Darren Owen (Dr_O) keeps Winamp updated here at the Winamp Community Update Project: https://getwacup.com/
He's been releasing new updates every few months for the last couple of years, and it's great. It's still how I use/listen to a lot of my old Media that's hard to find on streaming sites.
It also still supports the DSP plugins, a favourite of mine is Stereotool. I wish I could find a way to plug DSPs into Browsers for streaming from Youtube Music etc, but I haven't yet.
Anyway - Winamp isn't dead, it's still Whippin' the Llama's ass.
You might want to look into EqualizerAPO. You could use a browser that you don't normally use (eg if your default is Firefox, use Chrome), set up a virtual output using e.g. VB-Audio Virtual Cable, have it to go out via EqualizerAPO, and then run VSTs or other DSP software via EqualizerAPO on that particular output device.
Just to double check; what is this thing? (site itself doesn't explicitly mention it, or I couldn't find it). It's like the last 'official' Windamp release, binary patched with improvements (by the author?), and then a couple of recent plugins?
"For those who don’t remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership (our former parent company) and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say it’s long in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So it’s with pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way."
Wait, winamp didn't work on Windows 10? Why is that? I've been using it -version 2.91- in Windows 7 without problems (in fact I'm currently listening to it right now). I thought that it was solidly programmed and that it could work with any Windows as long as the underlying OS API was compatible. Is that not the case?
EDIT: Ok, after reading the comments, it seems that Winamp does indeed work in W10. So I guess that this "update" is not really necessary and this is just PR. I understand the reasons, but personally I've never felt the need to update.
I use winamp 2.91 on Windows 10 as my main music player. It works fine except .wav files have clipping/static which doesn't occur in other players, and some newer formats are not supported. But still works great for flac (with a plugin) and mp3. I use the double size feature so it's not tiny on a 4K HiDPI monitor.
I modified the embedded app-manifest inside Winamp.exe because Winamp incorrectly claims to support high-DPI mode. After patching that I’m able to use Winamp on my 200% displays without turning on Winamp’s built-in pixel-doubling.
Noting that I don't use winamp, and haven't since I found foobar2000 back in ~2004... I would not even notice that as an issue. The last time I had a .WAV I needed to play was in Windows 95.
WAV is to audio as BMP is to images: the fundamental, brutal, unsophisticated, first-effort approach that also, coincidentally, because of its brutality, somehow simultaneously represents an apex of fidelity and impracticality.
All other image formats get parsed to recreate either an identical or approximate bitmap as would have been encoded into the BMP file, but usually with more features or smaller size, or both.
All other audio formats get parsed to recreate either an identical or approximate audiowave as would have been encoded into the WAV file, but usually with more features or smaller size, or both.
BMP has the ability to hold compressed data too; for example they can hold JEPG and PNG compressed images. I don't think it has the ability to hold arbitrary data though.
One case is DJ equipment - FLAC support wasn't standard for a long time so DJs may be forced to stick with WAV to be sure of compatibility with the pro kit installed in clubs.
Also now that many sources provide 24bit audio you need to check for that and resample to 16bit to be certain it'll work.
All this winamp talk!
This makes me nostalgic of hours of 15 year old me downloading every skin to find the "best one", and listening to the Fragile by NIN.
Boomy late 90s pre-9/11 days when everything seemed so solid and successful.
Between those two, young in a good time for sure. But really, just young in a time. Essentially none of the issues we face today are new in the last 20 years. You were just less aware of them then.
True, but with the near instant access to records of events via the Internet, we should try to maintain a distinction between what we remember/experienced and the digital chronicles of the era. I get the feeling that this is going to be even more critical going forward.
Sure but in 1999 you had access to the Internet. You were just using it to download mp3s instead of find out how many people got blown up in a synagogue halfway around the world. Not to single you out because I was doing the same thing. Also there's clearly more information on the internet today, but we also use it differently. Social media did change how we consume information and created feedback loops we didn't (specifically) have in 1999.
