Winamp, the Best MP3 Player of the 1990s, Receives Major Update (arstechnica.com) 127
Winamp, the premiere music player of the late 1990s and early 2000s that was acquired by Radionomy from AOL in 2014, has received a major new update for the first time in four years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: The release notes for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 1999 say that the update represents four years of work across two separate development teams, delayed in between by the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the work done in this build focuses on behind-the-scenes work that modernizes the codebase, which means it still looks and acts like a turn-of-the-millennium Windows app. The entire project has been migrated from Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019, a wide range of audio codecs have been updated to more modern versions, and support for Windows 11 and https streams have both been improved.
The final release will be version 5.9, with some features targeted for release in version 5.9.1 "and beyond" (version 6.0 goes unmentioned). It requires Windows 7 SP1 or newer, dropping support for Windows XP. That said, in our limited testing the "new" Winamp is still in many ways an ancient app, one not made for the age of high-resolution, high-density displays. This may cause usability problems, depending on what you're trying to run it on. But hey, for all you people out there still trying to keep hope alive, it's nice to see something on Winamp.com that isn't a weird NFT project and a promise of updates yet to come.
The final release will be version 5.9, with some features targeted for release in version 5.9.1 "and beyond" (version 6.0 goes unmentioned). It requires Windows 7 SP1 or newer, dropping support for Windows XP. That said, in our limited testing the "new" Winamp is still in many ways an ancient app, one not made for the age of high-resolution, high-density displays. This may cause usability problems, depending on what you're trying to run it on. But hey, for all you people out there still trying to keep hope alive, it's nice to see something on Winamp.com that isn't a weird NFT project and a promise of updates yet to come.
Best MP3 player.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Best MP3 player.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Right up until the moment they decided it should play videos as well.
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Re: Best MP3 player.. (Score:4, Informative)
Or, ya know, just use vlc. It's clean and does exactly what's needed. Plays video and audio files without any nagging or whatever.
Don't see the point in using Winamp.
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Doesn't have that nice library interface.
Or Milkdrop visualizer.
Re: Best MP3 player.. (Score:5, Informative)
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How was this modded down? If it's wrong, a post explaining it would have been more useful to the conversation.
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Welcome to Slashdot!
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VLCs interface is nicely geared toward video playback, out of the way, the controls you need without a lot of fluff.
However, when it comes to audio, that interface isn't very good for me. I want an experienced geared towards "playing a bunch of short pieces in the background while I'm doing other things, with quick and easy access to go to next song and/or see info about the song at a glance and then getting back to my normal experience".
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One word: Milkdrop.
Oh, you'd like more? How about playing tracker files (MOD, STM, S3M, XM, etc.)? Still a better interface for organising and playing internet radio stations than anything else I've tried.
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Or why you install a proper music player like Foobar2000 first and VLC second. Even if Winamp was still in its 2.0 glory days Foobar is orders of magnitude better (and bonus points, it was written by a former Nullsoft employee who was pissed at what Winamp became).
Re:Best MP3 player.. (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, that ship has sailed, Foobar2000 is the best
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Yup. I'm on the foobar2000 train too. Its created by the same person that wrote the MP3 codec for Winamp. I've written a number of plugins for each, and found that foobar2000 while needing a bit more programming experience to get going, it has a hell of a lot better features. It has the best library management, and a nice minimalist design. It just isn't "pretty" like Winamp was with the skinning, but otherwise completely destroys Winamp in functionality and audio reproduction quality.
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Foobar 2000 with the proper plugins will play 5.1 audio (Mac Mini on my Marantz 6015)
Will try with plex
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incluscluding SDS and SACD rips
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Oups, meant DSD
Re:Best MP3 player.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I switched to Foobar2000 years ago and never looked back. It's got a very steep learning curve, but once you get it set up it does everything you could ever want. Library, temporary playlist, tagging, replay gain, all formats, visualizers etc.
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This is what I love about Slashdot. I did not know about foobar2000 until this thread. Thanks
It really whips (Score:5, Insightful)
If you know, you know.
Now do VLC (Score:2)
I'm always interested in good media players. I used to quite like VLC, but lord have mercy, the VLC for Windows 10 is completely shit. There's no menus. It forces itself to full-screen and I four clicks to put it in a window. It has a horrible interface. None of the usual Windows shortcuts do anything. It will often lock up and have to be force-closed.
Re:Now do VLC (Score:4, Informative)
I've never experienced any of that, and I use VLC a lot. Is it possible you have an old version?
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I prefer the win64 [videolan.org] version
Weirdly they seem to offer no convenient way to download it, you have to do a bunch of extra clicks.
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Yes, that was the answer. The MS Store version is terrible, but the version downloaded off the VLC website is fine.
Thank you guys.
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Avoid the MS Store. Nothing good comes from it.
