Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95, which is allegedly the best version out there.
Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple.
I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.
Me: Can't I pause that song by hitting space?
WMP: No, there are no keyboard shortcuts!
Me: I wanna play all the songs of this folder!
WMP: Ok, but I'll mess up the order! By the way, are you interested in purchasing
more songs from this artist? Cause I got a VirginMega link just right here!
Me: No thanks...
WMP: Why not? I mean, iTunes gets away with it, why can't I?
Me: I just want to play some music.
WMP: Really?? JUST that??
Me: I wish.
WMP is why I bought an iPod. As a Microsft employee at the time, I struggled longer than any mortal should to get WMP to sync music to my 2003-era Windows Phone. I eventually realized that any kind of synchronization and general usefulness in using WMP with a Windows Phone was nothing but marketing lies. So one day I said, "get in the car, honey, we're going to buy iPods."
iPods led to iPhones, which led to iOS development and Macs, to the point that there are no more Windows machines in the house and I haven't done Windows development in about five years.
All kicked off by the fact that MSFT couldn't make a software music player that didn't suck.
> This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud
Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud. You can have a consistent music library and can use any player client-side. Personally I prefer the spotify "all-you-can-listen" model, but I have a bunch of MP3s that aren't on spotify that I seamlessly stream from dropbox (either to winamp or the spotify client, which allows you to sync local files).
At least with winamp, there weren't really any major changes since Justin Frankel left, and what made it amazing back then is still in the program now.
I also recently switched back to Winamp. It just works and it's easy to control.
There's also a plugin called Chipamp which ensures you have all the latest plugins required to play video game music files (nsf, rsn, usf, psf, etc.). This is the best PC tool for listening to video game music.
No kidding. I used to use it all the time, and I just re-downloaded about a week ago as my player of choice, especially since it's capable of playing FLACs (looking at you, WMP).
This is part of why I prefer cloud services like Dropbox that also maintain local copies and simply use the cloud for syncing and backups. Best of both worlds, that way.
You can install Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) in your desktop and listen to your music from anywhere (iOS, Android, Windows 8). Your data, music and app is all local to system but still can access from anywhere as cloud.
Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.
I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
Nothing will ever beat the joys of finding new "skins" for the Winamp player -- I had so many amazing ones lined up, and loved nothing more than switching them all out.
> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
MediaMonkey [1] is awesome to find something. It's mainly a music organizer that just happens to be able to play music but it works great even with scattered single mp3 files. Autoplaylists [2], scriptable and extensive search options. Been using it for over 6 years now and never looked back :)
As others have said, foobar2000 for the minimalist, free approach with lots of configuration options, or MediaMonkey for a really good bit of paid software. The paid version of MM syncs perfectly well with iDevices and pretty much anything else too. Highly recommended. Also it doesn't force you into any particular directory structure in your music library so it'll take what you give it.
> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a player as winamp was but it did manage the library / tagging bits quite well. It seems to still be active so may be worth a look.
I recently fixed the id3 tags of all the mp3 music I own using MusicBrainz picard. Very useful software that uses a global database of music signatures.
There are ultimately two types of people in the comments right now: those that will miss Winamp and those laughing it was still around.
Winamp worked. It played all your MP3s without any of the other fluff. It played your music in a very lightweight program. What was also nice was this was before every program auto-updated; so you'd manually have to go update it; except, the newer versions were adding features, not fixing bugs. If you thought Winamp was fine, there was never a need to upgrade. I remember never upgrading Winamp until way into my college years.
People have mentioned it, but I didn't change to foobar because I always used Winamp. Even when they made the modern UI, you could (and can) still go Classic. Computer space and performance weren't issues because the extra bells and whistles are easy to never use.
Only a few weeks ago did I make the move from Winamp to foobar; and it was only to see the difference. Initial thoughts are I don't like how it displays my music; but I do like the shuffle since its playing songs I never hear.
It worked for playing MP3s, but once you had a collection of a certain size it didn't do a very good job of managing that collection, at least at the time I stopped using it. You'd double-click an MP3 or a playlist and it would completely forget about everything that was in there before. I got so sick of that.
It's been almost 10 years since I've used a new version of Winamp, but I really have to disagree with you about performance. When they started adding features it immediately started to suck performance wise. Had to go back to v2.whatever because of it. At the time I was on a top of the line or near top of the line Northwood system. v5 was a little better than v3, but it was full of ads at every corner if I remember correctly.
I used both, but in the end I just stick with Winamp because all I really care about is listening to music. It's really no big deal for me to find a playlist with Everything (or even just navigate there with Windows Explorer) and double click it. I suppose Winamp just fits in better with my workflow.