I think you have hit on something very important to internalize though. We tend to look at the past, and especially our youth, through rose tinted glasses. It's important to maintain a realistic perspective on history as it relates to the current day, especially because we know more about the past now than we did then.
My mom thinks the 1960s were a wonderful time to be a kid because that's when she was a kid. She might be right, but I struggle to say civilization was better in 1960 than in 1990 or even 2020. It's all a matter of perspective.
To put it another way if we think the world was best in our youth we probably also think it went to hell when we became adults and started looking around.
HIV/AIDS probably fits the bill or comes close. It doesn't seem as drastic as covid, because of the means of transmission. However, it was newly discovered in many living people's lifetime, and it did spread throughout the entire world relatively quickly.
The others that I remember being scary in media reports contemporaneous with the Winamp-ish era were Ebola (discovered in the '70s, an outbreak in '95), and SARS (2003), but thankfully those never spread worldwide.
> HIV/AIDS probably fits the bill or comes close. It doesn't seem as drastic as covid, because of the means of transmission
Actually, I take back what I said. Looking back at the perception of HIV/Aids (or "GRID" was it was originally known) it's terrifying in context because for a number of years there wasn't any idea about the nature of the disease nor how it spread - whereas with Covid we were able to narrow-down the virus' means of transmission within months.
I didn't intend to put you on the spot. I was equally surprised when I looked up the numbers. I knew HIV/AIDS death numbers were bad, but not that bad.
And as an FYI, from the same UN site (abridged): Yearly HIV/AIDS deaths have been reduced by 60% since the peak in 2004. In 2019: 690k deaths. In 2004: 1.7M deaths.
Things weren't necessarily better in the past.
Technology and science developments help! It's not all tech gloom.
I suspect you hit a point I never thought in that way.
Politically as point out by a book who we are (the we is American), the American dream as a furnace where all race lives happily together as American x (American American, American Mexican, American Italian ...). Obviously not paradise but the dream is alive.
2. Economically you have the chinese factor which raise up as cheap and very good labour source. And the America get the most of the value added. And the chinese seem to learn and even taste of democracy even (many experiment). Look like it is going to be end of history as all towards market based. Then Soviet Union collapse reinforced the good world.
3. The liberal of internet by a on letting commerical use of internet or at least access. The raising wave of a then liberal media (not to steal personal data in the west or monitor each movement by china).
That were all good and great. Hence 15-25 years ago the world is good.
We are suffered for the dream is not really happen.
The furnace concept is no good as many parts are not merging. They retain their only identity not as a property of American, and America whilst much better than china as more accomodating but nit sure how to deal with its elements.
China turns out is not towards a liberal country at all. Whilst based on its history it might be more left than EU but still one nay hope. But that hope dash and we have a Soviet Union v2.0 totalitarian communist spying race hating religion intolerance country, except this time it is all in USA economy. Fight it you hurt yourselves. And they steal so much you have not much left if not like the rest of the world surrender to its demand. Imagine Harvard today has to worry about its free speech in zoom is unimaginable in 15-25 years ago. Instead it may have to be silence to protect its student from a law in a tidy place called Hong Kong.
Internet is still free and liberal in nature. But it was cut so that country like china can go out and get what you want but Mit the other way round. I use vpn and pretend to be in Uk. I cannot even access many chinese site. But their TikTok and wechat can go to everywhere. Even their citizen is under the spell or monitoring overseas. It is so one sided good luck to the good side of internet. The bad side of access non stop meant monitoring 24 hours, by commerical or national nature.
After great saint you come great thief as Lao Tse has warned.
Wish they'd open source the thing already. Surely it can't be pulling the holding company much revenue at this point; I don't think you can even buy the premium version anymore. Just let me get a proper Linux port and I'll drop Audacious in a heartbeat.
