Unpopular opinion: there are bad examples, just like with any design trend, but the basic layout scheme for most websites for desktop use peaked with the "thin top bar & nav, 2-3 columns, left of which may also be navigation" standard style of the mid to late '00s.
Other designs are more convenient if you want a very easy-to-write responsive layout, and some sites do actually need something different, but that was as good as we've seen, in general, for desktop. You can't do it now because it "looks old" and people will assume your site is defunct, but it's the best.
Every time I get a flashy new modern design pop up, I'll just assume it will be gone in a year or so I just close the tab and try to move on to the next one..
Sometimes I'd get some bootstrappy looking website.. I assume not even half the buttons on that page work, don't even bother trying anymore, and move on..
Strongly agree and thought I was alone in this thinking. A flashy new web-design makes me immediately think "VC, smoke and mirrors salesy BS, here today gone tomorrow". If I don't see links to "Screenshots" "Docs" and "News" immediately in my view on the landing page, I peel out.
The new one sucks, but the old one sucks too imo. I know you don't say old websites were great but I've seen alot of people saying that and yet their examples are bad too, usually they look simple and efficient but they're horrible, like spanning the whole page or not enough empty spaces or bad use of colors.
Hey if empty spaces and bad use of colors are all you can complain about, then that's a win IMO. At least it still works, which only time will tell for current websites. But I have this sneaky feeling that time wont be so friendly.
It might "work", but it's almost entirely content-free. It might as well be a blank page with the old "Under Construction" gif everyone used in the early 90s for all the information it gives.
In fact, the first time I looked at it, I didn't even realize there was anything there, because it was just some random graphic that filled the whole window with no indication that I could scroll down for more non-content. If you ask me that website fails in pretty much every way it can fail.
Yeah, that newer site loads slower, messes up my scroll, and is makes it harder to find the content you are looking for. It is the kind of site that makes me navigate away quickly because I don't want to waste my time working around their bad UX.
I have a decent spec PC with 32 GB of RAM and a 500 Mbps connection and that site just straight up seemed to have "hung" for a long time before loading that ugliness.
What I really like about the original (not perfect) website is they understood WHY you would go to the website: to download winamp, or see what was new and download an update. Those are the top reasons, all other things like "news" are secondary and down the page.
There's also https://skins.webamp.org/, which, while looking at first glance like an image gallery, actually loads each skin into the fully-interactive WebAmp client as a way of previewing the skin.
Winamp skins were surprisingly restrictive, though; you couldn't really skin Winamp in a way that impeded its functionality / created mystery-meat navigation. Every Winamp skin was fundamentally just a set of textures applied to the same standard controls layout: https://skins.webamp.org/
That was true for "classic" skins, but starting with Winamp 3, Winamp supported free form "modern" skins that were defined in XML and had a custom scripting language so that the author could define their own behavior.
True; though I'm pretty sure the WinAmp anyone here actually has any level of nostalgia for, is WinAmp 2. WinAmp 3 was so lacklustre that they brought back a lot of WinAmp 2 stuff and called the result WinAmp 5. (And then everyone continued to use the Classic skins, which WinAmp 5 supported.)
If the form impeded function, it was easy to change. Some skins even made sure to cover all of Winamp's sections properly. The Invader Zim skin appealed to my 15-year-old tastes and still offered visible, functional controls with a readable playlist. Some skins looked cool, but if they removed options, they weren't used other than to show off to friends on occasion
This website doesn't even run smoothly on my overpowered gaming desktop. Back in 2000 I'd have never thought we'd be at the point where I can run games in 4K happily but not scroll through a website without it lagging up.
Much that was "obviously" bad in the mid '00s is good now. Mixing markup and style, heavy reliance on vector graphics and drawing things with CSS at runtime. Flash reborn as this sort of thing, but with much shittier creation tools and higher memory use.
Well, like most people, I've found streaming music is much more convenient than maintaining my own library and that's the way I listen to music most of the time. The discovery features those platforms offer are also welcome.
