Technology

Uhhh

But does it whip the llamas ass?

What a shame that it isn't open source.

I'll happily continue to use Audacious with a Winamp skin.

...That site's UI looks like someone saw the marketing literature for the Frigidaire produce preserver and said, "Yeah, that'll do."

Lovely that it is open source, but dear lord that UI is a blast from the past 😂😂 👴👵🏚️

Strawberry doesn't support about a dozen audio formats I use, so until it's got wider support I have to pass.

And it's not like deleting will fix it now, it's been copied millions of times now.

They're sponsored by WinRAR. Those guys are loaded.

In its day Winamp was the most comprehensive media player and users were super into its skinability which was a big deal at the time. Nowadays the "plays everything" throne is very firmly occupied by VLC, with a little cushioned stool next to it for Media Player Classic to sit on. However, neither of them offer the user interface experience that Winamp does/did.

Winamp was iTunes before iTunes. It was Spotify before Spotify. It did an excellent job of managing the hordes of totally legitimate MP3's we all had back in the day, and did so with an aplomb that nothing else seemed to manage. Really, its playlist and library management was top notch. Newer apps still piss me off because none of them do it the way Winamp did.

Side note, if you have an old iPod kicking around and don't feel like dealing with Apple's ecosystem, Winamp can still, to this very day, stick music on your device natively without having to install or use iTunes. Just saying.

But this source code release thing really baffles me. I have no idea what the point of that was supposed to be.

I think I tried Winamp back in the day but never really understood it.

What was there not to understand? It was a basic music player with playlist functionality, a plugin infrastructure to support playback of pirated music in underground formats like MP3, at the price of completely free and no ads (the website had banners but not the player).

However, wanting contributions while retaining the exclusive right to distribute the software is anti-collaborative. I’m reluctant to say it might as well be proprietary again

As you describe it, that is proprietary -- no "might as well be" qualification necessary. Just because you can read the source code doesn't make it Open Source; you've got to have all Four Freedoms for it to count.

Foobar is still the best there is, although the classic style interface might not appeal to younger people.

Still miss foobar which isn't on Linux, though deadbeef is fairly similar at least. Never got the hang of all the beautiful themes/skins users put together for foobar but it was still my go to music player. Excellent layout customisation, tagging and conversion UI, as well as as nice range of plugins

https://git.cbraaten.dev/AtRiskRepos/winamp