What Happened To Winamp? (arstechnica.com)

Winamp was released more than 20 years ago, and last week marked the 15th anniversary of the release of Winamp3. An anonymous Slashdot reader tries to explain what finally happened to Winamp: AOL planned to discontinue Winamp in November of 2013, but instead sold it to the Belgian online radio service Radionomy. The last update on Winamp's Twitter account was September of 2015, though it announced that they were looking for a new senior C++ developer. Then in December of 2015 Vivendi Group became that company's majority shareholder, stirring hopes that the company might one day launch a revamped version of the classic mp3 player from 1997.

So did they? Radionomy's Winamp page is still showing download links -- though they now lead instead to a forum post which says "code licensed to the previous owner" is being removed or replaced. But that post has been updated five times -- as recently as last October -- with "info about the next Winamp release," each linking to a thread on Winamp's forums which offer tantalizing glimpses into a still-ongoing development process. And last October a Winamp dev posted on Twitter that "a Winamp 5.8 public beta release could be imminent," while the web page at Winamp.com still says "There's more coming soon," with a background image of a llama.
"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition," their first general manager told Ars Technica in 2012. (Winamp's developers had been earning $100,000 a month just from $10 shareware checks before AOL acquired the company in 1999 for $100 million.) In May TechRadar wrote that Winamp "is still a great media player...but it now relies on third-party extensions to add features found as standard in more modern players."

I still remember all the visualizations and custom skins -- but does this bring back any memories for anyone else? Leave your thoughts in the comments. And what mp3-playing software are you using today?

Comments

I use it daily

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't stand itunes's bloat and insistence on taking control of my media files/directories.

Winamp forever, itunes never.

Re:I use it daily

[kennycoder]

Same here... With a clasical skin :)

Re:I use it daily

[jellomizer]

Winamp cannot load your songs onto the iPod. iTunes could.
That is the reason for iTunes dominance. iTunes looks good on OS X but it look out of place on Windows. However if you had an iPod/early iPhone iTunes was needed.

This isn't a case of a product failing due to bad design or engineering. Just a disruptive force came in and took it over. with the iPod, most people (not the Stereotypical Slashdot crowd) rather have their music on their own device then on a bulky PC. Having to be yelled at by IT workers for having 2/3 of their backups being from users keeping music files, on their work PC's, then getting sick of the extra 6 hours it took, so just deleting them from the user accounts, and if they complain they will just say, be happy we don't report this misuse of company property to your boss.
Having a different playlist at home and at work.

Winamp was fine. Playing music stored on your PC wasn't.

Re:I use it daily

[TheRaven64]

Winamp cannot load your songs onto the iPod. iTunes could.

WinAMP could with a plugin. WinAMP 2 didn't really manage your music, it expected you to manage it yourself and just managed a playlist. WinAMP 3 (remember, the one all the WinAMP users hated?) tried to.

There were lots of reasons that iTunes took over but the big one is that, for most users, hierarchies are not intuitive (only something like 10-20% of the population finds tree structures natural) and are horrible for managing music because there isn't a strict hierarchy even out of genre, performer, album, and composer. iTunes realised this and gave you a filtering mechanism (as did the BeOS tracker).

Re:I use it daily

[drinkypoo]

WiMP provided the same functionality as iTunes, except for the iPod/iPhone support. And frankly, it's a much better Windows application than iTunes, as in dramatically.

Re:I use it daily

[Rockoon]

Yes this!

Winamp wasnt great for its features although at the time it even played "tracker" files. Winamp was great because it wasn't bloated by any stretch of the imagination. I imagine most if not all the code is a mix of C and Assembler without several massive monolithic frameworks linked into it like just about everything has these days.

The explosion of formats however makes re-inventing all these wheels a daunting task, so all the players are now codec hells.

Re:I use it daily

[Monoman]

iTunes has to be one of the worst applications ever created. Give me WinAmp or Foobar2K any day before iTunes. I tried switching to a Mac about 5 years ago and gave up after 1 year simply because I could not find a decent program (free or free trial) that could handle a large and diverse (file types) audio file collection.

Re:I use it daily

[fluffernutter]

Mediamonkey was what I used to manage my music after the iTunes era but without the bloat. I bought a lifetime license for $30 years and years ago.

Re:I use it daily

[john081351]

the first thing added to any new windows build I do is install winamp. needs some updating but always works and gets the internet radio i love.

Re: I use it daily

[Shirley Marquez]

VLC isn't as good as Winamp at being a pure music player; it lacks Winamp's abilities to organize music and the UI isn't very slick. On the other hand, VLC has the merit of being to play nearly any kind of media file you throw at it; Winamp needs a bunch of third party add-ons to even come close to that.

Re:I use it daily

[HonestAbeHuxley]

Absolutely wonderful a better manager than winamp.

Re:I use it daily

[Reziac]

Same here. WinAmp 2.91 is sorta permanently glued to my desktop. I've tried other players; nothing else quite replaces it. In fact, nothing comes close.

Re:I use it daily

[Reziac]

I've tried others now and then, and have been through the whole gamut on linux. Nothing beats WinAmp for what I want it to do, which is just be a damn player and stay out of my way. I dislike needless complexity, cutesy interfaces, instability, resource hogging, and anything that fucks with my files.

And I have somewhere around 25,000 MP3s. But I manage that mass of files with directory trees and by using playlists (didja know WinAmp can load multiple playlists at once?), not with the player.

Actually, putting 'em into dirtrees and playlists means I don't have to do any management at all, just point and shoot.

Foobar2000

[Anonymous Coward]

This basically took over Winamp's userbase.

Re:Foobar2000

[YoungManKlaus]

Absolutely. Switched to foobar because it was so much more useful and less resource hungry. And I had a laptop with 240 MB ram back then, so that was really a concern.

Re:Foobar2000

[Duds]

"More useful"

Genuinely curious what could make a music player "more useful" than Winamp.

Re:Foobar2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Plugins for various formats, features for syncing to mobile devices, playlist and library management, conversion, reaching of archives (.zip/.7z).

Re:Foobar2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a hateful Nazi would say such a thing.

I stand in solidarity with the diverse mp3 player usage by its progressive former userbase.

Re:Foobar2000

[cheesybagel]

Yeah same here. But the thing is Youtube basically killed both.

Re:Foobar2000

[robvdl]

Probably for a lot of us yes, but most of my family on Windows continue to run Winamp still today as they really like the view that shows you all the album thumbs and haven't found a player yet that does this (Banshee in Linux comes close, but it's a bit less flexible).

Re:Foobar2000

[ColaMan]

Volume equalisation between tracks and albums mainly.

Re:Foobar2000

[dinfinity]

As with many things, Foobar2000 can be extended and configured to have such a view:
http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...