The print design people have really taken over web site designs these days. This would have been a very slick and expensive brochure in paper form, and we don't see that many of those in paper form because of the printing cost.
I have to scroll my scroll-wheel way too many times just to get to the next section, I couldn't even drag their little scroll indicator to move between them.
I only clicked because I was hoping the page would be a cool relic from the 90s but instead I was visually assaulted by four full screen autoplay videos and a cookie pop up obstructing 75% of the laggy page. Would not visit again.
Whoever is Winamp today, what they want to revive is not their old cool audio player, but just ride on the name and sell some modern piece of crap that has nothing to do with classic Winamp.
I do both: stream and play offline stuff. For the former, I use YouTube Music, which is incredibly awful, but at least it does work.
The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.
For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.
Let's be serious, you're not the target market. Anyone who is using minimalist software is not the target market for any corporate software. The fact it would drive you away is a feature and not bug.
Winamp was never a minimalistic player, it was one of the feature rich players. It allowed for all the UX/UI hacking you could get wayback then. It's just compared to today it was really simple.
You don't have to be minimalist to perform well. Like most other software from the era of 32MB-of-memory Windows desktops with two-digit-Mhz single-core processors, it had to be lean or everyone would hate it. That doesn't mean lacking features.
It wasn't lean in comparison to other MP3 players at the time. This is the thing I think people are forgetting. It was in comparison pretty much what that website is promising.
As someone who at the time had a Pentium processor at 100Mhz and 32Mb of RAM, I feel confident enough to say that Winamp was lean as hell.
Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.
If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.
There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.
The OS got in my way, rather than the player, trying to use 486 machines as mp3 "jukeboxes" back in the day—"the day" being when high-hundreds Mhz single-core machines were the norm, and 486s could be had at garage sales and such practically for free.
MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.
What MP3 players? Windows Media Player with the MP3 codec installed on your system? I don't recall there being a lot of options for Windows, at the time.
There were a few options. Napster for one. It's just the reason we don't remember is because we all installed Winamp and forgot about the rest. I spent more time looking for skins for Winamp that I did a replacement for it.
https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.
It was featureful but it was also high-performance. It was originally popular because it could play MP3s on systems where other players couldn't keep up.
...and the target audience has probably never even used or heard of Winamp, so if they're trying to ride on the name with that audience, it's going to be another fail.
Lots of people who originally used Winamp way back when are using Spotify, Deezer, etc. The target audience isn't an age group but people who want that style of music app.
To be fair, you get a different experience on mobile than desktop. Turning on responsive mode and I can scroll the site, with it off, I have no idea what it;s doing but it eventually scrolled to the bottom, although Im not sure what that white bar was trying to represent ... just kinda randomly moved
My comment was tongue in cheek, but the site did lock up my browser and ran at < 5 frames per second when it did load, I couldn't scroll to actually see the full site, so not exactly hyperbole.
My browser full on _freezed_ for a couple of seconds while loading this page. And indeed, I have to scroll multiple times to make anything happen on the page.
Not only you and not only this issue: On my Fennec browser on Android it was also impossible to scroll because rendering seemed really slow. So I think they overdid that revamping a bit.
The site brought my S10+ to a screeching halt. I had to force-kill Harmonic, the HN client I use on my phone, just to get out of it. Site preloading via an in-app webview is nice until you happen upon a site like this.
Not only that, but during some sections, the scroll indicator bounces around. I think they're trying to evoke the impression of a volume meter, and doing so incredibly poorly. They also broke keyboard navigation, so I can't even page-up/page-down past it.
Doubt it to be honest, if they're rebuilding Winamp from scratch then maybe. Otherwise, I'd expect it to be built on top of the existing Winamp source code which is all C++ and not extremely over designed CSS and Javascript
The webpage gives me exactly zero expectation that this will be in any way based on the original Winamp.
Furthermore, the original Winamp was Windows-only. For anything like this to be successful today it needs to be a webapp and/or a mobile app, which more than likely means starting from scratch.
