8 ms·
I feel like this is Winamp in name only. Even the site lacks all the whimsy and, dare I say, punk rock attitude of the original. Winamp is for people who want
by mvkel 5y ago
I feel like this is Winamp in name only. Even the site lacks all the whimsy and, dare I say, punk rock attitude of the original.
Winamp is for people who want to own their music. Those people no longer exist.
- jraph 5y agoWe still exist :-) Though I'm using Clementine now. Winamp does not have builds for my OS, and they didn't manage to go open source unfortunately. Anyway, Clementine, if less charming and less appealing than Winamp, is actually a bit more ergonomic and powerful.
- jcelerier 5y agoSame here but with Strawberry, a much more active fork afaik :)
- thesuitonym 5y agoI still use Winamp on Windows PCs.
- Semaphor 5y ago> Those people no longer exist. Sure they do, why else would bandcamp.com still be in business? That said, I grew up with Winamp but never understood the adoration for it. As soon as I wasn’t quite so young anymore, I preferred functional and not whimsy.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoSame. As soon as I discovered foobar2000 I never looked back. Still using it today.
- Semaphor 5y agoI probably would, but I found I preferred the library management aspects of MediaMonkey (Windows, proprietary), so that’s what I use today. But fb2k will always have a special place in my heart.
- skocznymroczny 5y agoI had to use foobar2000 because Winamp was too heavyweight to smoothly play MP3s on a 486 machine.
- laumars 5y agoWinamp always felt to me to be the pinnacle of functional. I ended up turning to Winamp for a whole plethora of stuff outside of music playback, like: - streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast - streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable) - real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections. The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant. I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.
- Semaphor 5y agoI guess if you need those, that makes sense. I have never needed them, and when people talk about Winamp, they usually mention all the skins it had (it’s the same for MySpace and Geocities, 2 other projects I don’t miss).
- im3w1l 5y agoRegarding the plugin system: They had a few different categories of plugins. You had input plugins that let it get audio from a wide variety of sources. A few I remember fondly were input plugins that were little emulators that ran playstation / n64 bytecode ripped from games to play their music. Then you could have your choice of DSP plugins applied after that, a visualization and then also an output. The output could play the music, but it could really do anything it wanted, like encoding it to ogg. Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.
- soylentcola 5y agoShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car. Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked. Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
- imiric 5y agoWinamp is from a different era of computing. MP3s were new, GUIs were starting to be experimental, "skinning" an application was novel, and of course, the 90s style of form over function had an influence. Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.
- aceazzameen 5y agoOh wow, I forgot about Sonique until your post. I even made some skins for it too. I used it at the time because it was a very flashy player, but Winamp was more powerful under the surface.
- ShroudedNight 5y agoWhat wasn't functional about it? From what I vaguely recall, I remember v2.95 being able to service as well as any other player, and the media library was one of the few that seemed to understand the value of using stable sorts when re-sorting by a different column. And then there were all the plugins... Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI like winamp, and continue to like it, because it gets out of my way. All the essential controls were readily accessible, including an EQ which almost all players lack today. The generative, music responsive displays were whimsically cool too. And it didn't constantly bug me to set up a play list for everything. What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.
- hermitdev 5y agoI used to use quite a few plugins in Winamp, as well. In particular, I always needed a gapless playback plugin in 2.x. Been so long since I've regularly used Winamp, I don't recall what other kinds I used, but I do know I typically used several. I probably had several visualization plugins, as well, particularly back when I was in college and would have friends over in the dorm. Music on in the background, visualization full screen.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoAh, memories of the dorm, winamp playing music, visuals in the background. good times. (:
- johnisgood 5y ago> Winamp is for people who want to own their music. Those people no longer exist. Sad. Well, I am here for one. And yeah, I remember Winamp from my childhood. I had badass skins! :D
- kgwxd 5y agoVLC users beg to differ. Once Winamp was sold to AOL, the name was dead, I'm surprised anyone was willing to pay money for it after that.