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Not to mention there is a bug that they haven't fixed for about twenty years. Go on the wikipedia article "Roundhay Garden Scene" and try downloading and playing that OGV file. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It wonks out on every platform, haven't bothered to look but I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some sort of security vulnerability in there too.
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I used to quite like VLC, but lord have mercy, the VLC for Windows 10 is completely shit.
It's completely shit on Mac, too. Try pausing it and single step. It will lock up after a few frames.
It's stuck in the 1990s. The authors refuse to let a mouse click pause the video because of "DVD menus" - like anybody plays DVDs with it.
(And surely they know if there's a menu on screen or not)
They also have different shortcut keys on Windows and Mac versions so you press 'S' for subtitles and it stops playback on Windows.
Playback over Wifi will also stutter on busy scenes (rain, sea) because it still only
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what do you recommend as an alternate
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MPC-HC
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-... [github.com]
It isn't perfect, but it does a lot more things right.
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It's just going to add to what we already know about you.
What we already know? Like the fact that he has petty trolls following him who are happy to snipe at him for nonsense reasons?
My preferred media players... (Score:4, Interesting)
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https://mpv.io/ [mpv.io]
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Don't forget who wrote Foobar2000, a former Nullsoft employee ... started just after Winamp 3 was released. Presumably he was disgusted as what his former employer had done to one of the most beloved music players ever released.
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Thanks, I didn't know that till now/
Winamp was great through 2.x (Score:5, Informative)
After 2.x they started putting shit in winamp that didn't need to be there, so there was no longer a good reason to run it.
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Yeah, but they learned their lesson and made it a lot better when they called it version 5.
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At the time I was trying to save on RAM. I just kept running 2.x, which just kept working fine, and people kept making format plugins for it. If you weren't using the stuff in 3.x, there was no reason to change.
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It's amazing by modern standards. Back when winamp was hot I had 32 and then later 64MB at home, and 128MB at work...
Only before v3 (Score:5, Informative)
The Winamp 2.xx series was the best player of the 1990s. Everything got worse with version 3 and 5 was absolute garbage. Therefore, no, The best mp3 player of the 1990s did not get an update, it's crappy successor did.
Correction: (Score:3)
"the best MP3 player of the 90's"...until one version came out where they had turned a great little standalone MP3 player into effectively an internet-driven storefront.
Given that change was made relatively near the end of Winamp's life, I'm going to guess that change is exactly what killed Winamp's popularity the first time round. The new owners makers are apparently still missing that whole point though, as just from the new website, the storefront concept has if anything been grown.
I just want a good media player, all the internet crap just gets in the way, so I'm sticking with VLC thanks.
In Defense Of Winamp 5 (Score:2)
"the best MP3 player of the 90's"...until one version came out where they had turned a great little standalone MP3 player into effectively an internet-driven storefront.
Given that change was made relatively near the end of Winamp's life, I'm going to guess that change is exactly what killed Winamp's popularity the first time round.
One of the things I appreciate about Winamp is they made an incredibly modular installer. While the default install is pretty big and includes lots of unnecessary things, it's easy to customize all the way down. The config I just installed for this test was about 30MBytes, 80% smaller than a default install of VLC.
The default Bento skin is crap, I completely agree, but "Winamp Modern", with its color themes, opacity options, and better support of scaling for higher DPI screens, is a good compromise that can
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I just want a good media player
When Winamp 3 was shat onto the world, a Nullsoft employee quit in anger and developed his own lightweight media player. Foobar2000 was born. VLC is good as a movie player, but Foobar2000 is orders of magnitude better for managing and playing a music library.
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thanks, I didn't know about foobar2000. For me personally though, the fact that it's windows-only makes it not much use.
I do have a windows PC, only used very occasionally for gaming, but for anything serious I use sharper tools. My 2 main computing environments are Linux and android, and VLC is available for both.
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Foobar2000 is for Windows, iOS and Android, and the Windows versions runs perfectly under Wine.
It's an excellent music player, and well worth a look if you're serious about music.
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Awesome, thanks I wil.
Not so sure about their website. (Score:2)
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It's everything wrong with the web, and definitely does not bode well for the new version. I'll wait until I see a lot of reviews before I try it.
XMMS WinCramp (Score:2)
XMMS rulez forewa!
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qmmp rules in infinity + infinity time even harder.
What did WinAmp do to deserve the name calling? (Score:5, Insightful)
it still looks and acts like a turn-of-the-millennium Windows app
it's a program. Repeat after me: PRO-GRAM.
It doesn't deserve being lumped into the junk bin with your apps.
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it's a program. Repeat after me: PRO-GRAM.
App is short for application, which is short for application program. When someone says app, they are saying program... In modern English. Welcome to the present.
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App is short for application, which is short for application program. When someone says app, they are saying program... In modern English. Welcome to the present.