What? I had no idea you could scroll.. I can only see the background+heading+paragraph.. nothing happens when I scroll.. Guess Firefox ESR is too outdated for the "new winamp".
Can't wait for the new "app" requiring a few gigs of ram and the latest OS...
Yeah it's pretty dark. The scrolling appears to be time-based. After you spend x milliseconds on a section, it'll let you move onto the next with any scroll event.
A bit of a cross between exceptionalism and the ever increasing feature scope of browsers. We're delivering fully fledged 3D video games and video streaming apps via the web, pretty much anything is possible, and marketing/design/product development teams can see that and want to leverage it.
I much prefer simple text/css websites, but here we are in 2021, where the web browser is the most ubiquitous software delivery platform on the planet.
According to AudioValley, which is the parent company of Winamp and Shoutcast, the new app is going to "become the one-stop platform for audio enthusiasts, which connects creators and consumers of music, podcasts, radio stations, audiobooks, and any other peripheral content."
If you want a dedicated music player, there are options like fubar, but very few people want that anymore, so it's hard to see why anybody would waste their time and money on such a project.
You're underestimating Winamp and related own-your-music music players. I have real-world usage data on quite a lot of music players and websites, here's the top 30. The number is how many songs played in total on that website (I run something similar to last.fm scrobbling)
This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.
1 YouTube 14,244,087
2 Spotify desktop 2,751,012
3 Monstercat 1,171,321
4 Pandora 895,765
5 VLC media player 892,006
6 iTunes 854,311
7 SoundCloud 724,019
8 YouTube Music 640,801
9 Deezer 501,474
10 Winamp 289,216
11 Foobar2000 251,726
12 Vk.com music 134,319
13 Aimp3 123,306
14 Musicbee 113,652
15 Google play music 89,827
16 Epidemicsound 87,573
17 Spotify web player 81,590
18 Media monkey 70,611
19 Amazon Music 55,691
20 Clementine 29,750
21 Tunein radio 24,413
22 Google play music desktop (community) 22,910
23 Media Player Classic Home Cinema 15,654
24 Pot player 11,348
25 Plug.dj 8,144
26 Tidal web player 7,770
27 Jriver media center 5,200
28 Digitally Imported di.fm 4,636
29 SiriusXM 2,397
30 Dubtrack.fm 1,031
Pleasantly surprised to see Clementine in the list (though a bit disappointed with how low it is in the list).
Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D
I tend to add whatever users request. There have been music players in the past that were requested but I was never able to add support for.
The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.
Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.
I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that
There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.
It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)
Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place
Except perhaps in the audio quality department... I don't know how much things have changed, but I recall youtube doing a bit of compression on the imported audio.
Opt-in does not mean the data is inaccurate. It could be wildly off, but most likely it is in the ballpark, and there is a chance it's completely indicative of the relative usages by various platforms.
If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.
It's accurate about tech-savvy people that listen to a lot of music. It's not accurate about music listening by all users everywhere. I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.
Absolutely! You can still run older version of Musicbee under WINE and it works without much issues. Now a days I use Guayadeque player and quite happy with it.
monstercat.com has a music player, that's where the count comes from.
My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.
If you kind of familiar with linux its really not hard and works kind of of the box.
But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.
Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.
Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.
Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:
# mpc search artist moloko | grep -i doctor | shuf | mpc add
Though I'm using Clementine now. Winamp does not have builds for my OS, and they didn't manage to go open source unfortunately. Anyway, Clementine, if less charming and less appealing than Winamp, is actually a bit more ergonomic and powerful.
Sure they do, why else would bandcamp.com still be in business?
That said, I grew up with Winamp but never understood the adoration for it. As soon as I wasn’t quite so young anymore, I preferred functional and not whimsy.
I like winamp, and continue to like it, because it gets out of my way. All the essential controls were readily accessible, including an EQ which almost all players lack today. The generative, music responsive displays were whimsically cool too. And it didn't constantly bug me to set up a play list for everything.
