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Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS
- mocko 5mo agoDoes it support original Winamp skins?
- taffydavid 5mo agoI see little to no information on whether or not it really whips the llama's ass
- huhtenberg 5mo agoAt 26MB setup package it most likely doesn't.
- surganov 5mo agoWe tried to keep it as lean as possible. MacOS itself adds quite a bit, and then there are libraries for format decoding, audio streaming, VST support, etc. Could it be smaller? Probably – but not by an order of magnitude.
- taffydavid 5mo ago26Mb sounds perfectly reasonable. Electron apps are usually 100+, and we live in a world where apps download gigabytes of LLMs in the background to do very basic stuff. Wait, it doesn't do that does it?
- surganov 5mo agoJokes aside, 180db also ships with a demo track — a nod to llama.
- xnx 5mo agoPay software that doesn't have anything to do with Winamp.
- surganov 5mo agoIt's called "inspiration". And if you actually used Winamp in the ’90s or 2000s, you probably remember that it used to be a $10 shareware app.
- sethops1 5mo agoCall me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.
- graphememes 5mo agocomplete opposite, i hate it
- wmichelin 5mo agoI also hate the idea of streaming, but I have been super lazy in the past I have listened to 44,000 songs on Spotify over the last 13 years. It has brought me a ton of value, but I would love to move back to owning my music as files. I've been getting fancier with managing self-hosted infra at home, especially using AI to help me out. Maybe I'll get back there, but I also can't imagine only listening to 500 songs!!!!
- cosmic_cheese 5mo agoiTunes/Music has its merits but in my opinion has been in decline since between versions 6 and 10 depending on the aspects being spoken about. For most of its existence it was subject to constant bloat and always felt a bit "off" compared to other Mac apps due to its nature as a cross-platform Carbon app full of bespoke UI widgets, and though its feature set got pared down and it technically became AppKit-dominant in the transition to "Music", it still doesn't feel right and is out of step with the rest of the OS. A proper AppKit iTunes-style player with the best parts of iTunes across versions but without the bloat would be a beautiful thing. Even better if it's FOSS so it doesn't get abandoned a few years down the road, as paid players tend to. While there's several apps in this general direction like Doppler[0], nothing really nails it satisfactorily. [0]: https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
- Marsymars 5mo agoI feel like iTunes/Music gets worse with every version, to the point where I've effectively abandoned it finally after macOS 26. My music collection is some tens of thousands of files served via a DAAP media server - since macOS 26, Apple Music will only play music for 5-15 minutes before giving up and just stopping. For years, it's had a trivially reproducible bug where pausing Apple Music while playing from a DAAP server, then restarting the DAAP server will crash Apple Music. After trying basically every airsonic/subsonic/plex/etc. alternative, I finally settled on simply using foobar2000 to play from an SMB share.
- VladVladikoff 5mo agoCool. Now please make it support skins that aren’t rectangular. https://warped3.substack.com/p/direct-win32-api-weird-shaped-windows https://warped3.substack.com/p/direct-win32-api-weird-shaped...
- surganov 5mo agoI remember using that "green head" Windows Media Player. It's fun for like five minutes, then you get back to the default, but maybe that's just me. But we definitely need more "weird shaped" apps, that's for sure.
- Torlan 5mo agoVibe coded?
- armchairhacker 5mo agoI recommend IINA: https://iina.io https://iina.io (https://github.com/iina/iina https://github.com/iina/iina)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- surganov 5mo agoMPlayerX and IINA are the best free video players for macOS, hands down. Music mode needs more love though.
- daneel_w 5mo agoGood retro feel. I don't mean to shift the spotlight away from the topic, but a great lightweight alternative is Tiny Player: https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/ https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/
- code51 5mo agobut there is Vox.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoDoes audacious work on OSX? Theres also xmms if you want to run it in xquartz
- echelon_musk 5mo agoIf by OSX you mean macOS, yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928363
- mghackerlady 5mo agoIt'll always be OSX to me, makes for a shorter version string (eg: xx.xx.x-OSX)
- cluckindan 5mo agoDJ mode seems useless for DJ’s and smells like feature creep. KISS, YAGNI.
- surganov 5mo agoI personally own a bunch of vinyl records and love to change pitch while listening to get a different feel for the familiar music. DJs used to mix with turntables that have only pitch and phase adjustments, it was very minimal.
- einsteinx2 5mo agoIt’s actually extremely useful for DJ’s listening to their music collection. I always miss being able to adjust the bpm when listening to some of my songs that I always play a lot faster or slower than they’re produced.
- 2III7 5mo agoWhat's wrong with foobar2000? Used to be one of the best music players and you could infinitely customize it.
- Demiurge 5mo agoI actually prefer VLC to foobar2000. However, I still prefer classic Winamp to to all other music players, and I wish I could get Apple Music work in the same interface. I like 100% of the classic Winamp player UI/UX. - I like the separate player, playlist, EQ windows. - I like that I can re-arrange the windows, and resize the playlist separately. - I like that the main player has a little EQ built in. - I like the layout of the main window. It's perfect. - I like the layout of the playlist window, it's also perfect. I can add "directories", "albums", etc. and again, I can resize the window. - I like the skins. I like the classic skin, but I also love the Sonicated skin. I still have it on my Windows laptop. - Conversely, I really dislike the "native" UI elements. - I like that lack of rounded corners on the classic Winamp windows, such that when windows stick together, they appear as whole, and I can drag them around as one. Mostly, it's a bunch of seemingly small and aesthetic things, but if a player doesn't have those things, I might as well just use iTunes.
