Again: no, people are not happy using iTunes. People use iTunes because Apple requires it for their expensive iDevices. They hate it, but they want to sync music to their iPhones.
You're saying that my assertion about video players is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy? That's a laugh. You just didn't want to dig your hole deeper by responding to what I said. Video players are not designed to deal with large music libraries, nor should they be. A sports car can be used to take lots of cleaning supplies between cleaning jobs, but a utility van will be far better suited to the task. Your choice of VLC to support this notion is especially hilarious. The VLC media library is like only using the Winamp playlist for your entire music collection.
Or perhaps you meant that foobar2000 is not the true Scotsman. In that case, you missed my arguments about the interface being poorly designed.
Now here's a real laugh for you regarding your sneering at Winamp market share. While I don't have stats from anywhere today, Lifehacker did a survey in 2013 to find out what the readers thought was the best desktop music player and in the end Winamp was the winner. So at least in 2013, 16 years after Winamp was released, it was still the preferred player for everyone that read Lifehacker at the time. Unfortunately, most articles seem to omit or only "honorably mention" Winamp based on it no longer being developed which at this point is really only a problem for people who want double size mode to look better or want to sync a modern iPod with Winamp (yes, Winamp used to sync iPods.)
I'm sure iTunes can play music back on garbage hardware while multitasking. Maintaining a 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo audio stream while multitasking was easily done by Winamp in 1997 on an original Pentium, so why wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing today on a bargan-basement Celeron that's slow for browsing but still two orders of magnitude faster than an original Pentium? It's not hard to have a realtime-priority and heavily optimized thread that does nothing but decompress music file data and pass it to the sound system. Good luck switching between iTunes and other stuff in 2GB of RAM while trying to do some actual work.
One more thing was never addressed. You never elaborated on why "underlying frameworks" is some sort of selling point. Last I checked, no one went out looking for media players and said "I want one that has underlying frameworks."
Playing music and running a browser and a word processor at the same time is a very common scenario. Ask any student in college doing a paper. Just because you have 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you can get away with running even a small number of bloated programs. My browser right now is using 2.5GB of RAM (lots of tabs, paused videos, uptime 8 days) which already exceeds 2GB, so with the browser already in paging territory excluding every other thing in the system INCLUDING the operating system and its required processes, 10MB vs. 160MB can be a significant amount of extra paging to disk. Note that the disk cache is also largely evicted once memory pressure is that high. By the way, you don't even want to know how much RAM Plex Media Server is using on my machine, and it's streaming nothing at all.
Playing video isn't the job of an audio player, but Winamp DOES play video if you want it to and has done so for a very long time. An AirPlay plugin exists for Winamp. "Underlying frameworks" by itself is not any sort of selling point. What good are the "underlying frameworks?" Winamp has had network streaming support built-in since the 90s. VNC is not a media player, it's a remote desktop program, but I'm guessing you meant VLC. I don't use VLC because I don't like the interface, so if you'd care to elaborate on what VLC has for audio playback related purposes (don't care about video features, no one needs video playback for music) that Winamp doesn't, I'm listening. foobar2000's interface is cluttered and ironically has way too much text padding at the same time, and where's the equalizer? What file formats does foobar2000 support that Winamp does not? A web interface plugin exists for Winamp.
No, I don't agree that people are happy using iTunes. iTunes is a piece of flaming crap, but if you have an iProduct your only realistic choice is to shove your library into iTunes, so you're stuck with it. Taking the path of least resistance does not make users "happy."
Feel free to buy me 32GB of RAM if you're offering. I won't turn that deal down.
When you say "most other media players," what specific media players are you talking about? You've mentioned "other options" twice and the claims made are baseless without specific examples of those other options.
As far as I can tell, the reasons Winamp fell out of favor are gross mismanagement by AOL, the user base aging and younger people not even knowing it existed, streaming services like Spotify and Pandora making it less important to a large chunk of the general population to have music files on their own machines, walled gardens like iTunes (default audio player box checked at install time!) and the iTunes Store making it more difficult to use Winamp, and the proliferation of smartphones as primary playback devices for lots of people due to simple convenience. Winamp had a pretty good Android app but they were way too late in releasing it to have an impact and it pretty much died when the entire Winamp project was shut down.
Just because people make alternatives to Winamp doesn't mean that they "need more." I'll give you the "don't give a crap" one because people actually still use iTunes for playback and it's a really yucky music player these days that exists more to funnel people into buying things than enjoying what they bought.
