13 ms·
I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes. At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself,
by jaysonelliot 13y ago
I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes.
At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported.
This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me.
Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world.
- caycep 13y agoWhy winamp? my understanding is that it's long been surpassed by other apps, i.e. foobar, even VLC
- tracker1 13y agofoobar is a bit... bare bones imho... and neither it or VLC have the shoutcast stream listing services... which will be an issue without winamp. :-(
- vomitcuddle 13y agofoobar is very lightweight and barebones, but it's also easily extensible
- codingdave 13y agoI have used it for all these years because it "just works". I have 2 needs in a music player - play whatever I have locally, and stream me something different when I want to. Winamp did both of those, and I never had an issue with it. It is hard to "surpass" something that meets my needs perfectly and has given me no issues for over 10 years.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jay_m 13y agoThe main reason I use Winamp is because it has global keyboard shortcuts for controlling playback. I'm not sure if any other media players have that, if anyone knows of one that does I would love to know.
- TheSOB88 13y agoFoobar does. You have to configure it but you can do it.
- mih 13y agotry foobar
- unethical_ban 13y agoTheSOB88, you are dead, my friend. Another casualty of a poor policy.
- MetaCosm 13y agoAHK (http://www.autohotkey.com/ http://www.autohotkey.com/) -- Global keybindings for any app you want.
- jay_m 13y agoWow I'd forgotten about AHK. Thanks for reminding me!
- criley2 13y agoOut of curiosity: I use AHK to do basic testing automation for a windows application that I have literally zero ability to control programatically (to achieve actually good automated testing). Anyone have a better option for this kind of use case?
- decode 13y agoAutoIt is a popular choice: http://www.autoitscript.com/ http://www.autoitscript.com/
- amag 13y agoIn my experience VLC eats a lot more CPU for just playing the same songs. While I like VLC for movie-files, Winamp is nicer when it comes to music.
- xtracto 13y agoYeah, I used to use VLC for playing video files, but man it takes a lot of memory and when it decides to "cache fonts" (or something like that) it takes literally hours to start. Now I prefer smplayer for videos and foobar for music. Although I've been a heavy Rdio user for some time.
- Zoomla 13y agoVLC can do many neat things but you can you easily rate an MP3 file nowadays?
- themodelplumber 13y agoVLC can do many neat things, but I never, ever saw it as a replacement for Winamp. It's more like a toolkit, or at least the multi-tool you fall back on to do a variety of things.
- dublinben 13y agoWho rates MP3 files?
- themstheones 13y agoI don't have any demographic information to share. But I personally attempt to rate my files. It gives a nice way to categorize by quality. That way I can have abjectly terrible music in my collection, but filter it out for the purposes of not ever wanting to listen to it.
- prg318 13y agoBecause it really whips the llama's ass.
- negativity 13y agoAh, Wesley Willis... Rock over London! Rock on Chicago!
- bhauer 13y agoWinamp was better than Burger King.
- _pmf_ 13y agoWhy is this not the top comment?
- ArcticCelt 13y agoFoobar is OK but because it tries to give so many power user options it can become a pain to do simple things like play list management.
- JacobSkyler 13y agoMy strategy is to install Columns UI (http://yuo.be/columns.php http://yuo.be/columns.php) and ignore the power options to the best of my ability. So far it's working.
- XorNot 13y agoI tried this, but it was never quite great. I'm very happy with Clementine which is cross-platform for Windows, Mac and Linux.
- mindcrime 13y agoBecause Winamp.
- gohrt 13y agofoobar still can't do sound level balancing (ReplayGain) properly. Does winamp?
- kderbe 13y agoWhat do you mean? FB2K has had excellent ReplayGain support for as long as I can remember.
- shellehs 13y agoI think it's just for good-old-day's memory. Just like Super Mario.
- marrs 13y agoTry running obscure file formats, like chiptune. Winamp reliably supports all of these with a very low barrier to entry.
- clarry 13y agoTry running less obscure (standard) file formats, like ogg/opus. Now you need to look for a plugin...
- surement 13y agoMilkDrop
- rm999 13y ago> This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud. You can have a consistent music library and can use any player client-side. Personally I prefer the spotify "all-you-can-listen" model, but I have a bunch of MP3s that aren't on spotify that I seamlessly stream from dropbox (either to winamp or the spotify client, which allows you to sync local files).
- piyush_soni 13y ago>Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud. Yes, but ideally, when it's your cloud. Just because all these major cloud players can just stop their service on their whim.
- networked 13y ago>all these major cloud player can just stop their service on their whim If you are concerned with minimizing monetary loss rather than preserving working copies of your media [1] you can treat that as an argument for choosing a media provider that allows you to pay a monthly fee. If (when) their service gets discontinued you switch to another one; the only problem you would face is migrating your favorites, bookmark, playlists and the like [2]. [1] Which makes sense when the specific things you want to access (watch, listen to, read, play, etc.) are not rare and can be found elsewhere. [2] Incidentally, this is something you could offer as SaaS. Edit: See http://resp.in/ http://resp.in/, http://www.getunify.com/ http://www.getunify.com/, the FOSS project https://github.com/mauimauer/portify https://github.com/mauimauer/portify, etc.
