Winamp Sucks

I'm not really a big Windows user, but I'm on a windows system at the moment, and I found choosing an MP3 player to be a bit of a tricky job. I immediately chose iTunes, and was really impressed with it when I installed it, but then found that it doesn't really handle the media library feature as I'd like it to. I rip all my CDs to MP3 when I get them home, tag them up and put them in the right directory. Sometimes I move a directory or rename it, or download a song and stick it in an "unsorted" folder, and ideally I'd like the MP3 app to just find it when I start the program up.

I might be grossly mistaken, because it seems wrong, but it appears iTunes wants me to add my directories manually, and doesn't ever scan them for updates. This means that if I rename a track or move an album it gets lost and iTunes doesn't know where to find it. Similarly, if I delete a track, iTunes still thinks I want it in my media library. Winamp scans at a time you can specify (mine's set to every ten minutes) for changes in your "watch folders", and at startup.

I've not really got a way with words tonight, but hopefully you understand what I'm looking for in an MP3 player, so if you've got any suggestions for something better than Winamp I'd love to know, because Winamp isn't perfect.

In regards to the GUI, have you had a look at the "non-step" skin for Winamp? It's the only one I can cope with, and it's very nice indeed. Perhaps it's one of those things that suits my computer perfectly but would just get in the way for everyone else. And as for m4a support, you can get plugins to fix that. It also doesn't support FLAC from a default installation, but there are plenty of plugins to fix that.

Sknning is a bad feature anyway. It's one of those feature-creep features, the last one tacked on before the program becomes totally unusable.

i've tried foobar a gillion times but i can't seem to get the hang of it.

Technically the bloat is quicktime not iTunes, basically iTunes for windows is iTunes straight recompiled for the Mac. Quicktime implements huge chunks of the apple API to make this and quickTime work with minimal recoding on their part, it's basically a built in emulator.

It is not an emulator.

http://www.ezthemes.com/previews/d/dancingajigwa.jpg

What's the word, then? Clunky? Inefficient?

look at the upside down tabs here

wtf

x-post

Sorry about the obscene amount of screenshots, I was trying to get across an idea of how the windows are set up.

http://www.winamp.com/customize/component/2001/11/10/S/large_image/Oxygen_2.jpg

Did you just upgrade from MS-DOS 5?

I keep my mp3 files organized into windows folders and then click on the file itself when I want to hear it. Winamp starts playing it back immediately. That's all I care about!!

So why is Winamp better than the others for your purposes, Spencer? (I admit I switched to QCD because it had built-in OGG support but I think it might also have better mp3 playback plugins.)

same lol

I don't have any need for it any more but Winamp >>>> iTunes.

man, I used Winamp up until very recently and it never went wrong. Don't know why I use AIMP now and it's always failing to detect what sound card I'm using (I swap all the time)

Still using WinAmp 5.61, see no reason to change. It opens quickly, can handle massive playlists, doesn't crash (or at least it's never crashed for me), and does what I need with minimal fuss.

i also still use winamp

although it still forgets to be always on top all the time

I want to go back to winamp because aimp doesn't have the mini mode, so I always have to go and find it, and it doesn't understand that if I drag some mp3s in, they should stay in the same order. But where can I get winamp now? The only website I can find doesn't have any download links.

winamp 5.6.4.318 for windows installer (inside a zip)

lol @ me

the minute I post this there will probably be some kind of world-shattering exploit revealed, but until then I feel pretty comfortable saying winamp is a perfect piece of software

winamp was great which means it still is but i haven't looked back from foobar2000.

tried several times to get foobar the way i wanted it and failed; no doubt i'll give it another shot when winamp stops working

k otm

http://www.winamp.com/ -> "follow this link to get updated news" -> http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=374929 -> second post = download links for the latest version?

ok, plex on iphone is actually.. pretty good now?

so i've switched from PC to Mac and I'm having trouble finding a media player that works properly. I just want to be able to play music. I'm not interested in creating a media library or making playlists or any of that jazz. Just want to be able to drag and drop a folder or double-click a file and get it to play.

iTunes - is just fucking awful in every way. It's as though the people who invented it had never understood people's needs. I'm sure last time I tried to use it, it tried to automatically copy all 2TBs of my music collection into low-bit m4a files on a hidden folder on my computer. Also, I never worked out how to get it to play an album all the way through without randomly shuffling to some other tune I played a few weeks ago. Terrible.