Winamp has visualizations, a library system, an equalizer, internet streaming and inter stream server capabilities, CD ripping, player device management, and a set of plugin frameworks. While playng music largely with default settings, it uses 10MB RAM. This PlexAmp thing uses well over 10 times that RAM and practically sits on top of a web browser core...while doing absolutely nothing at all. Oh, and it ultimately has less features than Winamp and is harder to use.
Computer RAM being commonly measured in gigabytes today does not justify the software framework bloat explosion. Every program in existence today seems to run on top of a fat core of frameworks that contain a lot of unnecessary cruft; in the case of PlexAmp, we can see that the inefficiency is an entire order of magnitude and then some. Start multiplying that by the number of programs on a computer. What good is Moore's Law when software is a gas that expands to fit its container? It has to stop somewhere.
"the reality is not even remotely as inefficient as you think" - I've provided you with Winamp's operating stats. Prove that PlexAmp "is not even as remotely inefficient as I think." Show me where PlexAmp uses 10MB of RAM. Show me where it uses 0.5% of an i7-6700HQ while playing an MP3 file. Hand-waving away concerns proves nothing; what are your numbers? The numbers mentioned elsewhere in this thread indicate that the inefficiency relative to Winamp is freaking insane, but you are certainly free to prove otherwise.
Winamp only distorts if you have the EQ cranked up and the audio is already loud and you don't lower the preamp but that's about it. Stupid low-resolution fonts? I guess you never turned on "double size" mode or used the CONFIGURABLE playlist font size.
There's no need for a Winamp replacement. I'm running Winamp right now on Windows 7 and Windows 10. Newer displays with higher resolutions or old nerds losing their eyesight need "double size" turned on so the controls are easier to read but that's about it. The classic skins need to be used for maximum nostalgia and readability. Milkdrop2 and AVS come with Winamp 5.666 and I have zero complaints. It takes a while for it to sort a playlist with tens of thousands of songs but it's just as awesome as it was in 1999. Best of all, it's written the way a program should be: compact, easy to control, almost zero learning curve, no unnecessary internet phone home bullshit (especially since Winamp has changed hands and ceased development, even the installation stat reporter doesn't work when it does try to phone home to bump the install base stats.)
Yeah, it's really shitty how they handled the Eich thing (Note: I'm NOT endorsing that site, the specific article just has some good points) but I'm not downloading "faggot social justice leftists," I'm downloading a browser, a tool to get things done. Just because a bunch of people working at a tech company have shitty beliefs doesn't mean I should avoid them entirely on principle. The same could be said about Google; the company is notoriously "left-leaning" which is really "identity politics authoritarian-leaning" if we want to be honest, yet I use YouTube and Google Calendar all the time at no cost to me, and I don't think much about the company's ideology.
Now when these entities decide to screw me over in some way, I'll start moving away from their offerings. YouTube has screwed around enough to make me start putting my stuff on other platforms just in case YouTube continues to do dumb shit.
I've got Firefox and use it 100% of the time. I push everyone to it. Microsoft is desperate to move people to Edge and wants us to think it's faster than everything. That's fine, but even if it was the fastest browser ever, I can't even do simple things in it. I've navigated to this very page in Edge and I'll tell you what is missing when I right-click some things:
Save page, undo close tab, view page info, view page source, inspect element, and everything I have add-ons to get. Right-click on an image and you can't view image, copy image, or copy image location, only save it or open the link under it. No bookmark link, save link, or open in private window.
Just tried a page with auto-play video and there was no way to mute the tab like in Firefox. One major feature I love in Firefox is highlighting a non-linked URL or domain name and being able to right-click it and follow it as a link anyway, and being able to highlight and search any phrase on a page is another good one. None of that is in Edge. Edge is NOT a browser for getting things done; it's a browser for crappy tablets and people that have no idea how to internet on them. Even then, that's a bit of a stretch; way too many basic functions are missing to take it seriously. Saving web pages locally was in Netscape and IE in the mid-1990s, for god's sake!
Email clients have been set to not load remote content by default for over 15 years. Gmail caches remote content to its own servers making tracking bugs in emails mostly useless unless you click an outbound link with tracking data in the URL. Unless you've changed the default setting from "DON'T load remote stuff by default" then you've not been trackable for a really long time. Who needs anti-tracking services? All I have to do is not click on any links. This is an old story. I wonder if the Wired article is "sponsored content;" they are, after all, one of the companies that has complained a lot about ad blockers, so I know they're pretty hard up for dollarydoos.
You forgot to mention "every radio coprocessor in every smart phone ever made." The radio coprocessor in cell phones typically has full "back door" access to the resources used by the main CPU and OS you interact with. The code for it is 100% closed off and the massive flaws in the cellular system's authentication that allow Stingrays etc. to actually work properly means you have this closed-off CPU that can do arbitrary stuff on your phone open to access from outsiders with knowledge of cell system architecture.
