WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever Yup, I called that one wrong. Twenty years ago. I bid farewell to WinAmp, the PC music player of choice. It had been made redundant by Windows Media Player getting better, WinAmp's owners getting bored, and the iPod blowing the doors off everything. As one of the first accessible Windows MP3 players, WinAmp was openly fun and …
... but I still am using WinAMP as my media player of choice. Classic skins somehow broke earlier this year from one day to the next (playlist window stopped opening), but the modern skin packages still function fine.
I've tried some of the modern fork/offshoots but none of them managed to capture the ease of use or the convenience of the original - so here's a toast to WinAMP.
Cheers mate, carry on and stay llama ass whoopin' awesome
I'm sorry, but I have abandoned WinAmp a long time ago. I remember using it, I remember perusing the skins and choosing my favorite, but all that is water under the bridge.
Now I use VLC. It does everything I need, does it well, and I'm not aware that it reports back to the mothership - or that there is a mothership.
I am a long time Media Monkey user ... fully paid for ... shock Horror !!!
Its greatest use, to me, is the way you can manage your Music.
I have a large collection of music [Classical, Jazz, Contemporary(Pop), Other(!!!???)] as MP3's.
All are 320 Kbps CBR .mp3 ... good enough for most people.
I use Neutron Music Player & BubbleUPnP on android to play the .mp3s served by Media Monkey.
[Neutron has very unique UI *but* it is worth it for the sound quality.]
If you are willing to work a little bit harder to install & get running ViPERAndroid FX it improves the sound no end.
(Not talking Bass boosting et al *but* sound quality etc.)
:)
It's not as good. Specifically its playlist management is nothing like as slick as the Winamp one was. It also doesn't do such a good job managing devices on the end of the dreaded mtp protocol. I'm using VLC too, because on Linux I can't find anything better, but god I do miss Winamp.
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It still plays music. What else is it supposed to do?
The fundamental problem with software is that it just doesn't wear out. An ancient version of Winamp that played music files a quarter of a century ago still plays those music files. This is the perennial problem of software suppliers -- how to build in wear and tear, or just plain obsolescence, into your product line. The contemporary poster child for this is, of course, Sonus who seem to have figured out how to brick product and yet somehow survive the resulting flak.
Meanwhile I'm still using a couple of Squeezeboxes, a standalone Squeezebox player and a service as the primary in-house streaming devices. Logitech did a great job with this range, too good a job (they had a rather neat rack mounted player for legacy hifi systems -- unobtainable, of course) so they tried first to sell a one way 'UE' upgrade which tied the players to their web ecosystem. This didn't work so I presume they're just waiting for the equipment to fall apart from old age. I'm left a bit puzzled as to the amount of effort that vendors will go to in order to ensure that their equipment doesn't "just work".
PS -- Still have, and occasionally use, an older Winamp. Seems to work just fine.
PPS -- Guess who doesn't own, and has no plans to acquire, any Sonus kit?
Though I did appreciate Winamp being able to play MODs as well. Of course, I am referring to “Modplay” from the days of DOS.
One of the most “ear popping”, mind-blowing tracks would be Jogeir Liljedahl’s “Guitar Slinger,” which of course is (hopefully) immortal by now.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=42560
(I don’t worry about “obsolete” software, with virt-manager I can run any old version of Windows in a completely isolated sandbox, with full GPU hardware acceleration, and from there can run any old Windows software… all completely within Linux. If I ever feel like running Winamp, I’ll just run good old Winamp. I don’t care about “modern” operating systems anymore.)
I'm old fashioned. When I listen to music, I generally want to play a whole album front to back. So I've been using Winamp since I can't remember, most recently last night. I have the .exe saved so that as and when I replace the home PC (yes, PC, because affordable laptops don't have enough TB to hold all my files) it gets reinstalled. Do adults *really* care about the range of skins? Are you looking at the screen - and the programme - the whole time you're listening to whatever?
An ancient version of Winamp that played music files a quarter of a century ago still plays those music files.
Right , so why all this talk of "Winamp is dead" ?
It does exactly what it says on the 25 year old tin.
It doesent need spare parts producing , or consumable supplies , and still runs in Win11 or Linux
Wow ... squeezebox... that takes me back !!!..
I still have the server version exe on an old memory stick .