Winamp - Ah Winamp. It really kicked the llama's ass back in the day. Easy to use, not fussy about putting things into playlists etc. Just drag a folder into the window and it plays straight through. Sadly doesn't seem to enjoy life on my Mac. When I try to drag/drop a music folder into the window it says the files aren't supported. Lovely.

VLC Media player - Can't go wrong with this? Wrong. If I drag a folder into the window, it doesn't expand into tracks, it just sits there as a folder until I click to expand it. Rubbish if I want to copy a bunch of album folders into it. I've tried all the settings, including one which seems to say it affects this, but it doesn't do anything.

Elmedia Player - insists on showing me the album cover instead of my tracklist. The tracklist comes as an optional floating window which you have to toggle on. Not useful.

In conclusion: Media players are awful and Macs are terrible machines invented by a terrible company who prize compactness over functionality. Somebody help me out here before I lob this over-priced piece of crap out the window and go back to my trusty 2012 Asus.

Clementine?

i'll check it! thanks!

"Clementine Quit Unexpectedly"

*Sigh*

And people told me that Macs 'just work'

foobar?

let's try it

working so far!! :-) thanks!

crikey, that was a saga

foobar is still good yep

i mean Apple sucks but it works pretty well for me on the PC

I have not touched QCD in decades but apparently it was still being updated as of last year:

https://quintessential-media-player.en.softonic.com/

not convinced that that's a real QCD update

for macs i'd ask elvis telecom what he uses

so I spoke to a Mac expert friend who suggested I really do look into iTunes again and that the functionality, particularly in relation to things like Serato which I use a lot, can outweigh some of its shortcomings.
I've never put my music into libraries, rather I've always kept it in folders which are carefully alphabetised on an external drive and which I access via Explorer (and more recently Finder).
But the idea of chucking all 2TB into a library and risk a jungle of broken/mislabelled ID3 tags does put me off. Will it mess up the already labyrinthine personal system I've cultivated over decades? Will it confuse Serato and mess up its own very finnickity Crate system?
Maybe the wrong thread for this question I guess...

lol have fun

I use Small Player (https://www.igorware.com/small-player) for playing sound files. It's a tiny program, starts instantly. It's great. Just plays stuff and nothing else. I haven't used it much for listening to music for hours on end or anything like that (I do all that in Spotify), so I can't guarantee how it performs. I use it mostly for listening through single mp3/wav files/folders of my own stuff, and it's always worked perfectly for me.

Oh shit, I got your PC-Mac switch the wrong way round. Tough luck.

Foobar2000 still rules. It can use your folder structure to organise its browser and it's also pretty flood for managing metadata tags. Not sure where the Mac version is at in terms of development.

Pretty *good.

iTunes - is just fucking awful in every way. It's as though the people who invented it had never understood people's needs.

Alternatives on the mac are limited. There's Swinsian and a fairly crappy foobar2000 version (PC version is much better).

For mass-tagging on the mac there's Yate, Musicbrainz Picard and (if you like command line) Beets.

Don't know about mac but foobar runs very well under wine in linux and Peter is actively looking for bugs to improve compatiblity

people like IINA as a kind of better VLC for mac.
https://iina.io

but just to preview a file, hitting spacebar after selection lets you play it immediately.

toaster plugin suddenly stopped working correctly and i can't figure out why

ffs

Happy 25th anniversary to @Winamp!

The first version of ⚡Winamp⚡ was released as freeware on April 21st, 1997!

⚡🦙⚡

Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass! pic.twitter.com/sLYQUa0g5P

— Daniel Albu (@danielalbu) April 21, 2022

Lol

i always expect more from DJ Mike Llama after that, but he peaked with the Llama Whippin' Intro

I still use it! Just for double-clicking files in Windows to listen to individual tracks or preview things. I don't use it to organize music or listen to albums or anything. But whenever I double-click an audio file in Windows it pops up and it's somehow comforting that it functions and looks exactly the same as it did when I started using it 20+ years ago.

it remains my main music player tbh

scrolling back and reading dog Latin's Mac woes, i think i had similar problems when i changed job and settled on Vox, which has worked fine ever since

I've been using Winamp since the late 90s, and it's still my main music player.

My one complaint, which isn't really a complaint to be honest, is that the Media Library is really overspecced for what I use it for - namely managing multiple playlists. It seems like an overly complex early 2000s file explorer, kind of at odds with the main window and Playlist Editor.

Foobar 4 life motherfuckers

!

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/winamp-releases-new-version-after-four-years-in-development