A nice view that is in between album cover browsing and a straight text based playlist is achievable with Simplaylist:
http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...
(see the screenshots here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/ind... )

Customizing foobar2000 can be pretty 'technical' (holding shift when accessing the menus, really?), but once you get it the way you want it, it works almost perfectly.

Re:Foobar2000

[Khyber]

A working speed, tempo, and pitch shifter, like what AIMP2 (not AIMP3) has.

Re:Foobar2000

[fluffernutter]

Don't know about foobar but I found it very useful that Mediamonkey would arrange music into folders based on MP3 tag. Then if you're going to a media device that isn't as smart, you just copy by folder.

Re:Foobar2000

[avandesande]

it has all kind of plugins for hi-fi I use it with a separate DAC, can play DSD etc.

Re:Foobar2000

[AndroSyn]

That's how it was packaged from Napster.

Re:Foobar2000

[Hamsterdan]

Exactly one of the reasons I use foobar2000 when adding albums to iTunes. Equalize using replaygain (meaning leaving the file intact), and then convert to itunes proprietary format (instead of using iTune's equalising stuff (don't remember the name, haven't used for a while)

Re:Foobar2000

[cjellibebi]

You can get the Pacemaker plugin for WinAmp to do just that - https://www.surina.net/pacemaker/

Re:Foobar2000

[Khyber]

Why would I want a plugin when the same functionality is built-into a music payer that uses even fewer resources than Winamp 2.71?

Re:Foobar2000

[Black LED]

I still need to polish it up a bit, but this is my own custom fb2k theme. Note that it not only has album art for the currently playing tune, but smaller thumbs for albums in the main list and a coverflow-like selector at the bottom.

I'm still deciding whether I want to keep the coverflow part around, integrate it differently or remove it altogether. The top control bar (to the left of the progress bar, which is also the actual waveform of the playing tune) has a few placeholder stop symbols because I haven't created the art for them yet, but overall I'm nearly done with it.

If you don't want to bother learning fb2k's scripting language, you can download a lot of nice, premade themes from DeviantArt. You can make fb2k look and work just like any other player or make it work the exact way that you want it to.

Re:Foobar2000

[stealth_finger]

Plugins for various formats, features for syncing to mobile devices, playlist and library management,

Ok

conversion, reaching of archives (.zip/.7z).

Now you're getting to bloat. You don't need one program that does everything.

Re:Foobar2000

[Shirley Marquez]

Packaging multiple MP3 files in a single download. Sites like Amazon and eMusic do that.

Re:Foobar2000

[YoungManKlaus]

Lots of stuff has been mentioned already ... personally:
1. actually proper ID3 tag handling (at least way better than anything winamp ever had)
2. volume normalization
3. tree-style media library
4. better interface (I have come to detest custom interfaces ... if you hear that spotify: you are the worst!)
5. _way_ better startup performance with my big library
6. mass tagger / mass mover (such a great feature to keep stuff organized)

just from the top of my head.

Re:Foobar2000

[Reziac]

I had the opposite experience. Tried to switch to FooBar and didn't like it much, plus it ate too much. Originally was running it on 128mb RAM and WinAmp didn't use enough to notice (still not much, between 8 and 13mb), but FooBar did. Then again, I never went past WinAmp 2.91, which I still use to this day. Once it got a FLAC plugin I stopped even bothering to install anything else.

Memories?

[Duds]

"I still remember all the visualizations and custom skins -- but does this bring back any memories for anyone else?"

Memories? I still use it.

I don't know what these supposed "Features" it doesn't have that are in modern players are but I don't want them. What I want is something that sits in one line at the top of my screen and plays music. It's still Winamp for that and has been since 1997.

Re:Memories?

[BeTeK]

Indeed I have tried foobar but I cannot get it configured as one line that stays on top of windows.

Re:Memories?

[Duds]

I think I tried foobar probably so long ago the name "Foobar 2000" wasn't hilarious but yeah, it just seemed like too much screen real-estate to tell me nothing useful window shade mode on winamp didn't.

Re:Memories?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, a proud user of Windows*. Probably still using XP even, because "it still works" and "I don't need to keep my machine up to date because only stupid people get hacked". Or something.

Seriously, VLC kicks winamp's ass so hard it isn't even funny.

It is a veritable army knife of media palyback. It is vastly more efficient, it has support for every codec known to mankind, it has support for multiple platforms - all flavours of desktop AND mobile, x86, ARM (so you can run it on a Raspberry Pi) and more - and, crucially, it is open source so your software can't be held hostage by someone else.

Heck, you can even run it headless and control it remotely.

Winamp is a relic of times gone by. It was ok then, in the dark ages, when IE6 was the pinnacle of browsing and 128MB or RAM was a luxury. But now it is just an obsolete piece of turd, irrevocably held down by the whims of whoever "owns" it.

I'd give you a nickel to get yourself a better media player, but I don't even have to. VLC is free as in beer and speech, so get some already.

And in case you are terrified of all the features VLC packs, you don't have to use them if don't want to. They stay out of the way, so you can use it as just another dumb old media player. I probably even still supports XP, so you are fine.

* Assuming, since Winamp support for other platforms is utter crap. It has an Android version, but that doesn't even exist in the Android Play store any more, and the Mac OS version is a stripped down, crash prone turd.

Re:Memories?

[mobby_6kl]

I have it playing a shoutcast stream right at this moment too.

The 2.x version that I'm using is lacking a media library which is really useful when you have hundreds of gigabytes of torrented^W legitimately purchased MP3s on disk. But that storage is now offline so while I don't miss it now, it's certainly a limitation because playlists become unmanageable at that scale.

Re:Memories?

[Lonewolf666]

I have to agree that it is a "legacy system", and will probably go the way of the dodo for you if (when?) you ditch Windows.

But as long as you keep a copy of the last decent installer, and Microsoft does not ditch the Windows Core Audio APIs, you can use it on Windows as long as you want. The owner cannot keep you from that. Just don't make the mistake and downgrade to Windows 10 S ;)

Still using version 5.66 lite on Win7 and quite pleased with it for playing audio. For video I use VLC though.

Re:Memories?

[dwywit]

And mplayer/ffmpeg shits on VLC. So what? Some people like Winamp. I like Winamp. I like VLC, too. I also like mplayer and ffmpeg - and they're free, too. I use the tool/s that best suit my needs at the time.

BTW, VLC fails badly when asked to convert formats, it can't cope with damaged AVI indexes, and it's not very efficient at real-time playback of MKV files, so don't go crowing too loudly there.

Re:Memories?

[hairyfeet]

I still give it to customers for use on their HTPCs as I've found most customers like to have the visualizations going when they are playing their music, gives their guests something to look at as they are passing by the screen at parties, and winamp has to be the easiest that I've found for computer noobs to use. Layout for the songs/artist/album on the left, and a big easy to hit visualization tab in the middle...couldn't be simpler to use and it takes me less than 3 minutes to show even the most noobish how to make playlists in winamp.