Gone to the dark side these days with Raspberry Pi A+, a cheap HiFiBerry DAC clone (£10ish) and Volumio plugged into old stereo amps and speakers dotted around the house. Pulling FLaC rips off my CD collection (yes, I'm that old) off an open media centre
I loved Winamp in it's day. Stayed faithful to it for many years.
> A good player was the old version of Winamp before it went mad...
Still using version 2.64 here, before the rot started. I think the next version included a web browser to show ads, or something annoying, so I've kept the zip and been using that version ever since. It plays my mp3's, doesn't get in my face, and even works on 'doze 11.
I remember that version. Nice to see it's still working on Win11. (Which I have managed to mostly avoid so far but it will be inevitable before too long)
All I ever used Winamp for was for Shoutcast streaming. Is it still good at that? Should I completely avoid the 5.x versions?
Thanks
> All I ever used Winamp for was for Shoutcast streaming. Is it still good at that?
No idea, I only ever play mp3's from files, those being on shared filestore is as network-y as it gets. I suspect this version pre-dates internet streaming though (back then streaming meant you could start playing the song before the "download" from napster had finished, and if you were lucky it would all come down in time :)
> Should I completely avoid the 5.x versions?
Probably...
I too used Winamp back in the day, but these days, my music collection is on a self-hosted Jellyfin server, and I use various local clients to access it from different devices. Obviously Winamp should be preserved as part of our history, but it is history.
Today, I can host a media streaming server on a 10 year old retired desktop computer. Back in the early 2000s you certainly couldn't have done that on a 486 from the 1990s.
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Not your exact use case, but back in the early 2000s we had an old 486 running Winamp (with the playlist and mp3s on a network share) as our music on hold system. The box had an old soundblaster with a ⅛" headphone cable run to our NBX-100 phone system.
If you wanted to update the playlist (like switching to a "holiday" playlist) you could do so right from your desk. To get the system to read the new list, it was usually easiest to just reboot the machine with the reset button.
The limitations with the 486 would be disk size. Audio streaming at my house is handled by a RaspberryPi 3 pulling files from a WD network disk. Nothing fancy, just low power (...and no fans).
I, like another poster, prefer to play complete albums because I grew up listening to LPs rather than song oriented singles. You can't play classical music on most modern music players because of their front ends, they have to have everything broken up into 'songs'. As far as sources go, its basically FLAC or nothing. Compression works OK through headphones, car audio and for generic casual listening but generates noticeable artifacts played through decent audio kit.
(FWIW, one of my players provides the primary feed for a Quad 22/2 system, an old valve amplifier. I've also got a heavy weight audio system -- nothing insane by audiophile standards but adequate for most listening.)
I have three iPod shuffles 4th gen. My son uses one daily, I pointed his itunes\music app to the nas with all my music, and he's regularly adding new stuff. He likes the wired headphones, as he needs them with his laptop at school too.
So to say they're dead may be like saying WinAmp was dead 20 years ago?
I've been using WinAMP since version 0.92 and am still using WinAmp 5.91 (5.9 Final Build 9999) and I don't have any problems with it. It gets used to play my MP3 files and Internet Radio stations. It's small, has no adverts, and runs just fine on every PC I have. On Android I use Folder Player as it works with the way I choose to organise my music, and the Android release of Winamp is a poor shadow of the real thing.
Yeah, party playlists and then you'd make the visualizer full screen and trippy visuals for everyone.
I've had foobar2000 as my main music player on win, but tried some version Winamp again a few years back, purely for the visualizations, and it didn't handle multiple monitors well.
In the years just before it went away I started on a clone for no reason than I could, and while I was waiting for my work permit, I was bored. I got a fair ways along and at some point I just decided not to, what was the point, Winamp will be here forever... and never opened that project again. Its either on a Jaz cart or 4mm DAT somewhere on the other side of the world...
Just a quick mention that although they removed their GitHub repository, they still have links to it on their website. Look for the "Legacy Player Developer" buttons :) Even their blog post proudly announcing the release of the code is still up and not retracted. I'm not sure people talked to one another before taking all the actions in the chain of events.
And the llama likes it.
I have kept Winamp on my computers all this time. Yes, VLC is there, too, along with media player, but I'm a traditionalist, so I have my trusty Winamp with me at the house and on the road. Yep, even got it loaded it up on my Motorola Razr flip phone. Woot woot.
Yong Yive teh Yyama's whipped Yass.
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