- huhtenberg 5y agoWhy would one pay any money when 2.95 still works perfectly?
- fps_doug 5y agoUnicode
- Fnoord 5y agoIf its proprietary there's probably bugs in the binaries (even DLLs) which can be exploited. But IIRC Winamp was FOSS'ed at some point.
- kgwxd 5y agoI meant pay for the name. Did other owners of the name actually try to make it a paid-for product? Now that I think about it, was the original free?
- markozivanovic 5y agoThere are some of us still out there! I started using Clementine Music Player[0] on my Linux desktop. Amarok inspires it, but it's a little less bloated. I'm not sure what more I could want from the player. Well, maybe some cool skins. :) 0: https://www.clementine-player.org/ https://www.clementine-player.org/
- SyzygistSix 5y agoExaile had a great Dynamic Mode that automatically generated playlists based on previous selections. It worked really well. I miss Exaile in Linux.
- StreamBright 5y agoWe do exist. Using Bandcamp and VLC.
- stinos 5y agoFoobar2000 is basically Winamp (though with, imo, some not-so-good defaults when it comes to UI bahavior) and still has a userbase. There are other examples like that. It's not just for the aspect you mention (owning music and deciding what gets played), but these players also support plugins via a fairly standard system, and some of them are pretty convenient.
- patrickk 5y agoI use and love Foobar2000, but I certainly agree that out of the box it lacks polish. There’s some great skins like this[1] that make it look amazing, but it can be a hassle to setup. Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar. But anyway, get Foobar2000 it’s great overall :) [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/foobar2000/comments/nn57ov/georgiareborn_a_clean_foobar2000_theme/ https://old.reddit.com/r/foobar2000/comments/nn57ov/georgiar...
- no_time 5y agoI would love to theme my fb2k but most themes I came across were basically saying "here, download this zip file containing 10 massive unsigned dlls sourced from various people" and that doesnt sit right with me. Especially when its not even on the official website but some 20 star github repo.
- reactspa 5y agoWhen I started mixing and matching songs from different albums to create "mixtapes" (playlists really) for myself, I did a deep dive into ReplayGain (because songs from different albums won't have the same levels). While Winamp had decent ReplayGain functionality (adding RG tags as well as reading them), Foobar2000 was the best. Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.
- LeSaucy 5y agoI wish macOS had a really solid Winamp/foobar2000 music player. Most now are all about managing a library (no thanks, I have a filesystem for that!) or integrating with cloud services.
- noisy_boy 5y agoI think audacious on Linux can be considered very similar to Winamp - it also works with most Winamp skins
- sebow 5y agoThose people definitely exist.For me the only concern is whether winamp will only take privacy seriously.That's about all
- accrual 5y ago> Those people no longer exist. I guarantee you, people with local libraries still exist. Another fun fact: streaming services and local libraries can coexist.
- donatj 5y ago> streaming services and local libraries can coexist I do so with Apple Music. The desktop apps UI is hot garbage, I miss iTunes.
- selfhoster11 5y ago> Those people no longer exist. That's a bold claim, and I'm young enough to barely remember the Winamp era.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Brendinooo 5y agoHappy Plex user checking in, we still exist!
- entropie 5y agoPlex is a good example how a player should not be. Jellyfin is the open source counterpart.
- Brendinooo 5y agoPlex isn't perfect. But since my songs are on my drive, there is nothing locking me in to Plex should I choose to switch. That's the most important thing. In the meantime, Plex is doing great work. Plexamp has been a joy to use.
- blunte 5y agoFIIO https://www.fiio.com/m17 https://www.fiio.com/m17 and many others make high quality players for people who have a collection. But honestly, streaming services allow discovery and exploration. I listen to hundreds of artists now that I didn't even know existed when I bought CDs and ripped them myself.
- kaetemi 5y agoSo did listening to streaming radio stations on Shoutcast.