- fletchowns 13y agoIf (when) their service gets discontinued you switch to another one; the only problem you would face is migrating your favorites, bookmark, playlists and the like [2]. I don't think this is a good strategy, you are putting yourself at the mercy of content license negotiations that are done by a bunch of idiots with their heads up their asses that you have absolutely no control over. There is no guarantee that the music you "rent" from one service will be available for you to "rent" on another service.
- davexunit 13y agoNo reason to use a proprietary music player.
- csmuk 13y agoEvery music player is proprietary somewhere be it codec, physical IC, transistor technology, speakers, headphones. Software is a teeny little bit of the whole thing.
- deathanatos 13y agoAnd because some piece of the stack is proprietary means I shouldn't try use non-proprietary software where I can and it makes sense? Software, while a "teeny little bit", is often the bit I find lacking and needing change.
- recursive 13y agoOne would be to play music.
- Nursie 13y agoApparently VLC does the shoutcast stuff now if you download a pls file from shoutcast.com and feed it to VLC. If you're a linux user then 'audacious' is a good/similar replacement to winamp IMHO. I switched to using quodlibet some time ago. Can't remember why (simplicity, the right views, stuff) but now everything else seems sucky.
- vomitcuddle 13y agodeadbeef is a very nice lesser-known linux music player that's heavily influenced by foobar2000. quodlibet is probably my second favourite, but it's written in python, so it can be a bit slow/heavy on resources at times. banshee is great for large libraries and as an iTunes replacement.
- prawks 13y agoI switched to quodlibet for the fast indexing and searching of large libraries. I'm sure other media library managers do that too, but it seems to be very nice in quod.
- dell1994 13y agoYou can install Tonido (http://www.tonido.com http://www.tonido.com) in your desktop and listen to your music from anywhere (iOS, Android, Windows 8). Your data, music and app is all local to system but still can access from anywhere as cloud.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoThis is part of why I prefer cloud services like Dropbox that also maintain local copies and simply use the cloud for syncing and backups. Best of both worlds, that way.
- scrabble 13y agoI also recently switched back to Winamp. It just works and it's easy to control. There's also a plugin called Chipamp which ensures you have all the latest plugins required to play video game music files (nsf, rsn, usf, psf, etc.). This is the best PC tool for listening to video game music.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- davidgerard 13y agoVLC?
- etler 13y agoAt least with winamp, there weren't really any major changes since Justin Frankel left, and what made it amazing back then is still in the program now.
- o0-0o 13y ago+ you can bypass iTunes and sync your iPod Classic using Winamp.
- fat0wl 13y agoFoobar2000 is also pretty stable and awesome -- just need to drop in the Facets component & it's a dream. Winamp is a nice memory from back in the Napster days tho. :)
- etler 13y agoI've heard some good things about it. I'll give it a try. Winamp is timeless because it's so simple and powerful. I loved the play next queue. If I felt like a few songs I could throw them on the temporary queue without interrupting what was going on. Great for playing music for others too.
- fat0wl 13y agofoobar has similar features its just confusing at first cuz it puts playlists in tabs. super powerful but takes some getting used to. facets is the necessary add-on because it basically gives you a really powerful search whereas by default there is... none. the other component i use is the ipod manager i forget what its called but you can find it easily. it lets you add/delete songs pretty easily & if you use flac/wav/whatever it can even convert to mp3 on the fly if you set up the encoder right. that way you can keep lossless on comp but have mp3 on ipod without making an mp3 directory
- brusch 13y agoThank you - I always looked down to Foobar2000 (it looked to basic for). But now I've downloaded it and it looks great ! Thank you for the tip. The facet plugin is great - exactly what I wanted.
- BlackDeath3 13y agoNo kidding. I used to use it all the time, and I just re-downloaded about a week ago as my player of choice, especially since it's capable of playing FLACs (looking at you, WMP).
- niels_olson 13y agoyou should check out subsonic http://subsonic.org/ http://subsonic.org/ I like the isub app for iphone, but there are android apps too: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/apps.jsp http://www.subsonic.org/pages/apps.jsp I find subsonic works best with a friend or two participating. A miniature music club if you will. If you already have a large library, you can use beets to organize it in a separate database (this is our current project) http://beets.radbox.org/ http://beets.radbox.org/
- Toenex 13y agoAs Linux user forced to use OSX at work I've settled on VOX [http://coppertino.com/vox/ http://coppertino.com/vox/] as suitable player for OSX.
- el_duderino 13y agoAIMP is Winamp's successor.