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Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

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51–60 of 91 posts

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#51
post #19

I've never understood why media players in particular feel they have carte blanche to completely ignore any attempt at integrating with the system look and feel. I never really got along with WinAMP due in no small part to that.

I usually agree with you. I can't stand most programs that don't use a native Windows interface. Even GTK ones can annoy me. However, Winamp is the one exception I actually like. Perhaps partly because you aren't forced to use a horrible, brightly-coloured, sparse interface that many of them get. Utilities that get forced upon you with device drivers are usually the worst at this.

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#53
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amarok 1 was better, but it's harder to get hold of than winamp :(

Clementine

Doesn't have all the functionality - it can't play TTA properly, there are limitations in its cue support, playlist/queue/search don't interact the same way they did in amarok.

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#54
post #46

I personally switched to foobar2000[1] years ago and never looked back. Some of the big reasons back then were gapless playback and proper unicode support (I have quite a bit of Japanese music in my collection), and the fact that it doesn't do anything unnecessary (like try to be a video player at the same time) - it plays (and manages) music, and does it very well. It has served my music player needs ever since - it…

If anyone is interested, see deadbeef for the linux equivalent of foobar2000: http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

(But personally, I use MOC: http://moc.daper.net/)

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#55
I use Winamp now but only because of its support for FLAC. I hate its UI, its far too messy and complicated with all kinds of windows that can be docked, undocked etc.

Its unfortunate the developers have never understood the concept of "less is more".

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#58
post #12
post #2

I guess I am the only person in the world still using Winamp. Just feels odd when I listen to mp3s and can't look up the ID3 tags with alt-3. And I never felt the need for a 'library', 'database' or huge spaceship cockpit UIs either.

My primary reason for staying on Winamp is that most of the plugins for playing video game console music formats (NSF, PSF, GSF, 2SF, USF, VGZ, KSS, SPC, and others) are written for Winamp. I've found a few programs that play a few of the formats, but Winamp is the only one that plays them all. (Any player that fully supports Winamp plugins would be an adequate replacement, but I'm also happy with Winamp in general)

"Most of my plugins for playing video game console music"

=

ChipAmp. http://www.chipamp.org/

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#59
post #40
post #2

I guess I am the only person in the world still using Winamp. Just feels odd when I listen to mp3s and can't look up the ID3 tags with alt-3. And I never felt the need for a 'library', 'database' or huge spaceship cockpit UIs either.

Amarok 1 was better, but it's harder to get hold of than winamp :(

Amarok used to be my favorite music player by far. I still can't believe how much good stuff in the Linux world was destroyed by the transition to Qt4/KDE4. It's been like a five year development setback.

Re: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#60
post #3

Every promising technology/company that gets gobbled up by the bureaucratic mega fauna enviably end up being re-chewed and strewn about as piles of dung (to be burned to repel mosquitoes). AOL's problem is that it's a corporation first, a product/service creating, maintaining and selling entity second. Oh sure, the execs may think they're "creating and maintaining" a product/service, but their mindset is "how do we m…

"AOL's problem is that it's a corporation first" Isn't its main problem today that it's a content farm operated by new-age antivax no-signal-to-noise peddler Arianna Huffington?

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