Not really. Nine times out of ten they are referring to a website. People are pretty clueless what they talk about anyways - not limited to tech or computer-related topics either.
Apart that, i'm also on the team that considers 'app' an ugly abbreviation. Has very little to do with `present`, unless you mean by present `clueless millennials`.
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Not really. Nine times out of ten they are referring to a website. People are pretty clueless what they talk about anyways - not limited to tech or computer-related topics either.
An application delivered through your browser is still an application. Not liking how it's delivered is irrelevant to that.
Apart that, i'm also on the team that considers 'app' an ugly abbreviation. Has very little to do with `present`
Mac users have been doing it since the eighties, but it only really took off recently — the ubiquity is the present.
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An app is user software. Software is anything running on the hardware. OS, drivers, apps, web browsers, websites in web browsers.
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No, it a website.
I've never head anyone consider Office365, the Windows 95 VM [win95.ajf.me], or Doom [browser-doom.io] a "website".
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Programs on mainframes have been referred to all along as applications. Using a web browser to operate a remote application on a web server is functionally not any different from using a terminal (or emulator) to operate a remote application on a mainframe. All you've just done is demonstrated what a noob you are.
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Nine times out of ten they are referring to a website.
That's not my experience at all. Even my mom knows the difference between an app and a website and she's a tech illiterate.
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Not really. Nine times out of ten they are referring to a website.
I've met some really dumb users in my life, but I've never heard someone refer to a website as an "app".
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apllication... application *of what*?
what was applied?
Can you not tell that it's a completely unnecessary word?
"application program", my ass
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"application program", my ass
In that case, bend over and prepare for input.
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App is short for application, which is short for application program. When someone says app, they are saying program... In modern English. Welcome to the present.
Huh? Have you been away for the last three years? These days we call them "experiences".
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Jim would like a word with you. (Score:2)
Jimmie is a nickname for James, but you don't call James Jimmie unless there's an understanding.
Apps are the Jimmie of applications.
No. I wouldn't. (Score:2)
WinAmp *was* the greatest player, but then succumbed to corporate greed, buried under features and bullshit unto uselessness.
Last good one was what, 5.666?
Personally I use WACUP or Foobar, community/os versions using root 5.666 code.
5.8? 5.9? The newest? Why would I POSSIBLY want to rejoin that when the last updates were all shitshows?
The point of WinAmp was
- easy to install
- easy to use
- very small footprint both HD and RAM
(Notice that "best leveraging of user data to be sold to 3rd parties" isn't on th
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Last good one was what, 5.666?
I'm using 5.623
(minimal version - doesn't support video playback)
Foobar2000 is the best now (that's not a joke). (Score:5, Interesting)
Check it out. [foobar2000.org] With PLEX and/or VLC as a secondary. I've run it with WINE effortlessly too.
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This. Winamp had it's place as a hyper efficient light weight media player at a time when everyone was piling on loads of crap into their media players (remember Realplayer?). Then Winamp 3 came out and shat the bed hard! Like diarrhea combined with burrito night hard. So hard that users reverted to using Winamp 2.
So hard that a former Nullsoft employee left the company and decided to create his own light weight ultra efficient media player. And within 6 months that former Nullsoft employee released Foobar2
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There was a gapless plugin for winamp back in 2.x and it worked OK for me. I can't speak to the efficacy in any newer versions.
Fond memories. (Score:2)
The moment when I first heard an mp3... and knew something seismic was up. Would I revisit it? Probably not.
I actually really like MusicBee these days, although it's Windows-only. Might be overkill in some ways but it handles my rather extensive collection with aplomb.
xv image browser update? (Score:2)
If only we could get a tasteful update to John Bradley's xv, still the best image browser ever.
It really doesn't even need much. Modern linux build compatibility, 64bit, multi-threading performance improvements, support for more image formats (and raw), improved image processing filter quality, maybe some modular support for tagging.
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If you liked xv, try nomacs, which has everything you asked for except maybe multithreading, I don't know about that.
API/Mini Browser Support (Score:2)
It would be cool if Winamp continues to support minibrowser capability. Perhaps it could be tied into Pandora, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and any other streaming music services.
An evolution into a media hub would be amazing.
It probably sucks now. (Score:2)
After all, it takes some real skill to make my entire browser stall while loading a webpage such that Winamp's NFT project managed to do. It instantly cast doubt on the abilities of the Winamp team to code in 2022 when they can't even make a webpage which loads smoothly.
Downloading it now. I fully expect it to need DirectX 14 and an RTX capable video card just to rendering the interface.
Re:ffplay, mplayer, vlc, ... (Score:4, Insightful)
WinAMP > WMP
As its always been.
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Yeah, but it's crap.
(still using winamp v5.6)
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No mod points today but definitely a +100 for you if I had them! ...but then I'm using Winamp 5.666 to listen to my ripped CDs while I type this.