Ya know there are plenty of times a customer doesn't want all the bells and whistles, they just want simple and easy and with winamp having a ton of visualizations built in as well as several auto generated playlists that customers just seem to love? It was really a no brainer to put it on my standard install stick, just a great player for HTPCs.

Re:Memories?

[Rockoon]

Core Audio post-dates winamp and foobar by about a decade for the former and about 4 years for the later.

It was introduced with Vista or 7 (can't remember which) and the other original audio API's (MMSYS, DirectSound, etc.) were then re-factored to use the new Core Audio API's rather than to talk to the hardware directly themselves.

It is unfortunate that they screwed up Core Audio with some wholly unnecessary vestiges of Microsoft's COM crap (still uses COM variants as a data-type, so you gotta pull in an entire COM framework if you want to really do it right)

Re: Memories?

[jez9999]

Milkdrop just seems to be a bunch of randomly-generated visualizations that don't have anything to do with the music playing - am I missing something? I never really understood it.

Re:Memories?

[Khyber]

Try AIMP2 (not AIMP3.) Fully-loaded with every song on my system (almost 1500 songs) and I'm sitting at only 3.7 MB. I never shut the program down.

Re:Memories?

[Lucky_Strikez]

I still use it as well, I do a lot of music/sound editing and I like how fast it pops up and starts playing compared to Media Player or any of the other bloated bullshit players.

Re:Memories?

[Duds]

I have VLC installed for video, but it still doesn't pass the simple "windowshade" test.

I don't care about support for other formats, I'm not running it on anything else and I certainly don't care about efficiency in the playback of an mp3 in 2017.

Re: Memories?

[sound vision]

Milkdrop does synchronize to the music. How apparent that is will depend on what music you are listening to, and also which visualizations you are using. When I tried it back around 10 years ago, the default visualizations were not very good, downloading packs of new ones was essential.

Re:Memories?

[Reziac]

I use 2.91 and yeah, when you get to a few thousand songs the playlist function gets unwieldy. My solution was crude and simple: multiple playlists. WinAmp can load as many playlists at once as you like, just select multiples like you would files. When you do that, the whole list loads almost instantly, and you can still shuffle, sort, etc.

Oh, and it's playing a shoutcast here too, from an online station that's now 19 years old.

The visualisations are wonderful

[Bruce66423]

Still capable of amazing me with some great effects that perfect on many occasions.

Re: The visualisations are wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote the Acidspunk plug in back in the days. I have sweet memories of the rivalry at the top download charts.

AOL is the death knell for technology, that's why

[Anonymous Coward]

(nt)

Still in use!

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I side-load it on my phone. I also have a VM running Shoutcast, so I can stream music from my collection across my wifi. I love Dronezone for specific types of meditations, and Space Station Soma is really good too. Especially after a few bottles of Robitussin LOL

Still use it.

[ckatko]

Still use it. I could go on, but it feels like this Winamp story shows up a couple times a year.

It uses a tiny amount of RAM, a tiny amount of CPU, supports tons of plugins, global hotkeys, and more. I would "upgrade" but I've never actually seen a player that's an improvement. Why would I use a "newer" tool if the newer tool isn't functionally better than the old one? Playing an MP3 shouldn't take more than 16 MB of RAM or >0.0% CPU. End of story.

Thank God ONE software package hasn't become a bloated piece of crap that requires 15 seconds to load and 1 GB of RAM to load a freakin' word document.

Re:Still use it.

[Lonewolf666]

Fully agree to parent. The most likely reason for using another player is that I might switch away from Windows eventually. Though I might check out the alternatives that have been suggested here.

I'm only moderately optimistic about the possible new version, however. With that kind of sequel, developers often forget about optimization and keeping the memory usage in check.

Re:Still use it.

[AmiMoJo]

I gave up on Winamp because its unicode support was crap. Unicode itself is crap but at least Foobar2000 supports it.

Re:Still use it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked it because it did one thing and it did it well.

Feature creep can ruin software.

ACDSee was like that. Was a great little image viewer at one time. Click on an image file and in the blink of an eye it was opened. Scroll through the pictures, ignoring anything else in the folder. Then it added support for non-image file types. Scrolling through pictures would be bogged down when it hit video or audio files that I was not interested in. Froze and could not scroll further until the file loaded. Made ACDSee useless to me.

Use Faststone now. A little concerned that video support has been added. Have not checked it out yet. *Sigh*

Re:Still use it.

[thegarbz]

Thank God ONE software package hasn't become a bloated piece of crap

Funny. I remember "bloated piece of crap" being my first criticism of Winamp 3. Admittedly we've moved the bar a bit since then.

Re:Still use it.

[fluffernutter]

Lol.. I bought ACDSee once fifteen years ago and I'm still getting emails begging me to buy it for "80% off".

Re:Still use it.

[Reziac]

Yes! And doesn't leak memory or resources. I can have WinAmp up continuously for months, using it for hours every day (yeah, rebooting is against my religion, and if there's not a black rectangle in one corner, I think my monitor is dead) and it's still under 15mb RAM and something like 0.01% of CPU, and this is an old box.

Never reinstall it either, just drag it from one box to the next.

Mobile phones

[jabuzz]

Is what happened to WinAmp. The truth is that the vast majority of people now use their mobile phone to listen to music and not their laptop or desktop. The trend started with the iPod and was accelerated by the phone. As flash capacity increased it has been ever pushed further down the line. As such the market for audio players on your computer has larg

You can get 400 albums on a 64GB microSD using 256kbps MP3 and still have plenty of room to spare for photos. It's not like 128 and 200GB+ microSD are extortionate either.

That said the Linux clone xmms suffered the same issue, a massive "redesign" that destroyed it and even qmmp seems to be dead. For me neither are any use now I have a HiDPI display which is a shame.

Re:Mobile phones

[sheramil]

Is what happened to WinAmp.

I use winamp on my phone.

Re:Mobile phones

[AmiMoJo]

Spotify and streaming in general. The kids don't bother with MP3s any more, they just stream.

Re:Mobile phones

[Barny]

Same!

Only sad thing was I paid for pro features and like a few weeks later they dropped them.

Re:Mobile phones

[RazorSharp]

This is true. I see a lot of kids these days who only use one media player: YouTube. It really doesn't make sense to them to use local storage for media files that are widely available on the internet. For them, local storage is for pictures, videos (that they shoot), games, and apps. When they're really into music they get a subscription to Apple's music streaming service or something similar. I'm pretty sure most kids wouldn't know what we're talking about when we say "MP3."