Fine, drop Windows or Linux and Firefox on there instead. It's a general-purpose computer, it can run Firefox and play stuff from Netflix and YouTube that way.
Given the cost of a low-end Intel Compute Stick, I don't see why anyone buys these locked-down ad-laden closed-ecosystem sticks other than lack of sufficient knowledge to set one up with Plex or Kodi.
I wonder if it would work better to have people working on a per-day basis. Then again, that would require less concretely observed metrics than simple "hours worked."
Your choice to avoid these major services forces you to opt out of society so while you do technically have a choice, it's a choice between being part of society and "choosing" to be a social outcast. Since not participating in society all but guarantees you'll have a hard time even getting a job or communicating with other people, the "choice" is not much better than having to choose between eating or not eating a box of arsenic.
I literally had a spoofed number come in that had an exchange of "555." Something tells me that there's no legitimate reason to allow such numbers through. I'm not a movie.
What bothers me about them is that most of these "smart" things don't work without the vendor actively allowing it and don't work without being connected to the damned internet all the time. If the vendor stops supporting it or goes out of business...it's a very expensive pile of bricks. There is no value to me in buying stuff like that and modifying my house to accept it all when I can't guarantee it'll be functional in even 5 years! It's not a cell phone; you can't just go out and buy another smart home system and install it in five minutes. Plus, what happens when it breaks down or stops working? Do you lose the ability to use the smart things in a stupid way, i.e. are you now locked out of your house?
Slashdot Mirror
One year ago Facebook was caught allowing housing discrimination by race and they had to pull those ethnic filters to clean the egg off their faces. I wonder how long that was allowed before someone figured it out though.
iTunes sucks: A GIF guide to why Apple’s desktop music app must be fixed
Why does iTunes suck so incredibly much?
iTunes sucks, we all know it. What are my options for music player (nonstreaming) on the iPhone 6s?
Why I Hate iTunes: Syncing Sucks And So Does Selecting Music
Can iTunes suck anymore than it already does?
iTunes Really Is That Bad
Apple’s iTunes Is Alienating Its Most Music-Obsessed Users
Eleven Reasons Why iTunes Sucks
Why does Itunes SUCK SO MUCH ???
Again: no, people are not happy using iTunes. People use iTunes because Apple requires it for their expensive iDevices. They hate it, but they want to sync music to their iPhones.
You're saying that my assertion about video players is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy? That's a laugh. You just didn't want to dig your hole deeper by responding to what I said. Video players are not designed to deal with large music libraries, nor should they be. A sports car can be used to take lots of cleaning supplies between cleaning jobs, but a utility van will be far better suited to the task. Your choice of VLC to support this notion is especially hilarious. The VLC media library is like only using the Winamp playlist for your entire music collection.
Or perhaps you meant that foobar2000 is not the true Scotsman. In that case, you missed my arguments about the interface being poorly designed.
Now here's a real laugh for you regarding your sneering at Winamp market share. While I don't have stats from anywhere today, Lifehacker did a survey in 2013 to find out what the readers thought was the best desktop music player and in the end Winamp was the winner. So at least in 2013, 16 years after Winamp was released, it was still the preferred player for everyone that read Lifehacker at the time. Unfortunately, most articles seem to omit or only "honorably mention" Winamp based on it no longer being developed which at this point is really only a problem for people who want double size mode to look better or want to sync a modern iPod with Winamp (yes, Winamp used to sync iPods.)
I'm sure iTunes can play music back on garbage hardware while multitasking. Maintaining a 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo audio stream while multitasking was easily done by Winamp in 1997 on an original Pentium, so why wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing today on a bargan-basement Celeron that's slow for browsing but still two orders of magnitude faster than an original Pentium? It's not hard to have a realtime-priority and heavily optimized thread that does nothing but decompress music file data and pass it to the sound system. Good luck switching between iTunes and other stuff in 2GB of RAM while trying to do some actual work.
One more thing was never addressed. You never elaborated on why "underlying frameworks" is some sort of selling point. Last I checked, no one went out looking for media players and said "I want one that has underlying frameworks."
Playing music and running a browser and a word processor at the same time is a very common scenario. Ask any student in college doing a paper. Just because you have 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you can get away with running even a small number of bloated programs. My browser right now is using 2.5GB of RAM (lots of tabs, paused videos, uptime 8 days) which already exceeds 2GB, so with the browser already in paging territory excluding every other thing in the system INCLUDING the operating system and its required processes, 10MB vs. 160MB can be a significant amount of extra paging to disk. Note that the disk cache is also largely evicted once memory pressure is that high. By the way, you don't even want to know how much RAM Plex Media Server is using on my machine, and it's streaming nothing at all.