And, yes, I do use VLC for video but never much cared to use it for audio. Winamp handles audio much better for me (with the Pimeer_Modern_v2 skin 8^).
I have tried a lot of different tools for audio and video play back over the decades but I've not yet found anything that works as well for me like Winamp and VLC.
Just my opinion and everyone has to find what works
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I quite like Windows Media Player, I still set it as my default audio and video player.
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Modern Windows doesn't come with a modern media player. WinAmp isn't modern, but it's better than almost anything, especially WMP.
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Have you really used WMP, it's pretty good.
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Modern Windows doesn't come with a modern media player. WinAmp isn't modern, but it's better than almost anything, especially WMP.
I'm guessing you don't run Windows 11. It comes with a very modern media player. A hyper modern media player so modern it makes you wish you were using WMP from Windows 7.
You don't need "modern" to have something "excellent", in fact I'm thinking the two are mutually exclusive. Foobar2000 for the win.
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Comparing against bundled, it's an easy win on the Windows front. Microsoft somehow never managed to put out a decent media player, despite the use case being pretty simple and straightforward.
Compared against other media players... Winamp at least seems to have an on-top, yet out-of-your way UI. Most media players in their most minimized on-top mode are at least three times bigger than WinAmp -shaded, and manage to have less information and controls than Winamp. Most media players seem designed around t
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Microsoft somehow never managed to put out a decent media player, despite the use case being pretty simple and straightforward.
I literally do not get the hate for WiMP, although let me just say that I've never run any version after what comes with Windows 7. Yes, it's bloated and not particularly fast. But it's also not particularly slow, it supports any media format supported by windows (which is all of them) and it has a lot of functionality. If all you wanted was a light and small mp3 player, you wouldn't run WinAMP after the 2.x series anyway, because 3.x is when they started shoving bullshit nobody wanted into it in order to c
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There's the task of 'library management' and of playback.
For 'dealing with untagged, poorly named files', currently I use MusicBrainz to do acuostic ID to make it a well tagged, well-named and organized collection. Then I toss it over to Jellyfin to make a competent streaming server as well as a group of directories. So I don't know if WMP fares well at fingerprint based song identification to compensate for poor naming or tagging.
For playback, in the 'standard UI' it takes up nearly a quarter of my screen,
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I will check out MusicBrainz next time I need to do that, thanks.
I've literally never had trouble getting WiMP to play a format, even before the existence of codec packs. If it chokes on file, you just search for the extension and windows codec, and boom! There's a download in the search results. Or at least, that's been my experience.
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MusicBrainz Picard to be specific. It has a bit of a curve, particularly happy to link a recording back to a tacky compilation rather than the actual original release of a track. So still needs hand holding for optimal results.
I would classify 'just search' as 'trouble', compared to other media players that pretty much had all the codecs as a matter of course by installing/updating. This is presumably better now that codecs have settled in a bit from the bad-old days of divx, realmedia, etc and now you j
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I literally do not get the hate for WiMP
Lets us see why people hate on WMP
It is bloated.
It is slow.
It COULD NOT play all audio formats. WinAMP and VLC both were better at it.
It had a horrendous interface.
The visualizations weren't as good.
A lot more customizable.
WinAMP allows me to hide the album art. Too many music apps do not allow this. I cannot stand having one section as bloated icons when everything else is text.
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Also: It runs Visual Basic script files inside MP3s so an MP3 can open your web browser and send you to a web site.
I'm not sure if they're disabled that now but it shows what WMP was designed for.
(and it wasn't to be the best mp3 player)
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It runs Visual Basic script files inside MP3s
I want whoever thought that was a good idea to be forced to testify under oath and on the record as to exactly why they thought it was a good idea.
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It COULD NOT play all audio formats. WinAMP and VLC both were better at it.
Apparently you're bad at Windows. WiMP will play any media for which you have a DirectShow filter installed. Name one format you can't find a filter for.
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Could not play all formats out the box.
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I have a feeling a lot of these WMP haters have never really used it and are just being haters.
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I love WMP. For naming MP3s MP3Tag is great and so is the developer.
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The graphical design and ergonomics of WinAMP (very compact yet readable and usable) is unsurpassed, and gave rise to an entire category of media players currently surviving through Audacious ( https://audacious-media-player... [audacious-...player.org] for windows and linux) which even supports WinAMP skins.
But in general it's the same as why people would install another browser, or another notepad application, or post-it application... Features, ergonomics, looks, reviews, recommendations from friends, all the usual ways people ha
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Functional. Minimal. Performant. Skinnable, and at least with 5.6 no other stupid bullshit like ads or anything like that.
It's quite literally the most minimalistic most performant streaming client out there for basically all non-commercial internet streams.
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No it's not.