Thank you Justin Frankel for this wonderfully whimsical piece of software and all the code you have shared over the years. I wouldn't have been a programmer if it weren't for you being providing such a stellar role model.
People laugh at me for still using winamp but I love it. It's fast, low memory, never crashes and the ui hasn't significantly changed for well over a decade.
More than that, it's one of the few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens when I was first getting seriously involved with computers.
Its death sort of marks an end of an era for me :'(
I remember as a teen talking to the developers on IRC, in one of the Windows development channels. I remember thinking they were crazy because they didn't want to use the standard Windows components to do the UI. I also remember wondering why anyone bother spending a half hour downloading 1 song over a 56k modem when you could just set your Sony Discman on top of your computer!
Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and effort into a project.
I always used Winamp on Windows, so when I switched to Linux I tried basically every single open-source alternative that worked with my workflow: Per-song ratings, a nested Genre/Artist/Album/Song library browser, global hotkeys, able to handle a collection of >100 GB and a useful playlist/queue system.
I'm another long-time winamp user. I got stuck on 2.91, never needed to update since it worked perfectly. The biggest reason why I never switched to another player (aside from all of them having zero features that interested me) is that the plugin system was extremely easy to use and had a community of devoted developers. I can reproduce like 20 or so different formats that the "naked" winamp cannot (mostly console chiptunes, like .vgm, .spc or .psf). I know that other players support those plugins, but for me, there's simply no need to switch. There's nothing I miss.
I strongly associate winamp with the early days of P2P, when I was just a teen and got fascinated by the possibility of, at last, getting (at 5k/s; way better than nothing) all those songs from a foreign music TV channel that never played in the local radios... and using Winamp to play them. But it's not just nostalgia: what makes Winamp such a great piece of software is that I still use it every day and it doesn't show its age.
Nostalgia. I remember the good old days just a decade ago when we would download any song we want (courtesy napster/kazaa) and the default music player would be: yep Winamp hands down. Keyboard shortcuts were so convenient. It just seems like we have headed in the wrong direction with how music is managed on our computers/devices etc. Not to mention the beautiful skins that we could apply for funkiness. RIP winamp and you will be missed.
Too bad, I liked their Android player as well. One of the few pieces of software I have used continuously for... oi... longer than I care to admit. Makes me sad.
I still use Winamp as my main musicplayer - it's customizable, import/exports to iPod easily, doesn't spam me with updates, doesn't force me to buy things through it, reads basically every format and above all it is really light.
It's a shame - seems like it died because it doesn't have a content purchasing mechanism forced on the user.
This is a sad day in computer history. Winamp was my first default music player and first true love of a computer program. It was in the end of the 1990s and ICQ ruled internet chatting and mp3s was new thing.
I used Winamp everyday. We shared music from dorm to dorm on the campus network. Everyone had Winamp. Parties had a dedicated Winamp computer with all the playlists with music available from the campus network.
We searched the net with Phoenix (now called Firefox) or Opera to find all the album art work. We installed beautiful Winamp skins and was amazed at audio 3d-visualization plugins that Winamp offered.
Winamp was early on handling multiple audio cards. I had dual audio cards, one just for Winamp connected to my HiFi equipment and the other for the rest of the Windows sounds connected to the computer table speakers.
Early with global hotkey support. Plugins that showed GUI popups of the music playing. Fraunhofer codec support. And it was super fast.
And I still remember the uproar when Winamp 3 was released. True fanboys stayed with the Winamp 2 release for many years, the classic.
Sad this has to end, but Winamp never successfully adopted to a world with full fledged media library players like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Back in the day we used Windows Explorer (or Norton Commander) to cataloged all our music and soon a community based naming standard convention of music was "created" by mutual agreement.
[+] [-] bbx|12 years ago|reply
Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple.
I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.
[+] [-] sandGorgon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|12 years ago|reply
iPods led to iPhones, which led to iOS development and Macs, to the point that there are no more Windows machines in the house and I haven't done Windows development in about five years.
All kicked off by the fact that MSFT couldn't make a software music player that didn't suck.
[+] [-] ygra|12 years ago|reply
For a ten-year old Winamp I'd have my doubts about Unicode support at the very least.
[+] [-] twentysix|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.aimp.ru/
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|12 years ago|reply
At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported.
This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me.
Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world.
[+] [-] rm999|12 years ago|reply
Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud. You can have a consistent music library and can use any player client-side. Personally I prefer the spotify "all-you-can-listen" model, but I have a bunch of MP3s that aren't on spotify that I seamlessly stream from dropbox (either to winamp or the spotify client, which allows you to sync local files).
[+] [-] caycep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davexunit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrabble|12 years ago|reply
There's also a plugin called Chipamp which ensures you have all the latest plugins required to play video game music files (nsf, rsn, usf, psf, etc.). This is the best PC tool for listening to video game music.
