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Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS

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Re: Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS

#13

Post by cosmic_cheese »

sethops1 wrote: post #6

Call me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.

iTunes/Music has its merits but in my opinion has been in decline since between versions 6 and 10 depending on the aspects being spoken about. For most of its existence it was subject to constant bloat and always felt a bit "off" compared to other Mac apps due to its nature as a cross-platform Carbon app full of bespoke UI widgets, and though its feature set got pared down and it technically became AppKit-dominant in the transition to "Music", it still doesn't feel right and is out of step with the rest of the OS.

A proper AppKit iTunes-style player with the best parts of iTunes across versions but without the bloat would be a beautiful thing. Even better if it's FOSS so it doesn't get abandoned a few years down the road, as paid players tend to. While there's several apps in this general direction like Doppler[0], nothing really nails it satisfactorily.

[0]: https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

Re: Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS

#15

Post by Marsymars »

sethops1 wrote: post #6

Call me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.

I feel like iTunes/Music gets worse with every version, to the point where I've effectively abandoned it finally after macOS 26.

My music collection is some tens of thousands of files served via a DAAP media server - since macOS 26, Apple Music will only play music for 5-15 minutes before giving up and just stopping.

For years, it's had a trivially reproducible bug where pausing Apple Music while playing from a DAAP server, then restarting the DAAP server will crash Apple Music.

After trying basically every airsonic/subsonic/plex/etc. alternative, I finally settled on simply using foobar2000 to play from an SMB share.

Re: Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS

#16

Post by Hamuko »

sethops1 wrote: post #6

Call me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.

I imagine the shittiness of iTunes doesn't really show up as much with a music collection as small as 500 files. I remember it being a slouch with more files. I'm currently at 73,000.
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