What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.
I used to use quite a few plugins in Winamp, as well. In particular, I always needed a gapless playback plugin in 2.x. Been so long since I've regularly used Winamp, I don't recall what other kinds I used, but I do know I typically used several. I probably had several visualization plugins, as well, particularly back when I was in college and would have friends over in the dorm. Music on in the background, visualization full screen.
Winamp is from a different era of computing. MP3s were new, GUIs were starting to be experimental, "skinning" an application was novel, and of course, the 90s style of form over function had an influence.
Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.
Oh wow, I forgot about Sonique until your post. I even made some skins for it too. I used it at the time because it was a very flashy player, but Winamp was more powerful under the surface.
Winamp always felt to me to be the pinnacle of functional. I ended up turning to Winamp for a whole plethora of stuff outside of music playback, like:
- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast
- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)
- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.
The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.
I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.
Regarding the plugin system: They had a few different categories of plugins. You had input plugins that let it get audio from a wide variety of sources. A few I remember fondly were input plugins that were little emulators that ran playstation / n64 bytecode ripped from games to play their music. Then you could have your choice of DSP plugins applied after that, a visualization and then also an output. The output could play the music, but it could really do anything it wanted, like encoding it to ogg.
Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.
ShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
I guess if you need those, that makes sense. I have never needed them, and when people talk about Winamp, they usually mention all the skins it had (it’s the same for MySpace and Geocities, 2 other projects I don’t miss).
I probably would, but I found I preferred the library management aspects of MediaMonkey (Windows, proprietary), so that’s what I use today. But fb2k will always have a special place in my heart.
What wasn't functional about it? From what I vaguely recall, I remember v2.95 being able to service as well as any other player, and the media library was one of the few that seemed to understand the value of using stable sorts when re-sorting by a different column. And then there were all the plugins...
Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.
Foobar2000 is basically Winamp (though with, imo, some not-so-good defaults when it comes to UI bahavior) and still has a userbase. There are other examples like that. It's not just for the aspect you mention (owning music and deciding what gets played), but these players also support plugins via a fairly standard system, and some of them are pretty convenient.
I use and love Foobar2000, but I certainly agree that out of the box it lacks polish. There’s some great skins like this[1] that make it look amazing, but it can be a hassle to setup.
Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar.
I would love to theme my fb2k but most themes I came across were basically saying "here, download this zip file containing 10 massive unsigned dlls sourced from various people" and that doesnt sit right with me. Especially when its not even on the official website but some 20 star github repo.
I wish macOS had a really solid Winamp/foobar2000 music player. Most now are all about managing a library (no thanks, I have a filesystem for that!) or integrating with cloud services.
I appreciate this perspective but I loathe using the filesystem to manage a music library. If a music player doesn't have a well designed and highly functional music library I most likely won't use it. Most are half-baked though, unfortunately.
You could try DeaDBeeF. It's Linux first but there are Mac OS builds. I've tried it, may be a little buggy on Macs but could be worth a check to see if it works for you.
I'm curious what your objection for organizing music in the filesystem is. Even music players packed with library management features need the files to exist somewhere, so organizing things intuitively on the filesystem seems a good starting point. The alternative, I guess, would be importing them into some non-navigable structure like a binary blob? I would think maintaining a persistent index of all the metadata is all you need beyond the individual files.
I keep my files well organized on disk, but I am also particular about how names are both shown and sorted, and rely on careful and comprehensive tagging instead. For example, I will not name folders "National, The" or "Beatles, The", or "Petty, Tom", but when I'm looking at my music I want The National to be filed under N, the Beatles under B, and Tom Petty under P like I would arrange on physical shelves. The compromise is that all the "Thes" land together in the filesystem, but are shown the way I like them when I go to play music.
I also want albums to be sorted by (original) release year but don't want to put the year in the folder or file names. Similarly, I want to be able to search, and with classical music it is nice to be able to show by composer or conductor or soloist, etc. Tagging and a robust music library make these things easy. Using the file system does not.
