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Audacious, a descendant of XMMS (which was a clone of Winamp), works wonderfully. Its "Winamp Classic Interface" looks exactly like Winamp and even (iirc) supports Winamp skins.

That said, I do miss the old (original) Whitecap visualization (one of the very few in which you could really see the music in what was still a visually stunning display), which only works on Winamp on Windows. (...not that Winamp's return would allow me to run this again.)

Agreed. There is also Audacious Media Player if you miss Winamp.

http://audacious-media-player....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

http://audacious-media-player....

"Audacious runs on Linux, on BSD derivatives, and on Microsoft Windows."

"Audacious is an open source audio player. A descendant of XMMS, Audacious plays your music how you want it, without stealing away your computerâ(TM)s resources from other tasks. Drag and drop folders and individual song files, search for artists and albums in your entire music library, or create and edit your own custom playlists. Listen to CDâ(TM)s or stream music from the Internet. Tweak the sound with the graphical equalizer or experiment with LADSPA effects. Enjoy the modern GTK-themed interface or change things up with Winamp Classic skins. Use the plugins included with Audacious to fetch lyrics for your music, to set an alarm in the morning, and more."

There's also a "Qt port".

#####

Then there's Clementine:

http://www.clementine-player.o...

"Search and play your local music library.
        Listen to internet radio from Spotify, Grooveshark, SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo, SKY.fm, Digitally Imported, JAZZRADIO.com, Soundcloud, Icecast and Subsonic servers.
        Search and play songs you've uploaded to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive
        Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists.
        Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
        CUE sheet support.
        Play audio CDs.
        Visualisations from projectM.
        Lyrics and artist biographies and photos.
        Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
        Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
        Fetch missing tags from MusicBrainz.
        Discover and download Podcasts.
        Download missing album cover art from Last.fm and Amazon.
        Cross-platform - works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
        Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
        Remote control using an Android device, a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
        Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
        Queue manager."

They did released Milkdrop under the BSD license a few years ago, there's a clone for OpenGL. XBMC uses it, and it can even load Milkdrop 1.x presets (totally just grabbed a huge set of those and am living like it's 2001 right now). I'm unaware of anything that can emulate AVS presets unfortunately.

Audacious can load Winamp 2.x and XMMS skins too. I'm still using it after a few years of flirting with other media players (ok, I may have given up and used xbmc on the teevee machine, but that's because it has a nice party mode and milkdrop!).

Thanks to XMMS, Audacious and many other open-source projects, the Winamp legacy lives on!

Audacious

http://audacious-media-player.org/

a name of an already popular open source application: http://audacious-media-player.org/
This is almost as bad as the libtorrent and libTorrent fiasco.

You mean like the music player? I hope they have more innovation in their work than in their naming schemes.

what the article talks about is Dynamic range compression, where the loudness of the piece is bumped up, losing the less loud bits (generally thinner notes) in the process.

it causes 3 things :

- heavy bass/loud voices.

- lost clarity of the song

- ear tiredom over time by listening to such DRC pieces.

it can be amended by crystallizers, software or hardware to great extent - x-fi x-treme music cards have it in their driver, and it works to great extent. but not everyone may have x-fi. the solution comes in with the below software :

http://audacious-media-player.org/

audacious is free. it has linux and windows versions. works great. link to windows version here :

http://boards.audacious-media-player.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=491

download this, run it, and turn on crystallizer in the plugins. set it to 5 or 8 depending on your speaker setup. also turn on equalizer, and adjust it accordingly. (bump up middle ranges in between 100-800 hz, the human voice, and keep the 60 hz and down (bass) a bit low. you can bump up higher frequencies a bit more for clarity.

you will see that you were listening to music as if it was 'muddy' before. it makes that much difference.

on top of this, you can acquire srs labs audio sandbox, or hd audio sandbox ( or whatever they were calling it now) from srs labs. it is a postprocessor, and if you choose 'wow hd' in 'stereo' selections and then bump 'definition' slider all the way up, your music will be much much more clearer. dont forget to arrange your speaker size slider accordingly too.

what the article talks about is Dynamic range compression, where the loudness of the piece is bumped up, losing the less loud bits (generally thinner notes) in the process.

it causes 3 things :

- heavy bass/loud voices.

- lost clarity of the song

- ear tiredom over time by listening to such DRC pieces.

it can be amended by crystallizers, software or hardware to great extent - x-fi x-treme music cards have it in their driver, and it works to great extent. but not everyone may have x-fi. the solution comes in with the below software :

http://audacious-media-player.org/

audacious is free. it has linux and windows versions. works great. link to windows version here :

http://boards.audacious-media-player.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=491

download this, run it, and turn on crystallizer in the plugins. set it to 5 or 8 depending on your speaker setup. also turn on equalizer, and adjust it accordingly. (bump up middle ranges in between 100-800 hz, the human voice, and keep the 60 hz and down (bass) a bit low. you can bump up higher frequencies a bit more for clarity.

you will see that you were listening to music as if it was 'muddy' before. it makes that much difference.

on top of this, you can acquire srs labs audio sandbox, or hd audio sandbox ( or whatever they were calling it now) from srs labs. it is a postprocessor, and if you choose 'wow hd' in 'stereo' selections and then bump 'definition' slider all the way up, your music will be much much more clearer. dont forget to arrange your speaker size slider accordingly too.

[..] To this day, the only thing I find lacking is multimedia players (and I especially miss Winamp).

