Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself

15 years on, Winamp still lives—but mismanagement blunted its llama-whipping.

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[kansanian]

Good read. Still using Winamp here after all these years. Have tried tons of other players, and never cared for them. Always came back to Winamp.
I don't want a "manager" and I don't want anything else in the way - Winamp still wins on this front, IMO...

VLC, for audio? No way. Random video files, sure.

Foobar - tried it, it's ok, but I wasn't sold.

iTunes/Quicktime, for playing anything? No way. Sure, it's neat to purchase something (I tried it the very day that it was finally available for Windows, and have bought a few things since), but it's too much of a mess for playback of local media. Too large. No need for all that code, or all of those services on a computer, just to listen to a song or fire up a short playlist.
--- I don't need its flat list of endless media, some of which it won't play (at least, not without kludging some workaround together - hello, FLAC is a real format...)---

Spotify, for general playback of local files? Tries too hard to look like iTunes, except more grey/black. (again) -- - I don't need its flat list of endless media, some of which it won't play (hello, FLAC is a real format...)---

Windows Media Player? Forget it. I don't want it crawling my drive, and I don't want it trying to impress me with tasteless design. Again, it's POSSIBLE to play FLAC, but why isn't this included in its default codecs by now?

(IMO) No other program beats Winamp for simplicity and ease of use, for local (audio) files.
Find file, double click, Winamp is playing the file - it "just works."

Sure, I also subscribe to Rhapsody, but I don't use it for local media. Would never consider iTunes or Spotify for handling my local files either. What a waste of resources and source of frustration. All this "media management" has ruined the simplicity of really managing one's actual media, via the actual file system.

Maybe I'm just old school, but I'd rather rip with something like EAC or FreeAC (formerly BonkENC) and know what the hell I'm getting, and then play with Winamp, than have some default 128kbps rip, in some folder somewhere, with who knows what metadata, etc.

Sad that AOL screwed up so badly with this. I still think it's a great music player program, and will continue to use it for my main machine, until I see a very good reason to stick with something else.

 

[kansanian]

Overlooking AOL's contributions (good and bad) The fact that it's still in use in light of the existence of VLC is a miracle.

One thing winamp does better than VLC is the metadata tag lookup, IMO but otherwise VLC is king and will not be displaced anytime soon.

(It goes without saying that itunes isn't even worth mentioning)

VLC has the great virtue of playing just about anything that is actually a video or audio file or stream(and doing surprisingly listenable things to a number of inputs that aren't supposed to be); but I'd never accuse it of being as pleasant as classic Winamp for basic music playlist wrangling.

Yup, I'm of the same opinion. VLC is great for video playback since it plays just about anything but the UI/UX for music playback leaves a lot to be desired.

Which is why I'm still using WinAmp after all of these years.

Another vote for this type of use. Video LAN player, right? Video. It's great for random video clips. Still prefer winamp here for music, too.

Not sure where they get their stats from, but I'd bet there are more of us still holding onto it than they think. Good software that still works, has no better alternative sticks around.