I always kept mine under {first letter}/{artist}/{album}/ Where "first letter" in, say, "the Beatles" would be "B", not "T". I had a separate folder where artists that started with a digit would go. Another folder for the occasional glyph. e.g. µ-Ziq.
When I started mixing and matching songs from different albums to create "mixtapes" (playlists really) for myself, I did a deep dive into ReplayGain (because songs from different albums won't have the same levels). While Winamp had decent ReplayGain functionality (adding RG tags as well as reading them), Foobar2000 was the best.
Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.
Cheeky shoutout for my side project https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ which lets you find where to buy a digital album the cheapest online. You can track your favourite artists and it will email you when they release a new album too. Feedback welcome!
Thank you! There isn’t a way to submit directly, rather it searches via the vendors. The base data is via the iTunes Search API[0] which is surprisingly accessible. Then it tries to grab more data from the other vendors.
Originally, I built it so all access was programmatic, it never stored anything but rather just triggered API calls, a bit of scraping and a matching algorithm.
But it does have database backed models now so you could technically add releases directly. Although deduping might be a bit of a nightmare.
This is very nice. It found a song I was looking for. It takes me to iTunes for purchase. And boom. They don't seem to be selling the song in India. I hate such policies by various stores.
FIIO https://www.fiio.com/m17 and many others make high quality players for people who have a collection.
But honestly, streaming services allow discovery and exploration. I listen to hundreds of artists now that I didn't even know existed when I bought CDs and ripped them myself.
This is still how I discover most of the music I've learned about in the past several years. Human-curated stations, accessible anywhere with an internet connection. Get a set of bookmarks in your desktop or mobile app of choice and you've got your own personal radio dial with stations that never go out of range. Plus you can see the currently playing artist and title at any time. I frequently screenshot them on my phone when something comes on that I want to look up later.
There are some of us still out there! I started using Clementine Music Player[0] on my Linux desktop. Amarok inspires it, but it's a little less bloated. I'm not sure what more I could want from the player. Well, maybe some cool skins. :)
Plex isn't perfect. But since my songs are on my drive, there is nothing locking me in to Plex should I choose to switch. That's the most important thing.
In the meantime, Plex is doing great work. Plexamp has been a joy to use.
I exist, and I badly want a solid modern music app that's made for people who own music.
There's some evidence there's a critical mass of people who want to own their music. You can see it at the merch booths at concerts and the sudden surge in vinyl sales. Is it a majority of people? No, but they love music and they're willing to spend money on it.
Eh, I'm happy to rent my music from Spotify. Available instantly, much cheaper, don't have to worry about storage on cds/hdd/cloud. Definitely the dream for me.
Exactly, I’d love to see WinAmp, or Audacious be able to at least just grab a playlist from Spotify or Youtube Music. All the streaming services are basically the same music, with their own terrible player, which adds nothing.
I just want to be able to stream music, without using 1.5GB of memory to run a browser.
After I enabled scripts to allow the dynamic content to load, I was presented with a blank screen for about 10 seconds, I was thinking, "what a waste of time so far", but then it finally loaded some animated content that says nothing.
Bad start in my humble opinion. Animated websites without real content are the bane of the Internetz existence.
Does it really work with noscript enabled, to any degree? I use uBlock origin in its "default deny" mode and the site does nothing beyond rendering a blue background.
I'm reluctant to enable any scripts on this site based on others' reports.
It's a WordPress not a full-blown app that won't render anything but an error without JavaScript.
I've got NoScript to block all JS, including 1st party, by default. On this website the browser shows from top:
- white marketing-ish text on blue background, stating something about "totally remastered" "next-generation" WinAMP, followed by pictures of "artists".