And later versions of Winamp bundled or included popular third-party plugins and features too. IIRC things like Jump-to-File and the Media library were originally written by third-parties and were license-to or acquired-by Nullsoft... I think? Then there’s probably some stuff AOL added too.
At this point wouldn't it make sense to just rewrite it from scratch? I'm sure there are projects already doing this (take a look at this one for example! https://webamp.org/)
I mean again, I'm currently using Audacious, which even supports Winamp 2 skins, so it's pretty much the same aesthetically. And it works well enough for my workflow (which is that I rarely ever actually look at my media player--I just want to queue something to play and have it run it my system tray, with Play/Pause available through MPRIS or media keys).
Actually, I wrote Nullsoft back in the day to ask about that, and someone wrote back that it was NOT a Wesley Willis quote, but just something random they thought was funny. I always thought that was hard to believe.
I had used Winamp since its original release, but when development on it seemed to die off and it looked like it was becoming abandonware, I switched to MusicBee, which I thoroughly love.
Maybe there's better software out there, but I've yet to find it.
Foobar2000 is also in the microsoft store which avoids a load of 'find the right download button that isnt an ad pretending to be a download button' nonsense
Personally, I hate this attitude. Using a big corps walled garden just for a tiny bit of convenience. With just a tiny amount of effort you can find reputable places to download software. But most people have your attitude and now pc's have become like consoles, where a big corp monitors all your activity and decides what you can and cant do with your machine, and the idea of the pc as a personal universal computing machine is dying.
Reminds me of the Benjamin Franklins qoute
"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
Just replace security with convenience.
Also, yeah thats super melodramatic, but it is qualitatively the same imo.
I never could get over the way they get you to install it with the equivalent of piping curl into. Or the way it kept advertising the paid version, which is really disconcerting when something has become effectively the only way to manage what software you have installed (or will be eventually).
I've been using it for years, it drastically reduces the pain of setting up Windows machines and it has at least 90% of the software I want. I would recommend it to any technically competent user.
But to your second point, I don't think of chocolatey as a package manager to rely on. I just see it as an alternative download location, and uninstall the software through the Control Panel later.
We use it via the ChocolateyGet PS provider. I.e. installing most software (but not all) is now just 'Find-Package foobar' and 'Install-Package winamp' etc.
Also to add, a new feature in Edge is copying Chrome style browser sign in. If you sign into the store, it gets added to your OS level accounts. Then Edge sees that and signs you into the browser. Google got enough shit for signing into Google in Chrome signing your Chrome installation into your google account.
Also if you're not paying enough attention, the default signing into the Windows Store is to turn your local Windows login into a Microsoft Account login.
I'm not sure I feel any safer downloading from the microsoft store given some of the items that show up in search results. I don't think it's reasonable to assume something is trustworthy just because it's in the Microsoft Store.
Does foobar allow you to just start playing music without adding it to a playlist yet? I remember trying to switch off of Winamp years ago and was shocked that I needed to add files to a playlist before they'd even play. With Winamp you just search for the song, play it, and the whole album is added to a temporary unsaved playlist that automatically changes depending on what album is being played.
There's an option in fb2k to send opened files to a named playlist (e.g. 'New'), in which case it doesn't disrupt any other playlists you have open and just plays the file like Winamp.
Foobar just makes the hidden playlists of other players all explicit. That doesn't preclude what you're asking for. The best way to do what you're talking about is probably with the Facets component or the search functionality of the columns_ui interface. You can do it with the default library search but it will switch out the playlist that's playing as soon as you search for something else.
I'm with you there. I switched to foobar2000 back in the early 2000's after getting royally fed up with WinAmp becoming crashy and to be honest I just hated the UI (I never found a skin I liked). I still use it today as my main music player, it deserves more attention.
One thing I can't do with foobar2000 (I've installed the version from Microsoft store) is keep it playing while my Windows 10 tablet screen is off.
There's a "Edit -> Preferences -> Playback -> Prevent screensaver & monitor standby option when playing" option which I have enabled, but playback still pauses when I turn off the screen.