- soylentcola 5y agoThis is still how I discover most of the music I've learned about in the past several years. Human-curated stations, accessible anywhere with an internet connection. Get a set of bookmarks in your desktop or mobile app of choice and you've got your own personal radio dial with stations that never go out of range. Plus you can see the currently playing artist and title at any time. I frequently screenshot them on my phone when something comes on that I want to look up later.
- yalooze 5y agoWe do exist :) Cheeky shoutout for my side project https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ which lets you find where to buy a digital album the cheapest online. You can track your favourite artists and it will email you when they release a new album too. Feedback welcome!
- Minor49er 5y agoAwesome site. Is there a way to submit releases or does it search them out through different vendors?
- yalooze 5y agoThank you! There isn’t a way to submit directly, rather it searches via the vendors. The base data is via the iTunes Search API[0] which is surprisingly accessible. Then it tries to grab more data from the other vendors. Originally, I built it so all access was programmatic, it never stored anything but rather just triggered API calls, a bit of scraping and a matching algorithm. But it does have database backed models now so you could technically add releases directly. Although deduping might be a bit of a nightmare. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/iTuneSearchAPI/index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...
- alok-g 5y agoThis is very nice. It found a song I was looking for. It takes me to iTunes for purchase. And boom. They don't seem to be selling the song in India. I hate such policies by various stores.
- LinuxBender 5y agoStill here. I use Ampache [1][2] which is a PHP application for my music collection. [1] - https://github.com/ampache/ampache https://github.com/ampache/ampache [2] - https://ampache.org/ https://ampache.org/
- azeirah 5y agoYou're underestimating Winamp and related own-your-music music players. I have real-world usage data on quite a lot of music players and websites, here's the top 30. The number is how many songs played in total on that website (I run something similar to last.fm scrobbling) This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest. 1 YouTube 14,244,087 2 Spotify desktop 2,751,012 3 Monstercat 1,171,321 4 Pandora 895,765 5 VLC media player 892,006 6 iTunes 854,311 7 SoundCloud 724,019 8 YouTube Music 640,801 9 Deezer 501,474 10 Winamp 289,216 11 Foobar2000 251,726 12 Vk.com music 134,319 13 Aimp3 123,306 14 Musicbee 113,652 15 Google play music 89,827 16 Epidemicsound 87,573 17 Spotify web player 81,590 18 Media monkey 70,611 19 Amazon Music 55,691 20 Clementine 29,750 21 Tunein radio 24,413 22 Google play music desktop (community) 22,910 23 Media Player Classic Home Cinema 15,654 24 Pot player 11,348 25 Plug.dj 8,144 26 Tidal web player 7,770 27 Jriver media center 5,200 28 Digitally Imported di.fm 4,636 29 SiriusXM 2,397 30 Dubtrack.fm 1,031
- madmax108 5y agoPleasantly surprised to see Clementine in the list (though a bit disappointed with how low it is in the list). Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D
- azeirah 5y ago
- motoxpro 5y agoEh, I'm happy to rent my music from Spotify. Available instantly, much cheaper, don't have to worry about storage on cds/hdd/cloud. Definitely the dream for me. Also, yes. Bad site, old Winamp was cool, etc.
- perryizgr8 5y agoI wish Spotify would separate the player from the service. As a service, Spotify is amazing. As a player, I would like to use something like Winamp.
- mrweasel 5y agoExactly, I’d love to see WinAmp, or Audacious be able to at least just grab a playlist from Spotify or Youtube Music. All the streaming services are basically the same music, with their own terrible player, which adds nothing. I just want to be able to stream music, without using 1.5GB of memory to run a browser.
- Karunamon 5y agoI've had stuff disappear from my Spotify playlists enough that I no longer trust them. Storage is cheap, nowadays.
- coffeefirst 5y ago> Those people no longer exist. I exist, and I badly want a solid modern music app that's made for people who own music. There's some evidence there's a critical mass of people who want to own their music. You can see it at the merch booths at concerts and the sudden surge in vinyl sales. Is it a majority of people? No, but they love music and they're willing to spend money on it.