Did you try the Audacious audio player? It was once forked from XMMS, which was a pretty good Winamp clone (for me anyways, haven't seen any Winamp since the year 2000 :). I still have Audacious configured to start with the XMMS skin, which is pretty close to how Winamp looked in 2000. With regard to media players, there's quite a lot of stuff around. Mplayer is certainly the best-performing media player on Linux. If you prefer a nicer GUI, there's also VLC. When you need more codecs, install Ubuntu package ubuntu-restricted-extras, and/or add the medibuntu repository to your package sources.

Too late! http://www.audacious-media-player.org/

On a serious note, I fully agree with what you said. Welcome to Hitlernet in 2020!

There was absolutely nothing wrong with Xmms as a Winamp-style media player that was quick, efficient and could handle Internet radio and almost all the popular DRM-free formats, yet it was automatically removed with other "obsolete" software. Yes, I can compile it again from source, but it just seems a bit obnoxious.

You want Audacious.

4. Audacity I have at least heard of, but never used. XMMS and the multitude of others mean that it is hardly a barrier.

I think you're confusing audacity with audacious. Audacity is a sound file editor, XMMS and audacious are sound file players.

Audacious conveniently plays a large amount of console formats out of the box (i.e. with the default plugin set), including NSF/NSFE. While Audio Overload does support a few really obscure formats (WonderSwan!) that can't really be played on anything else on Linux, Audacious supports many more console and old-school computer formats, including SID (Commodore 64), a ridiculous amount of Amiga formats (using UADE) and lots of Adlib formats (e.g. CMF). Audacious also has the advantage of having a large amount of input and output plugins, including I/O of WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. Generating an MP3 (or a large bunch of MP3s!) of an NSF is therefore a simple matter of switching the output plugin to FileWriter, telling it to output an MP3 (CBR, VBR, ABR; take your pick) and feeding Audacious the NSF file(s). Feed it properly tagged NSFE files and you get even get properly tagged MP3 files.

If a developer already has to implement their own update mechanism to insure this for new versions and the initial registration and host their own "repository" for the software, why shouldn't they just roll their own service entirely?

If I already have to implement my own login mechanism and host my own "website" of pages, why shouldn't I just roll my own HTTP server entirely?

Here's hoping they find a way to save time by using the existing package managers. I know I would. Dependencies alone is a pretty big deal -- for instance, suppose you ship a product written in python. You could roll your own shell script to check the version of python used, or force people to download the package and test it, or worse, distribute python with your package (something OS X people have to do if they need a version other than what Apple ships) -- or you can simply make your package depend on Python, and let the system handle everything else.

I mean if they have to choose between rolling their own service or, rolling their own slightly less functional service and trying to write a script for each of the many existing package managers, why should they do the latter?

Well, they could just pick one. Frankly, the only package manager out there that I think is worth considering is dpkg. The only other that's even remotely popular is rpm, and it's horribly broken, both technologically and politically. I liked Gentoo, but Gentoo/Portage packages are basically scripts anyway, and it's trivial for them to wrap other packaging systems -- in fact, they do it all the time.

So, distribute debs via a repository -- which is simple enough that even a small project like audacious can run their own (note that it only provides audacious packages) -- and then start talking about whether you want to legally let other people repackage your stuff (for instance, Gentoo). It may be a bit of legal work, but certainly no development time, to support Gentoo or Debian once you support Ubuntu. (Or Gentoo/Ubuntu once you support Debian.)

I think it is vital that a standard for packages and package management include an official registration channel for licensing as well as a standard location within the package for such a license in order to get developers on board.

Fine, as long as you understand that "within the package" is relative. The important part is that the license is delivered to the user before they use the software, and can always be found wherever the software is installed.

The basic idea is not only the ability to extract a portable package from an installed application, but to do so in a very user friendly way. If I drag my application icon into my IM window or e-mail or to a CD, it should "just work." You could do this with great complexity by having the OS recognize those export methods...

It already has to, to an extent. The example you give with IM is illustrative; most IM clients don't recognize sending more than a single file at once, and a .app is certainly not a single file.

Also, Linux does not have you EVER click directly on where the app is. You click on things like menu entries. I do, however, have an idea for how such a UI could look and work, and how you'd do the backend. I think it's actually somewhat trivial compared to writing a new package manager, which I intend to do anyway.

We're not just talking about music, but also images and movies and the like. Simply having a standardized location within the package greatly simplifies finding these items, means development tools are more likely to make use of that location, and means third party tools designed to extract these and convert them to more common formats know here to look.

Would you be happy if we had standard locations scattered around the filesystem?

Oh,

Winamp -> XMMS

1. Many Windows don't know what "Winamp" is. They use Windows Media Player or iTunes. Please point people to alternatives such as Exaile (Gnome) and amoroK (KDE).
2. Please advocate something modern. XMMS still uses GTK1 and feels very out of place on a modern desktop. It does not compete with a modern Winamp in terms of functionality. Please point people towards modern Winamp-like programs such as Beep Media Player and Audacious.

The newer versions of Winamp suck, but at least it still sucks less than the alternatives. However, when I use Windows I usually use iTunes.

XMMS is pretty much deprecated. I mean, it still uses GTK1 . If you want something XMMS/Winamp like, give Beep Media Player or Audacious a try. Both of those support XMMS and Winamp skins, have a good amount of plugins, and are modern.

Personally, though, I think the current best two are amaroK (KDE) and Exaile (Gnome).

please don't advertise xmms, it is a piece of gtk1-shit, you just give fuel to linux-bashers ("see, it looks like shit and can't display unicode titles").

As a drop-in replacement use Audacious