"Cable TV's attempt to boost Netflix subs is coming" - corrected headline
Playing video isn't the job of an audio player, but Winamp DOES play video if you want it to and has done so for a very long time. An AirPlay plugin exists for Winamp. "Underlying frameworks" by itself is not any sort of selling point. What good are the "underlying frameworks?" Winamp has had network streaming support built-in since the 90s. VNC is not a media player, it's a remote desktop program, but I'm guessing you meant VLC. I don't use VLC because I don't like the interface, so if you'd care to elaborate on what VLC has for audio playback related purposes (don't care about video features, no one needs video playback for music) that Winamp doesn't, I'm listening. foobar2000's interface is cluttered and ironically has way too much text padding at the same time, and where's the equalizer? What file formats does foobar2000 support that Winamp does not? A web interface plugin exists for Winamp.
No, I don't agree that people are happy using iTunes. iTunes is a piece of flaming crap, but if you have an iProduct your only realistic choice is to shove your library into iTunes, so you're stuck with it. Taking the path of least resistance does not make users "happy."
Feel free to buy me 32GB of RAM if you're offering. I won't turn that deal down.
When you say "most other media players," what specific media players are you talking about? You've mentioned "other options" twice and the claims made are baseless without specific examples of those other options.
As far as I can tell, the reasons Winamp fell out of favor are gross mismanagement by AOL, the user base aging and younger people not even knowing it existed, streaming services like Spotify and Pandora making it less important to a large chunk of the general population to have music files on their own machines, walled gardens like iTunes (default audio player box checked at install time!) and the iTunes Store making it more difficult to use Winamp, and the proliferation of smartphones as primary playback devices for lots of people due to simple convenience. Winamp had a pretty good Android app but they were way too late in releasing it to have an impact and it pretty much died when the entire Winamp project was shut down.
Just because people make alternatives to Winamp doesn't mean that they "need more." I'll give you the "don't give a crap" one because people actually still use iTunes for playback and it's a really yucky music player these days that exists more to funnel people into buying things than enjoying what they bought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It WASN'T sarcasm? Ohhhhh, that's not good.
Winamp has visualizations, a library system, an equalizer, internet streaming and inter stream server capabilities, CD ripping, player device management, and a set of plugin frameworks. While playng music largely with default settings, it uses 10MB RAM. This PlexAmp thing uses well over 10 times that RAM and practically sits on top of a web browser core...while doing absolutely nothing at all. Oh, and it ultimately has less features than Winamp and is harder to use.
Computer RAM being commonly measured in gigabytes today does not justify the software framework bloat explosion. Every program in existence today seems to run on top of a fat core of frameworks that contain a lot of unnecessary cruft; in the case of PlexAmp, we can see that the inefficiency is an entire order of magnitude and then some. Start multiplying that by the number of programs on a computer. What good is Moore's Law when software is a gas that expands to fit its container? It has to stop somewhere.
"the reality is not even remotely as inefficient as you think" - I've provided you with Winamp's operating stats. Prove that PlexAmp "is not even as remotely inefficient as I think." Show me where PlexAmp uses 10MB of RAM. Show me where it uses 0.5% of an i7-6700HQ while playing an MP3 file. Hand-waving away concerns proves nothing; what are your numbers? The numbers mentioned elsewhere in this thread indicate that the inefficiency relative to Winamp is freaking insane, but you are certainly free to prove otherwise.
Yes, it literally doubles the size of the interface. I don't see a problem with readability there. What can't you read, and why can't you read it?
Winamp only distorts if you have the EQ cranked up and the audio is already loud and you don't lower the preamp but that's about it. Stupid low-resolution fonts? I guess you never turned on "double size" mode or used the CONFIGURABLE playlist font size.
Oh hey, found what I was actually looking for to show the bloat of modern "apps."
LUDDITES.
Winamp is using 10.6 MB of RAM and 0.4% CPU on my machine right now as it plays a song. If PlexAmp can run in less than that, I'm happy to try it out. Oh, wait, that's right...everything today, no matter how simple the purpose, is made of a hundred massive bullshit frameworks and high-level inefficient glue code. Oh well.
There's no need for a Winamp replacement. I'm running Winamp right now on Windows 7 and Windows 10. Newer displays with higher resolutions or old nerds losing their eyesight need "double size" turned on so the controls are easier to read but that's about it. The classic skins need to be used for maximum nostalgia and readability. Milkdrop2 and AVS come with Winamp 5.666 and I have zero complaints. It takes a while for it to sort a playlist with tens of thousands of songs but it's just as awesome as it was in 1999. Best of all, it's written the way a program should be: compact, easy to control, almost zero learning curve, no unnecessary internet phone home bullshit (especially since Winamp has changed hands and ceased development, even the installation stat reporter doesn't work when it does try to phone home to bump the install base stats.)