- dark text on white background inviting to future (I presume) beta tests, links for "creators" who might want to release music on the future (I presume) platform and an invitation for "any type" of business partnerships
- links straight to last stable .exe download, social media accounts, legal notice, privacy policy and other usual footer stuff
Based on other comments, I presume that this is all there is to see apart from fireworks and increased electricity bill. The site has content like a typical startup site.
> Solo performer, band or label? Register now for updates on the new Winamp, and how to release your music to a brand new audience.
So it's a platform like Spotify and Apple Music now, not a media player.
As someone who grew up with Winamp on my secondhand Pentium II laptop in the 90's, I don't care. This doesn't appeal to me. The original Winamp died a long time ago.
Winamp, as it's intended to be, lives on in the WACUP project. It's compiled for modern systems and is just as configurable, if not moreso, than the original Winamp. This is what I use for my local needs and I'm completely satisfied with it. I run it on a 4K display in double (2x) scale mode and a modified classic theme. It's perfect. :)
Shout out for WACUP. Just found out about it recently and was pleasantly surprised to see Doctor.O was behind it. Now there's a name I still remember from the old winamp forums. He was a developer for Winamp until the end of the AOL days.
New Star Wars and Star Trek properties are developed by people who don't understand (or even like) the original Star Wars or Star Trek properties. As always, when rebooting or remaking something from the 1990's, they're hoping they can get a payday from:
1. Curious young people who missed out on the original, and will check it out because those poor souls have no pop culture of their own and have grown accustomed to remakes.
2. Crusty old farts who complain about everything, but a lot of time still check it out anyway out of nostalgia.
They usually DO make enough of a payday to justify the model.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's also the only of the four most recent Treks (I'm counting The Orville) that's decent.
The trailers made it look terrible, but it's actually pretty OK.
The Orville's the second-best—holy crap, alien cultures with values that aren't what humans want to see and who don't immediately drop them when confronted with a starship captain! If only real Trek could be so bold, more often—but the mostly-bad attempts at humor drag it down and MacFarlane probably shouldn't have starred.
Do they love Star Trek, or are they just skilled at poking fun at the silly previously unacknowledged parts of the Star Trek universe? For example, the holodeck cum filters joke.
I like the show so-so, but I feel like the non-humorous writing is a bit lazy.
Tangential:
Have you noticed in the new Star Wars movies, where a character will quote a line from a previous movie in an attempted nod to fans who eat up that sort of stuff. For me, it elicits an eye-roll, like when my dad keeps recycling the same corny jokes.
Picard and Discovery are...pretty bad, but Lower Decks has a lot of people that truly love Star Trek on it and it shines through in the sheer attention to detail and jokes delivered in every episode
I expect some SaaS with ads on top from this Winamp reincarnation.
Someone will try to "Spotify" the brand, UX and the player.
And by the way, I hate to be "that" guy but this landing page is horrific.
Starting with the sign/branding and ending with "colorful animated excitement" that is trying to kill my web-browser.
Does anyone know if there exist players on Linux on which one can code visualizations (i.e. visual effects following the sound), as we could do on Winamp?
(Of course, it would be even better if we could use the same syntax - and reuse those of Winamp...)
--
Edit: I see that there exist a "ProjectM", reimplementation of MilkDrop (Ryan Geiss 2001, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilkDrop). The scripts ("presets") are as expected open and are ".milk" text files to be placed in a directory (/usr/share/projectM/presets). Large backward compatibility with the original scripts exist. I see at least a collection is found on archive.org ; another is at mywinamp.com ... I see the github repository also links to big collections ( https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectM ).
ProjectM does not need a player: it listens to the played audio for the beat etc. But I understand it is also embedded in Kodi, Helix, Silverjuke and Silent Radiance Distance Disco. ... It seems also VLC uses it (not on all platforms, they write).
"Remember WinAmp? Ever wondered what it would be like to kill it and reanimate its still-warm corpse as a monstrous Revenant, a mistake of nature? Well, wonder no more!"
This website is horrible even with uBlock Origin and NoScript. I am assuming the new Winamp will also be horrible. I think I'll stick to Foobar2k, which has been absolutely fantastic for decades.