Re: Mobile phones

[leifmadsen]

I stopped using winamp and xmms because I now just use Google Play Music and stream everything. I can even download music offline to play on my cell at the cottage and it goes via Bluetooth to my Bose wireless speaker.

At the end of the day, obtaining mp3 files, storing, sorting, organizing etc is just too much work. Also I listen to a lot more music that I'd not have known about. Unless a new winamp provides all the same functionality of Google Play Music subscription, I'm not sure I'll have a reason to use it.

Re: Mobile phones

[leifmadsen]

It's not just the kids. I'm 36 and have been using computers since grade 2, ran a BBS, used winamp until I moved to a Linux desktop fulltime in 2000 (subsequently switching to xmms) and I'm now a full time streamer.

My job is intense and I don't have time to deal with managing local mp3s. It simply makes no sense. I now use an online streaming service full time which also provides offline access via downloads.

Re:Mobile phones

[thegarbz]

Is what happened to WinAmp.

WinAmp 3.x is what happened to WinAmp. What a piece of shit that was. I stopped using WinAmp in favour of several alternates over the years (currently Foobar) long before "mobile phones" did anything other than make calls and send 120 characters of text.

Re:Mobile phones

[JBMcB]

Kinda sorta. There is a fairly sizable community behind Foobar2000, which I consider to be the successor to Winamp (super configurable, hackable, and plugins to play anything you want) There is also quite a bit of support for JRiver Media Player. In both cases it's usually people with more esoteric media collections, or those who don't like the way streaming media sounds, or audiophiles who want to manage their ripped media collection.

Re: Mobile phones

[Minupla]

44 (AKA old enough that I had to break out calc to work that out :)) and ditto. You can apparenlty teach an old dog new tricks, although I'll NEVER understand my daughter's love for watching other people play games on Youtube she doesn't wanna play herself! I'll watch her watching someone play a game on youtube and offer to get it for her on Steam. "No it's OK Daddy, I just wanna watch play".

Kids these days!

Re: Mobile phones

[Khyber]

"At the end of the day, obtaining mp3 files, storing, sorting, organizing etc is just too much work"

What horrible music player were you using? I just download everything I want, right-click->sort in my music player, and it does it all automatically for me. You know, we've got these magical little things called IDv3 tags.

Re: Mobile phones

[JohnFen]

I stream, too. But I do it from my own streaming server.

Re: Mobile phones

[JohnFen]

This. I don't understand why people are saying it takes a lot of time or effort to maintain their own song library. Modern tools make doing that almost entirely automatic.

Re: Mobile phones

[JohnFen]

Ten songs a month on iTunes vs the entirety of recorded music. The argument just isn't there.

I suppose it depends on what you want. If I have the recordings, then I have access to the music under any circumstances and forever. With streaming, neither of those things are true.

Re: Mobile phones

[JohnFen]

Plus, almost all of the software that automatically organizes them can also place them into your preferred directory structure.

When I get new music, the effort required to properly tag and categorize it usually consists of clicking a button in an application. With very obscure music (my tastes seem to lead me to more of that than most people) that isn't in the databases, I may have to click a couple more buttons and maybe type in a string or two, but we're still talking, worst case, of about 5 minutes of work.

Job done.

xmms

[Anonymous Coward]

For the rest of the world, there is XMMS (www.xmms.org/) which is the same thing, done better.

Re:xmms

[Calydor]

Done better how?

Does it clean up recording artifacts in the MP3s? Does it remove the sound of people cheering from live performances so you can hear the artist more clearly? Does it see an MP3 is a remix that's ten times worse than the original, so it plays the original instead?

I'm honestly curious in what way XMMS does music playing better than WinAMP.

Re:xmms

[MMC Monster]

MP3 players should play MP3s. Not download or play alternatives.

Post-processing is nice, though. More mp3 players should have more robust post-processing.

Re:xmms

[Anonymous Coward]

Winamp + pacemaker plugin. 30% increase in tempo (no increase in pitch) == about 3 cups of coffee. For coding sprints, +30% on fast techno == crazy awesome.

Re:xmms

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your "professional" meter needs calibration... Itunes webpage looks like it was designed by an interior decorator. The winamp homepage looks like it was designed by a domain squatter. The XMMS homepage looks like it was designed by an engineer.

Re:xmms

[Khyber]

Or just get AIMP2 which has native speed, tempo, and pitch shifting built-in. Don't use AIMP3, as they changed the libraries that handled that and the quality of sound from that suffered tremendously.

LinAmp

[Anonymous Coward]

In the mid-1990s I was determined to quit using Windows, so I switched to BSD & GNU/Linux, almost exclusively the last 10+ years. I like Open Cubic Player, DeadBeef, XMMS (v1, but can't get it,) Audacious

Re:LinAmp

[Lonewolf666]

About XMMS:
Source is available at http://www.xmms.org/ (http://www.xmms.org/download.php). They offer XMMS 1.2.11, which arguably is V1. Binaries appear to be missing though. Looks like the site has not been maintained for a while.

Re:LinAmp

[jenningsthecat]

In the mid-1990s I was determined to quit using Windows, so I switched to BSD & GNU/Linux, almost exclusively the last 10+ years. I like Open Cubic Player, DeadBeef, XMMS (v1, but can't get it,) Audacious

If you like DeadBeef, you might want to check out Decibel Audio Player.

Re:LinAmp

[Wolfrider]

--Yep. Deadbeef for Linux, VLC for Linux and Windows, and Doubletwist for Android.

Re:LinAmp

[Mike Frett]

Why don't you like Audacious? It's a fork of Beep which is a fork of XMMS. It has it's own UI and a Winamp Skin, It's the only player I like. Let's not forget that VLC plays Audio too! =p

AOL had it all in the palm of its hand

[DrXym]

Nullsoft single handedly invented the MP3 players, streaming audio & video and P2P filesharing and downloads. AOL Time Warner (as it was at the time) singlehandedly failed to capitalize on any of these things and in fact drove the founder out by squelching his projects.

The SUPER stupid part is AOL did this a lot. They bought up a lot of innovative companies and squeezed the life and individuality out of them and stifled their potential. Want to know how dumb it got? AOL forced all their subsidiaries to migrate their email systems to use the AOL client because of course they did.

Re:AOL had it all in the palm of its hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically Realplayer had streaming audio before winamp or shoutcast. Winamp had a lot more features though and mp3 was better quality than realaudio, so it won the battle of the media players.

Re:AOL had it all in the palm of its hand

[JohnFen]

Perhaps, but technically, RealPlayer was a supremely buggy piece of shit.

Re:AOL had it all in the palm of its hand

[93 Escort Wagon]

Technically Realplayer had streaming audio before winamp or shoutcast.

While RealPlayer offered streaming before Winamp, its first streams were still buffering when Winamp got finished and people started using it.

