ago
      It sort of plays disconnected songs fairly well; I wouldn't say it plays music perfectly fine.
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
iamcreasy 10y ago
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.
- rootw0rm 10y ago
  "It's one of the best DAW out there." ftfy
  - AckSyn 10y ago
    The man knows how to write quality software.
- einr 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Could use slightly more streamlined UI though. A lot of important functionality is hidden behind manual. (Recording. Mastering is rather fine.)
- davidgerard 10y ago
  added!
reethaxor 10y ago
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.
rootw0rm 10y ago
MPC-HC for just listening to my playlists, MediaMonkey for library management of TBs.
vijucat 10y ago
Still a happy user of Winamp 5.666 (released Dec 2013). I love the keyboard shortcuts.
booleandilemma 10y ago
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!
sengork 10y ago
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.nullsoft.com/customize/component/2009/3/6/P/_WideSound_DSP_plugin_2.exe http://web.archive.org/web/20120505234347/http://download.nu...
- pmlnr 10y ago
  Sonique, I still have skins downloaded for that somewhere.
- aembleton 10y ago
  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/File:Media_player_sonique-1.95.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)#/media/...
  - sengork 10y ago
    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).
aphextron 10y ago
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 10y ago
  "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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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?
captbaritone 10y ago
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).
- bharani_m 10y ago
  This is wonderful! Thanks for making it. Is this a wrapper around the browser's default audio API?
  - captbaritone 10y ago
    Correct. You can see all the We Audio API stuff here: https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/blob/master/js/media.js https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/blob/master/js/me...
- gri3v3r 10y ago
  Looks cool. Time travelling.
  - captbaritone 10y ago
    And it's built on Redux, so you can time travel in that way too! ;) https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
ChrisNorstrom 10y ago
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.
- dagw 10y ago
  Winamp was bought by a company in Berlin I believe. Belgium, according to the article, and apparently they're still involved in some kind of legal dispute over the deal. https://twitter.com/ed_rich/status/817065613411713025 https://twitter.com/ed_rich/status/817065613411713025
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  This happens all the time, big players buy smaller ones and let them die or kill them. google does that all the time.
winteriscoming 10y ago
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.
madarco 10y ago
Still using winamp 5.0 with MEXP plugin: the best music library out there: http://www.mexp.dk/ http://www.mexp.dk/
KON_Air 10y ago
Nobody even remembers Sonique...
- doubleplusgood 10y ago
  I do, but I think it didn't support all the nifty Winamp visualization I really liked.
thepiwo 10y ago
I wonder why foobar2000 isn't mentioned more often. It's a great and customizable player. It replaced winamp for me (~2010).
- thirdsun 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        according to wikipedia there are a windows phone, ios and android versions out right now.
- spronkey 10y ago
Mithaldu 10y ago
> 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
- Asooka 10y ago
  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.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Yep, that's the one!
  - kaybe 10y ago
    What the heck, this really is incredibly catchy. It's already been lodged in my head for 3 days.
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      it was lodged in my head for 16 years, count yourself lucky
      - kaybe 10y ago
        Let's see in 16 years..
cowardlydragon 10y ago
You can only kick the llama so many times before it kicks back.
yakult 10y ago
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.
t3ra 10y ago
Foobar2000 is an awesome alternate to winAMP. There are a few winamp skins for it if you want a dose of nostalgia
- digi_owl 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
nopcode 10y ago
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/
trm42 10y ago
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 :)
stanislavb 10y ago
One thing - I just miss it. So much of nostalgia.
Bahamut 10y ago
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.
greencore 10y ago
Finally found alternative - Clementine player for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and even RaspberryPI
masscontrol 10y ago
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
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
iask 10y ago
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.
StillBored 10y ago
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?
BuildTheRobots 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Audacious is basically the successor to this. The lineage of forks is: (Xmms -> Beep Media Player -> Audacious)
  - BuildTheRobots 10y ago
    Thank you. Audacious I also used quite a lot, but it's been so long I completely forgot the name :)
voycey 10y ago
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 :(

164 points by davidgerard 10y ago

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!

spronkey 10y ago

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.

metaobject 10y ago
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.
- donatj 10y ago
  Back before I moved to Mac there was a plugin I used in Winamp for syncing iPads. I'm not sure you could find it these days though.
- ukyrgf 10y ago
  http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/ http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/
roystonvassey 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    It's far superior on MacOS, performance is way better and it's integrated into the OS.
    - diamondo25 10y ago
      Yea, just in a way there's no easy way to assign the play button to launch Spotify instead.
  - mih 10y ago
    Bad on Windows? Steve Jobs had a different opinion - https://youtu.be/iwxnWuG_Ruw?t=1m4s https://youtu.be/iwxnWuG_Ruw?t=1m4s
  - brandon272 10y ago
    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.
fileoffset 10y ago
AIMP3! it's the closest thing to Winamp I've found which is actually good.
a012 10y ago
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, ...).
- provemewrong 10y ago
  Exactly, foobar2000 killed Winamp, for power users at least.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

davidgerard 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Remember why they made is virtually impossible to download directly from their side, for reasons I can't recall? That was awesome.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Winamp is basically what a music player by the people behind http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/ would be.
mudetroit 10y ago
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.