I may get accused of UI nostalgia, but I'm always shocked that the simple UX of winamp is not found on any modern media player (at least none I've found in 2021, on MacOS).
I just want to:
* Go to desktop and select one of more folders full of music.
* Right-click -> Play, or drag into the player. Either add or replace to existing file set.
Most of the comments are about the UX, on which I have no comment. On Winamp, though, I thought this was a nostalgia piece!
Hear, hear. My pandemic project was digitizing all the vinyl records I still wanted to listen to, and then selling them on Discogs [1]. I combined those with my CDs, and put it all on a 256GB microSD card for my phone! Even using FLAC instead of MP3, it's plenty of space.
Shuffle randomly and listen in the car. It's better than any radio station, and no subscription fees or commercials.
It's easy to find an Android app that just does this, which is basically the same thing Winamp did back in the day.
It's hard AF to find an app for the Mac that just does this. They all have zillions of other features that get in the way. And no, VLC does not JUST do this; it does a million other things that obscure simple play-my-music functionality. I settled on Elmedia, which is sorta tolerable.
Apple's Music app and their devices don't support FLAC, but they do support Apple Lossless format. It's annoying to have 2x the files if you want to support both ecosystems, but if you only want to have lossless music in Apple-land, you can use XLD to do a one-time convert.
VLC is surprisingly terrible for audio. It struggles to read tags and almost never auto-sorts properly, it cuts off the end of tracks, there's no ability to play without gaps, etc.
I use VLC as my primary audio player. While I can't speak to the sorting and tagging issues, I can't say I've ever heard it cut off ends of tracks or play without gaps. Maybe those are related to your sound buffer settings
Gapless playback won't be available until VLC 4. Audio getting cut off at the end has been a known issue for 10 years, and will apparently be fixed in v4, as well. I realize that I could be running the nightly to fix the audio issue, but then I'm just trading for other existing v4 bugs -- and these fixes were only implemented very recently into the nightly, so for me at least, VLC has still been a very subpar audio player.
A name looking for a problem to solve, long since solved.
You'll be dearly remembered as my mp3 player of choice from 95 to around 2001, so long and thanks for all the fish.
Yes it was great, and still … I use Vox 2.7.7, but not sure how long it will last with macOS moving forward. It was last version without requirement to login in cloud and pay subscription to use features as simple as equalizer. But even with this version, I had to `chmod -x /Applications/VOX.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/*` to stop background crap.
Question: Did you see the announcement about the winamp relaunch?
Answer:
Yeah. I regret not buying Winamp back when I had the chance; it wouldn't have been expensive and it was out of a sort of selfishness not doing it (not feeling like dealing with the stress of it). While the new owners appear to have the best intentions, sadly at this point it's pretty obvious that they don't have the right skills/process to do it right. IMO they're looking at it from a top-down perspective, rather than bottom-up. I'd love for them to prove me wrong. :/
It's not exactly clear what this is. Is it a music player, or a new streaming service? They make a big deal about their history, but then also talk about fair revenue for creators.
I have a vague fear that it's going to try and do something like Brave's "BAT" but for music that you have locally -- which I guess could work if you distribute your music for free (as I do for much of mine), but doesn't make sense if you purchase your music. I certainly can't see myself wanting to pay for the same music twice -- once for the physical or digital copy, and then again for "Winamp Attention Tokens".
Much more likely though that it's just another music streaming service.
>If it was fair then they wouldn't have to label it as such.
This doesn't compute. It is recognized that compensation to artists is a sticking point with several streaming platforms. If a new one comes along and says "we're different", what is wrong with advertising a competitive advantage?
My suspicions were raised seeing a site using the Winamp name. When it didn't display anything but the background for a few seconds on my overpowered desktop and internet connection, I was afraid it was trying to run an exploit of some sort. I closed the page before even seeing it.