Microsoft Monopoly Abuse Killed Winamp

[Inviska]

Winamp was required to play mp3 files on Windows in the late 90s because Windows Media player did not support the codec. This allowed Winamp to grow as a successful product, up until Microsoft started bundling Windows Media Player 7 with Windows. Since WMP7 had support for mp3, most people just used that, simply because that's what mp3 files opened in when they double clicked on them. This lead to a rapid decline in Winamp users, and thus through the illegal practice of bundling Microsoft was able to abuse its Windows monopoly to kill off another competitor.

Bundling is an illegal practice for trust companies, and it always amazes me that they were able to get away with this with no investigation at all. It's not the only time Microsoft has used its bundling of Windows Media Player to its advantage. With WMP9 Microsoft added the VC-1 codec as a competitor to h.264. VC-1 was supposed to offer lower royalty payments to h.264, while offering similar performance, but once all patents were assessed the royalty payments turned out to be the same as h.264, so VC-1 offered no advantage at all to the incumbent codec. However, Microsoft used its Windows monopoly and bundled WMP application to push VC-1, and they were so successful they managed to get VC-1 included in with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards. Some early Blu-rays from Warner used VC-1, but the quality was noticeably inferior to h.264, and thus it is rarely, if ever, used for Blu-rays now. However, thanks to its monopoly abuse anyone who buys a Blu-ray player is paying money to Microsoft because all Blu-ray players have to support VC-1.

Re:Microsoft Monopoly Abuse Killed Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, please go fuck yourself, anti-Microsoft trolling cocksucker, and take your revisionist bullshit with you. Every version of Windows included media player. What? They weren't supposed to update it because you said so? Stupid asshole. Winamp killed themselves with version 3 and their hellspawn WASABI bullshit. Still balls-deep in the pirating scene on IRC, no one stopped using Winamp because of Windows Media Player. They stopped using it because it started sucking on its own. No one that actually knew what they were doing used the default players for ANYTHING on ANY OS.

Re:Typical History Ignorant Article --- iTunes ...

[cheesybagel]

AOL at one point was merged together with Time Warner remember?

Still use it

[SCVonSteroids]

What else would I be using?

Re:Still use it

[billybiro]

What else would I be using?

Foobar2000

Re:Still use it

[CodeHog]

MusicBee

Re:Still use it

[Idisagree]

if you didn't already know there's a revival project from one of the original crew with a beta edition out that's pretty solid:

WACUP (Winamp Community Update Pack) - getwacup.com
The latest version being v0.9.9.1744 (August 3rd 2017).

Happy days!

Re:Still use it

[Big Car Retread]

I like MusicBee too :-)

Re:Still use it

[skastrik]

The 1by1 folder player (http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html) is very minimal and light weight. Probably works best for those who like to listen to whole albums.

Banshee

[MMC Monster]

I use banshee, but only because of inertia.

I have ~8000 songs and Banshee takes forever to start up. Upon startup I get a grey shell of the main window for about 5 seconds before anything happens.

Other than that, it seems to work fine.

This happens with the same music collection among several computers and recurs about a week or so after wiping out the config files.

Re:Banshee

[old_kennyp]

I use it too and it does everything i need.
I get the same startup grey screen but a random song starts playing immediately and thats fine by me too.

Re:Banshee

[indi0144]

Such lower standards. I Use Foobar and have around 200000 tracks in the autogenerated playlist (at least half of them FLAC, APE, DSD) And foobar2k starts up instantly. I can open and close foobar 3 times in 10 seconds. And the music and db is stashed on a slow WD green drive FFS. The only thing I miss from Winamp is the visualization studio.

Winamp Winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

It really whips the llama's ass.

Audacious

[pcjunky]

Audacious does most of the things winamp did. Can even be made to look almost exactly like it. Even has plugins like winamp.

Re:Audacious

[Udom]

Audacious can use any of the skins from the sites that offer Winamp skins, and also skins generated by Skinamp.exe under Wine. Audacious also has an installer for those using windows.

Re:Audacious

[TeknoHog]

I also use Audacious whenever I need extended functionality in terms of input/output plugins. It also ties in with my curses frontent I originally wrote in 2002 for XMMS. However, for everyday use I prefer simpler textmode players such as Herrie.

iTunes/Winamp

[wonkey_monkey]

"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today

Are the two that comparable? Winamp's a media player. iTunes is a front-end for a store and a device manager.

Re:Still use it here

[JonnyCalcutta]

I didn't know Justin was involved with Reaper, even though I use it for my very rare musical doodlings. Even though its not actually free you can 'evaluate' it indefinitely (I'm not a musician at all, just occasionally like to fiddle around with a keyboard/daw).

Lets face it Nullsoft were pretty instrumental in the birth of Internet Radio with Winamp and shoutcast so its great to see he's still around.

Still use it because of crossfading and stereotool

[c120plus]

I still use winamp when I need sound quality. Mainly because of two plugins. - Stereotool (https://www.stereotool.com, I use the paid pro version) - SqrSoft-Advanced Crossfading (http://sqrsoft.com.ar/downloads.html, free) If only Spotify or the competition would finally offer winamp-compatible plugins...

Ditched it.

[EnsilZah]

I ditched it around the time they decided it needed to play video, burn CDs and have a fucking integrated browser.

Re:Ditched it.

[thegarbz]

I ditched it 15 years ago. I still light a candle every anniversary of the death of Winamp ... errr I mean the release of Winamp 3.

Re:Ditched it.

[indi0144]

This. Later I was moving to Linux so I used and loved Amarok in the 3.x era, Then when I got back into windows and went to look into winamp, fuck, it was like it froze in time, so stale. Swapped to Foobar2K and have not looked back, the audio quality and plugins are way beyond anything else. Where else can you split/upmix stereo DSD tracks to 7.1 speakers while using WASAPI or ASIO? while only using around 3% cpu and no fancy audiophile sound card.

On the Mac I use VOX, Is the only one free that supports hd tracks, its decent, but meh I dont use it much.

On android AIMP3. Plays 24bit files even without a DAC for them, and even then, its easy on the battery.

Audioplayers have come a long fucking way dear submitter, the question SHOULD BE. why people still linger and long for an inferior player like Winamp?

today

[markdavis]

>"And what mp3-playing software are you using today?"

Audacious [under Linux], of course. And guess what skin? Refugee Winamp 2! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:today

[markdavis]

>"Am I the only one using mpg123?"

I did for a while. Often I just play music with "mplayer" command line. Evolved to xmms for a long number of years before switching to Audacity. I still use "play" or "mplayer" when I want to just hear something I want right now.

Re:today

[Reziac]

There exists WinAmp3 for linux, but since I can't get the durn thing to run (not even after unpacking the RPM, since it wouldn't install either), I can't tell you if it sucks.