[+] [-] niels_olson|12 years ago|reply
http://subsonic.org/
I like the isub app for iphone, but there are android apps too: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/apps.jsp
I find subsonic works best with a friend or two participating. A miniature music club if you will.
If you already have a large library, you can use beets to organize it in a separate database (this is our current project) http://beets.radbox.org/
[+] [-] Nursie|12 years ago|reply
If you're a linux user then 'audacious' is a good/similar replacement to winamp IMHO.
I switched to using quodlibet some time ago. Can't remember why (simplicity, the right views, stuff) but now everything else seems sucky.
[+] [-] Toenex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlackDeath3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] el_duderino|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dell1994|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Elepsis|12 years ago|reply
Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.
I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
[+] [-] sharkweek|12 years ago|reply
Sad to see it go...
IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA'S ASS
[+] [-] masklinn|12 years ago|reply
Foobar 2k works very, very well.
[+] [-] Semaphor|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.mediamonkey.com
[2] Autoplaylists are only available for the Gold version.
[+] [-] julianz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbell|12 years ago|reply
I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a player as winamp was but it did manage the library / tagging bits quite well. It seems to still be active so may be worth a look.
[+] [-] ansgri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jagat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsumnia|12 years ago|reply
Winamp worked. It played all your MP3s without any of the other fluff. It played your music in a very lightweight program. What was also nice was this was before every program auto-updated; so you'd manually have to go update it; except, the newer versions were adding features, not fixing bugs. If you thought Winamp was fine, there was never a need to upgrade. I remember never upgrading Winamp until way into my college years.
People have mentioned it, but I didn't change to foobar because I always used Winamp. Even when they made the modern UI, you could (and can) still go Classic. Computer space and performance weren't issues because the extra bells and whistles are easy to never use.
Only a few weeks ago did I make the move from Winamp to foobar; and it was only to see the difference. Initial thoughts are I don't like how it displays my music; but I do like the shuffle since its playing songs I never hear.
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greg5green|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilitirit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ruud-v-A|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] V-2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corford|12 years ago|reply
More than that, it's one of the few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens when I was first getting seriously involved with computers.
Its death sort of marks an end of an era for me :'(
[+] [-] atwebb|12 years ago|reply
Thanks for all the skins and memories!
[+] [-] bluedino|12 years ago|reply
Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and effort into a project.
[+] [-] computer|12 years ago|reply
For anyone else looking for the same thing: the one that I ended up choosing was http://gmusicbrowser.org/. See http://gmusicbrowser.org/screenshots/ListsLibraryContext.png.
[+] [-] AndyKelley|12 years ago|reply
It's a cross-platform music player backend C library. It's meant to be generic enough to be the backend of any music player.
I use it as the backend for Groove Basin [2] which just might hit milestone 1.0.0 around December 20.
[1]: https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove [2]: https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin
[+] [-] eli|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GBiT|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordaco|12 years ago|reply
I strongly associate winamp with the early days of P2P, when I was just a teen and got fascinated by the possibility of, at last, getting (at 5k/s; way better than nothing) all those songs from a foreign music TV channel that never played in the local radios... and using Winamp to play them. But it's not just nostalgia: what makes Winamp such a great piece of software is that I still use it every day and it doesn't show its age.
[+] [-] vanwilder77|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] codegeek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 51Cards|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|12 years ago|reply
It's a shame - seems like it died because it doesn't have a content purchasing mechanism forced on the user.
[+] [-] fetbaffe|12 years ago|reply
I used Winamp everyday. We shared music from dorm to dorm on the campus network. Everyone had Winamp. Parties had a dedicated Winamp computer with all the playlists with music available from the campus network.
We searched the net with Phoenix (now called Firefox) or Opera to find all the album art work. We installed beautiful Winamp skins and was amazed at audio 3d-visualization plugins that Winamp offered.
Winamp was early on handling multiple audio cards. I had dual audio cards, one just for Winamp connected to my HiFi equipment and the other for the rest of the Windows sounds connected to the computer table speakers.
Early with global hotkey support. Plugins that showed GUI popups of the music playing. Fraunhofer codec support. And it was super fast.
And I still remember the uproar when Winamp 3 was released. True fanboys stayed with the Winamp 2 release for many years, the classic.
Sad this has to end, but Winamp never successfully adopted to a world with full fledged media library players like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Back in the day we used Windows Explorer (or Norton Commander) to cataloged all our music and soon a community based naming standard convention of music was "created" by mutual agreement.
And then came music streaming.
Bye Winamp!
// A pro license owner
[+] [-] redblacktree|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibudiallo|12 years ago|reply
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