And while it seems that's not the case, I'm still suspicious of the project since it sounds like it's just going to be the same as any other modern music player, just riding on the Winamp nostalgia.
I’m disappointed there are no mention of llamas and whipping…
In all seriousness though, Winamp took their slogan "It really whips the llama's ass!" from a song by
an infamous, schizophrenic outsider-musician and visual artist named Wesley Willis[1].
I'm conditioned on Winamp classic skin for my oldschool mp3 listening the way I suppose audiophiles want the ritual of dropping the arm on the LP. Since as early as I can remember I have downloaded some obsolete version of Winamp due to bloat and desperate re-branding/re-appropriation. A re-imagined Winamp is a paradox, but then again it was more or less always abandonware.
Windows desktop audio players (which is still a very valid use case thank you) long moved on from the void Winamp left. My two favourites are AIMP (more aimed for single-file playing), and Foobar (more suited for large collections). Both are compatible with Winamp's DSP plugins, and can be even used with AVS ones, along with Winamp-like themes.
I think both for me and for a lot of people the most relevant thing in the winamp brand is the historical ui which was amazing. If these guys can't deliver on that I'm not sure if there's any value in using the winamp brand.
So whatever their plan is, I hope it's the opposite to this website.
Winamp nostalgics might want to try Qmmp, which inherited the old Winamp spirit (small, fast, bloat-less). Runs on Linux, BSD, Haiku, Windows, and possibly MacOS as well.
Grab a working portable version of Winamp for Windows quickly from the internet before they ban those (portable means they don't need to be installed and hence you don't need administrative rights on your PC).
Seems like a good location to ask this: I've been on Winamp 5.x for a while, I'd like to move over to WACUP, but I really want to keep all my listening statistics. Is there an easy easy to export that database?
I miss the assortment of mesmerizing visualizations from the early days of Winamp. The succesor apps never seemed to offer the same quality of visualizations, and then that whole concept seems to have faded away.
Oh no, hopefully it will not be another privacy violating CPU hog.
Why can't they just maintain the original Winamp? Making sure it's up to date, maybe improve the quality of equaliser etc.
I really don't want to "connect with the artist" nor I want artists to shove their content into my playlist. I also don't want any cloud garbage - I want to play files from my media only, without any tracking.
It seems to me what this will end up with is fake artists creating content optimised for conversions rather than art coming from their soul.
RIP my I5 CPU. This is perhaps the worst website I have ever visited and I am a developer that has seen many terrible sites. Is there a bitcoin mining script or something? Good lord, Firefox with uBlock origin couldn't even load it properly. This is the browser edition of covid
Yeah, I can see this improving my listening experience or whatever, absolutely. It will be totally rad, yo. I hope I can slap all the 300 V2 skins from my collection onto this, plus dsp_audiostocker—otherwise no deal, going to fb2k instead.
I have a mental problem with sites like this. I want to see what this is all about without endless and needless scrolling.
Greeting users with delay and some lava lamp blobs is probably not the best way. But what do I know. I am down to business guy so others might have different idea.
I don't really care what's going on here with a relaunch and flashy/bloated site (Winamp 5.8 works fine/great), but the in the footer playing the classic "whips" sound is a nice touch.
I don’t hate the EU for this. How did you extrapolate that? Also, when something has unintended consequences, the responsible party should own up to it—not throw their hands in the air and call everyone else stupid. What a ridiculous mentality to have.
>when something has unintended consequences, the responsible party should own up to it
That's exactly what happened. You really should read up about things you seem to have strong feelings about.
The EU declared the "EU Cookie Rule" (the ePrivacy Directive) a failure, due to malicious compliance, and was one of the reasons the GDPR became a thing. Ad companies really shot themselves in the foot there.[0][1]
> Something needs to be done about these cookie dialogs the EU imposes on the rest of the world. What a stupid rule.
This puts the blame on the EU, not on the Ad companies doing this, which is where I 'extrapolated' from; there's not another intepretation of this phrase that I'm aware of.