WinAmp is still great

[MoarSauce123]

And back in the day it was the only convenient tool to rip CDs until Audiograbber came along. It is still a great player, but limited. I defected to VLC that plays about everything.

Re:Streaming killed players

[MoarSauce123]

Which is about owning the song vs paying a service to provide a song. Streaming is like renting an apartment, you pay often more compared to buying and in the end you are left with nothing. Amazon at least lets you download the songs your purchased...fair deal.

Obvious

[nospam007]

It's dead, Jim.

SMPlayer is fine

[Progman3K]

It comes down to simply playing the media files and being quick and reliable. All the rest is just useless crap.

Now that you know that I like SMPlayer - LEAVE IT THE HELL ALONE!

It seems like Winamp was really good but then got more and more bloated, I don't want that happening to SMPlayer

Winamp

[jon3k]

Winamp - it really whips the llama's ass!

Not sure about everyone else but for me what replaced winamp was mpd with ncmpcpp on my desktop and laptop and Google Music on mobile. This let's me access my library either locally with mpd clients or remotely by pushing it all to Google Music and using their player.

I haven't really used winamp since the early to mid 2000s. That's when the iPod hit and then I used Songbird which USED to be able to sync media to your iPod. Then I jumped from that to Google Music around 2011 and mpd for local access at home. If Google decides to "pull a Reader" and discontinue Google Music I'd probably switch to Subsonic (good mobile apps) or Shoutcast or something.

MediaMonkey

[ufodziner]

I switched to MediaMonkey a long time ago. Handles file management well, nice interface, and converts non-native file types (I store in flac format) to iPod compatible versions on the fly when syncing with an iPod/iPad, etc...

Re:Winamp 2.81

[Luthair]

While I can't say I use it anymore, my memory is Winamp 3 killed Winamp

Replacements?

[achacha]

Aimp is the closest I found (http://www.aimp.ru/)
Fubar2000 not as refined as Aimp but seems to be more extensible (https://www.foobar2000.org/)

Why pick, I run both.

Re:Replacements?

[afaiktoit]

I havent tried foobar in a decade at least. I'm using aimp at the moment but being from .ru I'm always worried its going to try and hack my election.

Re:Replacements?

[Khyber]

You're from the RU and you aren't using fucking AIMP2?

What sort of non-Communist are you, Comrade?

Re:Replacements?

[afaiktoit]

I'm not from the .ru, aimp is and I'm using aimp v4.

Re:Replacements?

[Khyber]

Anything after 3 is bullshit. Stick with the last version of 2. It is superior in every way down to sound quality when you use the built-in speed/tempo/pitch shifters.

Re:I switched to iTunes

[jenningsthecat]

You know, I just really want a media player that forces itself into my life in strange and unusual ways.

LOL - thanks for the chuckle. I guess iTunes is the systemd of media.

resenting this last question's wording

[zuki]

Your question seems to legitimize .MP3, it implies that it's the only format that people would ever use to play music. While you may well be right that it's what a majority of people use, you just made me very sad realizing how hopeless it is to try and get people to care about listening to music that has decent sound quality in lossless formats when most of us never have issues like running out of storage space anymore.

This is not to say that mp3 isn't a perfectly appropriate choice on personal portable audio devices that we use with earbuds while 'on the go', because it's totally suited for that.

But in the case of WinAmp and since this was a desktop app, there is a good number of us who actually have high-end audio interfaces with audiophile-grade D/A converters connected to large speaker systems, in which case such a choice of audio format arguably can and does make a difference.

To answer the question, foobar2000 is so superior to anything else out there, it seems like the natural inheritor of all of the endlessly customizable features that made Winamp such a cool program to use back in the day. foobar2000 is capable of playing back any format known to man, including, FLAC, APE, ISO images of DVD-A, SACD and many other exotic formats, yet isn't encumbered by all of the bloat that has turned iTunes into such a dog for anything serious like dealing with very large music libraries.

Even if Winamp was to be released today, it would have a very hard time catching up to the amount of extensibility and customization that plugins currently offer to foobar2000 and given its recent history would likely come as a freebie bundled with all sorts of toolbar installers and other sponsored crapware.

Incidentally, and for anyone running OS-X, WineBottler allows for foobar2000 to run very smoothly, and I assume it's the same for Linux. Which means that using such a solution would probably would also work for Winamp under OS-X...

Audacious

[Steelheart]

is what I use on Linux. It is called a descendany of XMMS, supports winamp skins and can sit in one line at the top of your screen (which seems to be a wanted feature).

Re:winamp is dead

[Teun]

I see you've yet to reach KDE and it's players.

winamp is dead jim

[FudRucker]

try xmms, or qmmp, or audacious, (oops those are Linux apps) maybe you can switch to Linux too

Well, I do know Shoutcast still exist.

[lkroll4565]

Recently (well, January) added the Shoutcast channel on my Roku. Fantastic. Much better than Spotify, imo. :) Haven't played with WinAmp in over 8 years (didn't re-install when I upgraded my WinXP to Win7 back then and now that machine finally pooped and bought a Win8.1 which I upgraded to Win10). Still, I do like Shoutcast and a brain cell reminded me of Shoutcast and I decided to do a search to see if they still exist and indeed they do. :)

Ultraplayer

[justthinkit]

It uses a tiny amount of RAM, a tiny amount of CPU, supports tons of plugins...Playing an MP3 shouldn't take more than 16 MB of RAM or >0.0% CPU. End of story.

Ultraplayer: 2MB download, 8MB ram, 0% cpu

I went looking for something better when I saw Media Player taking one-third of my CPU (at the time). Found Ultraplayer. Never changed.

I'll tell you what happened...

[dAzED1]

The Llama, which had been ignoring it for years, suddenly turned around and whipped *its* ass. Winamp hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Re:I'll tell you what happened...

[jittles]

The Llama, which had been ignoring it for years, suddenly turned around and whipped *its* ass. Winamp hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Yeah but for $100,000 a month I would have GLADLY let that llama whip my ass. Just saying.

Re:Original XMMS or Audacious(Audacity, I frgt whi

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora and Slackware still ship it.
rpm -qa|grep xmms
xmms-faad2-2.7-8.fc25.x86_64
xmms-1.2.11-27.20071117cvs.fc25.x86_64
xmms-libs-1.2.11-27.20071117cvs.fc25.x86_64
xmms-normalize-0.7.7-11.fc25.x86_64
xmms-flac-1.3.2-1.fc25.x86_64
xmms-pulse-0.9.4-17.fc24.x86_64
slapt-get --show xmms
Package Name: xmms
Package Mirror: http://slackware.mirrors.tds.n...
Package Priority: Official
Package Location: ./slackware64/xap
Package Version: 1.2.11-x86_64-5

For playing audio

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

I use WinAMP/Foobar under Windows and Audacious/Juk under Linux.