I have read that I have to adjust my Win 10 power saving options but I was wondering that surely there's a better way. Microsoft's Groove player can play with the screen off without adjusting my current power options.
I though more people would have this problem, but most players actually didn't support it.
What I wanted to do is mirror the stereo signal playing from the front speakers to the back speakers. Simple really, but Foobar2000 was the only player that could do that out of the box.
While Deadbeef is a great player in general, it doesn't buffer the data when playing from a network drive, which causes a playback interruption every time there's a connection problem, even for a split second.
For this reason I've been resorting to using mpv as an audio player, even though it's interface is not really designed with music playback in mind.
If you're worried, you should probably upgrade your suspicion of all software, not just Russian-made software. The fact that it's made in Russia should not matter much: You should audit the code, compartment it from the rest of your system (e.g. with virtualization), or not run the software.
You're right to be worried about what software you run, but Russia is not necessarily the most relevant threat actor. Take this as an opportunity to develop your threat model and apply mitigations where sensible.
Yeah, right. Russian developers have no time fixing bugs as they need to write the reports for their detailed FSB curator on how many backdoors they coded in this day.
On a serious note, there's thousands of ex-USSR coders involved in many important software projects. Does it really worry you? It does worry me as long as the software is not Free or at least Open Source, but then it doesn't really matter where the coders came from.
Yes, I was working in Silicon Valley for a company that was also using Mozilla technologies.
I remember the XULRunner meetups with them, in Mozilla HQ where the Moz people were basically saying:
- OK, our product is Firefox. We focus on fixing bugs that affect Firefox, so if the bug in XULRunner doesn't affect it you're on your own. Feel free to send a patch.
- Yeah we did that, the patch have been sitting in Bugzilla for 2 years
- ... shrug
Anyway even with full support of Mozilla they probably wouldn't have survived to iTunes+iPod, but clearly using a technology that the vendor has no interest in didn't help them.
I'm surprised anyone still does. Unfortunately that was deeply tied into the Mozilla stack, and they didn't want to be a platform vendor, so just running an old version isn't really tenable.
(To bring things back on topic, I believe a couple of people involved in Songbird was previously related to Winamp.)
I've always thought of AIMP (https://aimp.ru) as the modern sucessor to winamp. It has that braindead ease-of-use, with a lot of pretty impressive functionality and integration easily accessible from a standard install. Foobar is the choice for ultimate customisation, but i gave up trying to achieve what was present in a basic AIMP installation, and in several years of playing, coverting and tagging, the only lasting changes ive made are the installation of one skin, occassionally selecting a new highlight color for it, and initially pointing it at the directory containing my LAME binary, and dictating my file naming scheme for transcodes.
I only use a single playlist and thereby would like to get rid of the "default" playlist tab in the compact main window. Would you know how to do that?
I tried Winamp a few months ago and was disappointed to find that it's evolved into a media center more than a player. I was hoping just for a simple player where I can easily drop files in a running playlist, like VLC does. There were also some issues I experienced (that I don't remember), but I'm guessing they have been ironed out since win 10 is officially supported now.
foobar2000 is deceptively complex, it's probably the most complex and featureful music player. It's not bloated with stuff like online service integrations or whatever, but it is not basic, especially when you consider its plugin ecosystem.
So... why not use VLC since it already supports what you want? :-P
Theoretical purity aside (being an everything player, transcoder, etc instead of just an audio player) it is simple to use and lightweight enough (e.g. just opened an mp3 file and VLC's memory usage was ~25MB), at least for modern PCs.
Winamp at its core IS a simple media player. If you install it and don't include all the addon modules, you end up with a small, light player and not much else.
Seriously? It's incredibly slow to boot up and behaves really weirdly, also it seems to have drag controls even with a mouse which makes it a jarring experience to use. Immediately got Foobar2000 after using it for a bit.