mattbgates 10y ago

Still whippin' that llama's ass?

bbcbasic 10y ago
Poor llama

NeutronBoy 10y ago

I would still use Winamp! It was a great piece of software... ... if I didn't stream all my music now.

gdulli 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  If you do that multiple times a day, give DuckDuckGo a shot: "song name" "artist" !yt Takes you right to the YouTube results.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Chrome is smart. If I just type "y" and then tab, it automatically goes to youtube search.
    - imesh 10y ago
      I just typed 'y' the other day and it just got what I was going to want in 10 seconds...
    - LindenRyuujin 10y ago
      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.
    - bigbugbag 10y ago
      looks like chrome copied an old opera feature ;)
sverige 10y ago

nodesocket 10y ago

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.

herbst 10y ago
Did you just compare a blown up video player with a playlist function to a extendible music focused player
- grogenaut 10y ago
  did you just get angry about someone asking a question about a music player and a video player that also plays music perfectly fine. :)
  - herbst 10y ago
    No. Just wondering in a angry tone ;)
  - stan_rogers 10y ago
    It sort of plays disconnected songs fairly well; I wouldn't say it plays music perfectly fine.
themodelplumber 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

iamcreasy 10y ago

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.

rootw0rm 10y ago
"It's one of the best DAW out there." ftfy
- AckSyn 10y ago
  The man knows how to write quality software.
einr 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Could use slightly more streamlined UI though. A lot of important functionality is hidden behind manual. (Recording. Mastering is rather fine.)
davidgerard 10y ago
added!

reethaxor 10y ago

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.

rootw0rm 10y ago

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

vijucat 10y ago

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

booleandilemma 10y ago

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!

sengork 10y ago

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.nullsoft.com/customize/component/2009/3/6/P/_WideSound_DSP_plugin_2.exe http://web.archive.org/web/20120505234347/http://download.nu...

pmlnr 10y ago
Sonique, I still have skins downloaded for that somewhere.
aembleton 10y ago
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/File:Media_player_sonique-1.95.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)#/media/...
- sengork 10y ago
  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).

aphextron 10y ago

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 10y ago
"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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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?

captbaritone 10y ago

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).

bharani_m 10y ago
This is wonderful! Thanks for making it. Is this a wrapper around the browser's default audio API?
- captbaritone 10y ago
  Correct. You can see all the We Audio API stuff here: https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/blob/master/js/media.js https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/blob/master/js/me...
gri3v3r 10y ago
Looks cool. Time travelling.
- captbaritone 10y ago
  And it's built on Redux, so you can time travel in that way too! ;) https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools
TorKlingberg 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

ChrisNorstrom 10y ago

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.

dagw 10y ago
Winamp was bought by a company in Berlin I believe. Belgium, according to the article, and apparently they're still involved in some kind of legal dispute over the deal. https://twitter.com/ed_rich/status/817065613411713025 https://twitter.com/ed_rich/status/817065613411713025
bigbugbag 10y ago
This happens all the time, big players buy smaller ones and let them die or kill them. google does that all the time.

winteriscoming 10y ago

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.

madarco 10y ago

Still using winamp 5.0 with MEXP plugin: the best music library out there: http://www.mexp.dk/ http://www.mexp.dk/

KON_Air 10y ago

Nobody even remembers Sonique...

doubleplusgood 10y ago
I do, but I think it didn't support all the nifty Winamp visualization I really liked.

thepiwo 10y ago

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

thirdsun 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      according to wikipedia there are a windows phone, ios and android versions out right now.
spronkey 10y ago

Mithaldu 10y ago

> 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

Asooka 10y ago
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.
davidgerard 10y ago
Yep, that's the one!
- kaybe 10y ago
  What the heck, this really is incredibly catchy. It's already been lodged in my head for 3 days.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    it was lodged in my head for 16 years, count yourself lucky
    - kaybe 10y ago
      Let's see in 16 years..

cowardlydragon 10y ago

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

yakult 10y ago

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.

t3ra 10y ago

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

digi_owl 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

nopcode 10y ago

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/

trm42 10y ago

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 :)

stanislavb 10y ago

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

Bahamut 10y ago

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.

greencore 10y ago

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

masscontrol 10y ago

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

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

iask 10y ago

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.

StillBored 10y ago

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?

BuildTheRobots 10y ago

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 10y ago
Audacious is basically the successor to this. The lineage of forks is: (Xmms -> Beep Media Player -> Audacious)
- BuildTheRobots 10y ago
  Thank you. Audacious I also used quite a lot, but it's been so long I completely forgot the name :)

voycey 10y ago

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 :(