I would have used Juk everywhere and for everything but it's abandoned and it doesn't support streaming audio.

As for their time shares it'll be: Juk 48% (my audio library), Audacious 48% (streaming audio), WinAMP 2% and Foobar 2%. I guess you can easily see that I don't use Windows much.

I used Winamp ...

[CaptainDork]

... long ago to get to an Axis camera with sound at an open mic venue.

The downside is that the Gentle User had to know how to download and implement the piece of crap, so the audience was limited.

I played, "In The Early Morning Rain," by Canada's greatest, Gordon Lightfoot.

Now we use Facebook Live.

For mp3, I use my iPhone.

I LOVED WinAMP, but now use VLC

[SpiralBound]

I see a lot of posts praising WinAMP for avoiding bloat, but software bloat is actually the reason I stopped using it. It started off as this super streamlined player which could handle nearly every format you could throw at it. Then it started adding unnecessary features, then the UI became complicated with sliding out panels and hidden screens, then they added a built in web browser? It started slowing down, taking up memory, and generally didn't act like a streamlined player any more.

Then I found VLC. It doesn't have the visual polish WinAMP had, but it is a an efficient player which doesn't try to be everything on my computer. The ONLY thing I miss from WinAMP is the randomise playlist feature. I used to load up a big playlist, randomise it, and then play it in sequence from start to finish. All other players I've found so far do NOT have this feature. Sure, they'll play a playlist in random order, but you can get repeats this way. Still, that's a tiny quibble.

Re: I LOVED WinAMP, but now use VLC

[Voyager529]

1. Virtually all of those things are optional. Winamp, even its current iteration, has a very granular custom installer. It's possible to do a 20mb installation that does exactly what you're looking for, down to the 2.x default skin with no flyout UI elements.
2. VLC...the application with all its codecs internally bundled, video stream reading, video transcoding, font cache building, alarm clock setting VLC whose kitchen sink installation is twice the size of Winamp as is it's startup time...that's your example of small, tight code? Don't get me wrong, I do like VLC and its ability to play basically everything, but let's not confuse "inefficient code" with "minimalist UI".

Re:The Llama...

[I'm New Around Here]

They love them in Hawai'i.

Last version was free

[DogDude]

I like how Nullsoft gave away the full version of Winamp for free just before AOL shut them down. Version 5.6.6.3516 (aka: version 5.666) is one of the best versions ever, and I still use it every day.

My oldest post on Winamp forums

[future assassin]

http://forums.winamp.com/showt... mind you it was shoutcast related.

I remember when I figured out how to use wwwamp https://github.com/royrico/hal... and several .pls files to have automatic DJ source switching when it required custom solutions back then although never did write it up so can't remember off hand what I did.

Clementine

[niks42]

Clementine works for me - even has some visualisations, and plays FLAC files.

Re:Clementine

[flargleblarg]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Good stuff.

Re:winamp is dead

[JohnFen]

Huh? I use Debian, and let me look -- yep, I have XMMS and Audacious, as well as others.

Oh please

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition," their first general manager told Ars Technica in 2012.

You mean it could be a fat, bloated piece of shit with a miserable, fucked-up design and a craptastic UI?

Re:Oh please

[zifn4b]

"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition," their first general manager told Ars Technica in 2012.

You mean it could be a fat, bloated piece of shit with a miserable, fucked-up design and a craptastic UI?

For whatever reason even with all its UX flaws, iTunes is accessible to younger kids and Grandma. Winamp was always for the power user. Power user software always loses even if the competitors are technically inferior. It's all about catering to the lowest common denominator and the bar there is usually set quite low.

No update, please/damnit.

[homebru]

Daily user of WinAMP 5.572 (2010) on win7. Repeated popups urging upgrade are ignored.

Don't any of you use Linux?

[TheDarkener]

BACK IN MY DAY, Slashdotters used Linux and X11AMP. Then XMMS. Then XMMS2. Then Audacious.

I still use Audacious, in fact it's right here on my left screen.

Re:Don't any of you use Linux?

[BlueLightning]

Similar story here, except now I use qmmp. It owes pretty much everything to WinAmp in terms of design, just as the ones you mention do.

Re: The Llama...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Ain't English wonderful?

Nostalgic player for Gen Xers.

[cutefatbird]

Damn if just mentioning Winamp doesn't bring back fond memory's of days long past..I feel like its 1997 all over again - America is at the height of our power - Cold war is over, Grunge Music is playing everywhere and most people don't even know anyone who owns a cellphone. Good old days if we ever had them.

I use it all the time

[LeftCoastThinker]

I bought one of those shareware licenses back around 1999 and I still run 5.666 almost daily. It is a great media player and is far superior to iTunes for listening to and managing music.

Why So Much Emphasis on mp3 Files?

[DERoss]

I notice that many of the comments on this topic praise how well Winamp plays mp3 files. I installed it, however, because I enjoy streaming classical music (from radio stations that also stream into the Internet) and many of the streams could not be played by RealPlayer (which at one time was a dominant streaming application). Even today, there are streams that are mp3, mp4, m3u, sdp, ram, and possibly others. I now have Winamp, VideoLAN (VLC), and RealAudio so that I can "play" all of them. (VLC seems to be able to play most of them.) I have very few music files on my PC, but I have a list of radio stations that stream into the Internet.

By the way, if any application for streaming is crap, it must be Windows Media Player (Does it still exists?). And I really dislike streams that use Web-based players that require you remain on the source's Web page.

Re:Winamp was great for its time, but VLC rules

[Bert64]

You could use various quality reducing tricks or playing in mono etc, i was able to play mp3s this way on a 25mhz 68040 (amiga), although there would also have been a lot less OS overhead than with windows..
With a 50mhz 68060 i had no problems whatsoever on amigaos, and a 100mhz mips r4600 running irix was fine too.

Audio players? It depends on the OS I use

[sombragris]

In Linux I use:
- Clementine
- Sayonara Player
- mp3blaster
- plain old mplayer

In Windows:
- Clementine
- Foobar2000

In Android:
- Foobar2000

arstechnica didn't do their research properly

[Idisagree]

It would be nice if the author bothered to look at Winamp's current development as well...

Winamp is still being developed by DrO

in beta form at getwacup.com
Named - WACUP (Winamp Community Update Pack)
Latest version is v0.9.9.1744 (August 3rd 2017)

It's not dead just yet, thank you very much!!!

I still use it

[fabioalcor]

Because I really can't live without the "queue" feature. I usually play my lists in random mode, but sometimes I'm in the mood for certain musics, so I just select them in the list and put them in the queue. After those are played, it goes back to random mode. Ah, and I can configure keyboard shortcuts for doing that pretty quickly and easy, so it doesn't break my "flow".