Yeah, it's really shitty how they handled the Eich thing (Note: I'm NOT endorsing that site, the specific article just has some good points) but I'm not downloading "faggot social justice leftists," I'm downloading a browser, a tool to get things done. Just because a bunch of people working at a tech company have shitty beliefs doesn't mean I should avoid them entirely on principle. The same could be said about Google; the company is notoriously "left-leaning" which is really "identity politics authoritarian-leaning" if we want to be honest, yet I use YouTube and Google Calendar all the time at no cost to me, and I don't think much about the company's ideology.
Now when these entities decide to screw me over in some way, I'll start moving away from their offerings. YouTube has screwed around enough to make me start putting my stuff on other platforms just in case YouTube continues to do dumb shit.
I've got Firefox and use it 100% of the time. I push everyone to it. Microsoft is desperate to move people to Edge and wants us to think it's faster than everything. That's fine, but even if it was the fastest browser ever, I can't even do simple things in it. I've navigated to this very page in Edge and I'll tell you what is missing when I right-click some things:
Save page, undo close tab, view page info, view page source, inspect element, and everything I have add-ons to get. Right-click on an image and you can't view image, copy image, or copy image location, only save it or open the link under it. No bookmark link, save link, or open in private window.
Just tried a page with auto-play video and there was no way to mute the tab like in Firefox. One major feature I love in Firefox is highlighting a non-linked URL or domain name and being able to right-click it and follow it as a link anyway, and being able to highlight and search any phrase on a page is another good one. None of that is in Edge. Edge is NOT a browser for getting things done; it's a browser for crappy tablets and people that have no idea how to internet on them. Even then, that's a bit of a stretch; way too many basic functions are missing to take it seriously. Saving web pages locally was in Netscape and IE in the mid-1990s, for god's sake!
Email clients have been set to not load remote content by default for over 15 years. Gmail caches remote content to its own servers making tracking bugs in emails mostly useless unless you click an outbound link with tracking data in the URL. Unless you've changed the default setting from "DON'T load remote stuff by default" then you've not been trackable for a really long time. Who needs anti-tracking services? All I have to do is not click on any links. This is an old story. I wonder if the Wired article is "sponsored content;" they are, after all, one of the companies that has complained a lot about ad blockers, so I know they're pretty hard up for dollarydoos.
You forgot to mention "every radio coprocessor in every smart phone ever made." The radio coprocessor in cell phones typically has full "back door" access to the resources used by the main CPU and OS you interact with. The code for it is 100% closed off and the massive flaws in the cellular system's authentication that allow Stingrays etc. to actually work properly means you have this closed-off CPU that can do arbitrary stuff on your phone open to access from outsiders with knowledge of cell system architecture.
Fine, drop Windows or Linux and Firefox on there instead. It's a general-purpose computer, it can run Firefox and play stuff from Netflix and YouTube that way.
Given the cost of a low-end Intel Compute Stick, I don't see why anyone buys these locked-down ad-laden closed-ecosystem sticks other than lack of sufficient knowledge to set one up with Plex or Kodi.
I wonder if it would work better to have people working on a per-day basis. Then again, that would require less concretely observed metrics than simple "hours worked."
Your choice to avoid these major services forces you to opt out of society so while you do technically have a choice, it's a choice between being part of society and "choosing" to be a social outcast. Since not participating in society all but guarantees you'll have a hard time even getting a job or communicating with other people, the "choice" is not much better than having to choose between eating or not eating a box of arsenic.
I did not buy a fucking 2560x1080 monitor to have one thing on the screen at all times. Go back to Mars, Microsoft.
I literally had a spoofed number come in that had an exchange of "555." Something tells me that there's no legitimate reason to allow such numbers through. I'm not a movie.
What bothers me about them is that most of these "smart" things don't work without the vendor actively allowing it and don't work without being connected to the damned internet all the time. If the vendor stops supporting it or goes out of business...it's a very expensive pile of bricks. There is no value to me in buying stuff like that and modifying my house to accept it all when I can't guarantee it'll be functional in even 5 years! It's not a cell phone; you can't just go out and buy another smart home system and install it in five minutes. Plus, what happens when it breaks down or stops working? Do you lose the ability to use the smart things in a stupid way, i.e. are you now locked out of your house?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate
I'll just leave this here.