- bombcar 5mo agoWinamp was synonymous with m3u playlists, how well does VLC handle those? Ah, fond memories of cron jobs generating m3u playlists for me ...
- tomjakubowski 5mo agoApple has MusicKit now. In theory you can build whatever (Mac or iOS) app skin you want on your Apple Music subscription. https://developer.apple.com/musickit/ https://developer.apple.com/musickit/
- Demiurge 5mo agoTime to fire up the vibes, Xcode here we come! No, but seriously, thanks for sharing.
- chrisallick 5mo agome too, released two weeks ago on hackernews: https://github.com/chrisallick/light-crime-audio-player https://github.com/chrisallick/light-crime-audio-player getting good reviews!
- eps 5mo agoThere's no source code? Why is it on GH then.
- chrisallick 5mo agoanswered in show hn post and a github issue. source is coming in a week or so when im back at computer. claude wrote a large portion of the visualizer and im trying to rearchitect how it taps the audio feed and understand it before releasing source. it felt weird to publish code i didnt have a strong hand in. people wanted the player though so i put up the release.
- AndyMcConachie 5mo agoI love Strawberry Music Player. Works great and does everything I want.
- Serhii99 5mo ago[flagged]
- ErroneousBosh 5mo agoLiterally just installed QMMP on Haiku with the default Winamp skin because my partner misses the 90s.
- lschueller 5mo agoThe Buy button is kinda signaling, that they don't understand, what Winamp and this whole time was about... New tools with a frenetic mdding scene behind it, max customization, no tutorials, but digging through every file to see what you can change, bulky windows, which all needed to be arranged aside, like browser, napster, icq, winamp, your cs server chat in a thick browser.
- surganov 5mo agoI miss these times too. And I’d like to remind you that Winamp used to be a $10 shareware app (that’s roughly $30 in today’s dollars). The first version of Winamp didn't have any windows, it was pure utility application. Do you still think there's value in "max customization"?
- lschueller 5mo agosubjective value, yes. Objective value, never was and never meant to be. Therefore not a "product" or something you can sell.
- conception 5mo agoCog is a dated but pretty good winamp clone that supports mod and s3m like winamp did. Someone should bring that one back to life instead.
- lofaszvanitt 5mo agoSigh this is the same insanity that tesla brought into the car dashboard UI/UX, They removed physical buttons and now everyone is bringing them back. Same applies to music players.
- surganov 5mo agoYou didn't like shader backgrounds?
- cybercatgurrl 5mo agodoes it support exclusive mode?
- surganov 5mo agoWhat for? It's just streaming audio chunks with Core Audio that you cannot bypass. Even if there's resampling of 44.1khz to 48khz (Mac's default nowadays), it's not audible. Bit by bit perfection matters when you do a lot of processing, like in the context of a DAW or sound plugins, but not so much in the listening context. DA (digital-to-analog) end-chain matters much more – the actual audio interface and speakers, where all file-to-sound-wave reconstruction magic happens.
- HDBaseT 5mo agoDoes it support Milkdrop2 visualizations?
- surganov 5mo agoNot at the moment, but this is actually a good idea. Thanks
- qa3-tech 5mo agoNice build. Will check it out. Winamp had a simplicity to it that made it great to use. Just enough config to not get in the way. I find that most modern players somehow emphasize configuration for the perfect playback experience when all you want is to just launch & listen with minimal involvement. Definitely onboard returning to owning more your own (purchased) content.
- manny_rat 5mo agoAnother alternative is Reamp, I’ve been using it for years, it’s macOS and directly supports Winamp skins. The site is a little shady though! https://re-amp.ru/en https://re-amp.ru/en
- simsation 5mo agoAmazing, thank you for the reamp tip! I used winamp always in my Windows years like 15yrs ago. But then I switched to Mac and forgot about winamp completely.
- surganov 5mo agoNice, thanks for the link. It actually works, but lacks basic features as opening the whole folder with subfolders, pressing spacebar to play or loading large amounts of files, the app hangs immediately.
- photonair 5mo agoIt’s great to see a modern take on the classic audio player focused on local libraries rather than just streaming. I also appreciate the transparent one-time purchase model in an era where subscription fatigue is so common among desktop tools. This looks like a solid, focused utility for power users who still value fine-grained control over their playback.
- surganov 5mo agoThank you for the kind words!
- sudhirvashist 5mo agoGood feels overall, I also missed winamp. Thank you.
- surganov 5mo agoThanks!
- einsteinx2 5mo agoLooks very similar to IINA in design (to be clear I like IINA), so I’ll check it out!
- surganov 5mo agoThere are some similarities for sure! I also like IINA and have used it extensively in the past. The main additions are the flexible layout, waveform view, shader background, better performance and smaller app size, pitch and effects and bunch of other small things. So even though they can look similar (both have album cover and playlist), the experience is hopefully quite different.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]