Some time ago I even did searched another player with similar feature but couldn't find. Any suggestions?

Who remembers the demo opening?

[renegadesx]

Winamp (winamp,winamp). It really whips the lama's ass.
Good times, good times. Im a Spotify user now but back in the days, use Napster (then Kazza) to download and Winamp to play. I also used Sonique which had the best skins of any application ever, but version 2 entered some kind of development hell.
But back to Winamp, is XMMS still being developed? I remember that was a fully working open source backport, compatible with Winamp 2 skins and everything. BeOS had CLamp that was the same thing.

AIMP

[Aeyan]

If foobar2000 is too barebones for you and you want a Winamp-like project with active development, try AIMP.

The Llama Abides, dude...

[BoogieChile]

http://www.winamp.com/

Although it's been a bit of a quiet decade... The last release was version 5.666, in 2013, but the bits I use it for still work just as good as ever.

According to DJ Egg, who appears to be the only developer left, the latest public beta appears to be stuck in the dread Swamp of Legaldepts

MilkDrop is still the best visualiser, bar none, and the LineIn source still works perfectly.

It runs on a laptop plugged into a projector that paints the ceiling at our band's gigs with a 1920x1080 screen at 60fps. It is frequently admired and commented on.

I miss Sonique

[Ranger]

Winamp was pretty cool and had a large user base, plus all of those add ons. Another top competitor player that I was partial too was Sonique. I liked its skins and visualizations better. I can still play it on WINE using my Mint laptop.

itunes today

[schleimkeim]

There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers

Then it would be the same ad infested cancer that iTunes is. What exactly is good about that?

MediaMonkey

[execthis]

Me too. I like MediaMonkey. It also works somewhat ok under Wine if no skins are used. Sometimes I get annoyed when it takes too long to open a music file from Windows Explorer, which forces me to use it's own directory browser which however is sometimes really inconvenient.

Re:Original XMMS or Audacious(Audacity, I frgt whi

[execthis]

Interesting, didn't know that. It's been out of Debian and derivatives for a while now unfortunately.

Re:me too

[jabuzz]

If you want to listen to audiobooks (I do this alot) then give up using a music player because they suck and get a dedicated audiobook player.

Smart Audiobook Player is by far the best of the bunch, mostly because it does m4b and it's possible to remove the DRM from an Audible aax file and come up with a m4b with zero reencoding of the audio. You can do it all with ffmpeg or if you have access to windows track down an app called inAudible which does it all point and click.

Using a server now

[houghi]

I am not so much using a player as a server. MPD is what I use. It is on a data server and my PCs can connect to it with anything I like. I use xfce4-mpc-plugin and gmpc and I use them at the same time, depending on my mood.
Sometimes I even use mpc in CLI.

That way I can play it from any of my machines.

If I wanted I could even do it from my phones , but I have no need for it at this moment.

Don't need winamp

[stealth_finger]

Just use groove..............sorry thought I could do it with a straight face.

iTunes

[zifn4b]

...that's what happened.

It really whips the llama's ass!!!!!

[cj9er]

Best tagline ever for an app...

Re: The Llama...

[stealth_finger]

It's.

Re:VLC

[Shirley Marquez]

VLC lacks the UI chops, but has the advantage that it can play just about everything. An open source player that uses libVLC for the actual playback could be a great piece of software.

Loved the Llama...

[MercTech]

Yep, back in the day; Nullsoft got my shareware check.

Winamp was the program implementing the Fraunhoffer codec for the 90s. Motion Picture Expert Group Layer 3 encoding (MP3 for short) became synonymous with the Fraunhoffer Codec developed by Germany's Fraunhoff Institute.
https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html

The Codec was copyrighted but the decoding algorithm was released for non commercial use and the source code could be downloaded from the Fraunhoff Institute's website. For a nominal fee; you could license and download the encoding software.

It was a big gigglefest and a flurry of copying files to a different file name when a Microsoft patch implemented MP3 playback one week and tried to patch it out again the next week as they had never gotten rights to use the Fraunhoffer Codec for commercial use. It seems that Winamp, being a shareware program, slid right past the copyright restrictions of the time.

When AOL acquired Winamp; I wondered how long it would take to destroy the product. I was surprised that they didn't destroy it trying to make it AOL exclusive. (AOL never got over the internet and thought everyone really wanted their proprietary sandbox.) But, lack of improvements left Winamp to be outmoded over time.

Gad, I wish there were a decent alternative to iTunes.

Whatever my distro will provide + VLC

[Voice of satan]

I had a brief affair with winamp when i shortly used winXP on my pentium 4. I liked it. It could play everything i would throw at it.

I quickly switched to linux and used the media player du jour. AmaroK when i was on KDE. Rythmbox when i used GNOME2 then when Ubuntu switched to unity i switched to XFCE and i use gmusicbrowser since then.

Plus VLC for some proprietary media and sometimes an old sidplay for win95 i run on WINE when i want to listen to commodore 64 music.

I heard a lot of positive comments about clementine. I never tried it.

Could use a mod/tracker player on linux.

Boot To The Head

[jman.org]

We all know what happened to WinAmp.

The llama whipped back, and it got it's ass kicked...

No one wants to see a Winamp Four-skin!

[sirsky]

Winamp is installed standard on every Windows machine I use. Winamp v5.666, the Final Nullsoft Release, without the Media Library. This version has ALL of the AOL bundled streaming junk removed, as well as any mention even of AOL. No 'Modern' skins, just good old Winamp 2. Works perfectly for me.

The llama finally succumbed to its injuries

[darkcrimson]

All of that ass whipping across millions of users took its toll on the poor llama, who has been on life support since 2015.

Who listens to MP3s?

[baerd]

I still have winamp installed but I haven't listened to an MP3 on a computer for years so I haven't used it. Basically my phone has replaced mp3s, or when I do want to listen to music I just look on youtube for it as it is much easier.

Those were the days...

[dddux]

Those were the days... but today I use whatever is there to play music with. Usually VLC. Dedicated music players have become obsolete IMHO. VLC does it really good and it also plays every other thing I throw at it. Really, I can't understand the need for a dedicated MP3 only music player. It's so 90s.

Still use it

[AdmNaismith]

I have whatever the last release was before AOL made it disappear, and several user-made ST-TNG skins (a major reason I still use it, apart from being small and simple). It plays sound files whenever VLC doesn't butt in.

Still using it

[mADneSs]

Seriously, just wanted to check the comments to confirm that I wasn't anywhere near one of the last people using it and was not disappointed.

You had to have a Pentium to use WinAmp

[Kevin108]

I only had a 486 DX4. I had to use WinPlay3 for years before I could do anything with WinAmp.