Huh? Im not sure what you're saying, but it behaves like every other player wrt controls and never observed boot delay, it opens as soon as I click it.
My laptop uses an HDD too, startup times are bearable for me as I've disabled its indexing features (by removing the folders under the "Choose where to look for music" setting).
My needs are simple: I just need an MP3 track to play when I double-click on it, I have no intention to bother setting up a dedicated media system in the age of Spotify.
Groove does the job, and it even shows a nice, minimalist and no-frills UI while at it.
No offense intended by who in their right mind would boot off spinning rust in 2020? You can get a brand new 240GB SSD for $30 and a 1TB for $90. That’s ignoring the used market where you can get a solid used Intel for $10. If you need more storage buy a spinning disk for bulk storage - even if it’s a laptop, usb-3.1 is faster than the drive.
I was a die-hard Winamp user for years. Anytime I got a new PC and uninstalled the bloatware, the first of a few apps installed was Winamp. But in recent times, I don't use it much. I'll turn on Radio Paradise now and again, but am finding myself listening to Amazon music nearly all the time.
"* Improved: [in_mod] OpenMPT-based Module Player (replaces old MikMod player)"
The new plugin is not configurable. This is a shame, as I like to listen to my chiptunes without interpolation for instance. Hope this changes for the coming releases!!
Did anyone use the Apollo player?
As I remember it, it had the perfect UI and was very sleek, supported conversions and some WinAmp plugins. None of that Skin extravaganza that gets old really fast.
The winamp interface is really clean and efficient. Under linux, xmms2 has almost exactly the same interface and thats what I have always used to play mp3 files
Just downloaded this... changed the scaling for my 4k monitor and works perfectly. I think for my music listening I'm switching back to winamp from vlc.
I knew I had to get Winamp again when I saw a site with an insane collection of themes. Probably one of the only times I would make a switch because themes
Can relate to this, audacious was terribly slow in the past but it's a pretty good music player now. However, the Winamp skin hasn't dated that well imo
Quote: "Support for Windows Audio seems to be one of the key developments and this change allows for complete compatibility with Windows 10".
I always used Winamp as my music player, since 90's. Current version on it's files details says "version 5.6.6.3516 / Copyright 1997-2013 Nullsoft Inc". Never had any issues with it, dunno why they said that.
I never stopped using it. Still the best music player I've seen. The version I have is a little crashy on windows 10 though.. Sometimes it wont play music and I have to stop any instances of it in task manager, and the restart it before it works.. Its fairly common. I wonder if this new update has fixed that?
I wish they'd bring Winamp for Android back, imho it was the best option for offline libraries on Android and worked really well all around. Of course, I'm looking back through ~10+ years of nostalgia so I could be wrong.
Aside: if it's back as well, and I'm just unaware, apologies.
JetAudio was similar to Winamp, and arguable better in my opinion, because I can toggle the playlist window, and completely hide the player UI. I use it even today since 2006.
Kjöfel and Sonique were two other Winamp competitors. The great thing about each of these is they have a cool, skinnable interface. Makes it stand out compared to the rest of your software. You don't want all of your software that way though, and if you look at macOS HIG that wins. Including iTunes.
Wow. Been a long time since I've used Winamp.. but man was it good!
I used to have a ton of fun developing presets for the visualization plugins - AVS(Advanced Visualization Studio) and Milkdrop.. are those still functional?
I still use Winamp on my Windows machine with the Drone skin. It looks tiny in docked mode in UHD, but I know all the keybaord shortcuts and I'm not on Windows much anyway.
He's been releasing new updates every few months for the last couple of years, and it's great. It's still how I use/listen to a lot of my old Media that's hard to find on streaming sites.
It also still supports the DSP plugins, a favourite of mine is Stereotool. I wish I could find a way to plug DSPs into Browsers for streaming from Youtube Music etc, but I haven't yet.
Anyway - Winamp isn't dead, it's still Whippin' the Llama's ass.