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Whipping the Llama's Ass 22 years later

Deleted member 12790

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
24,537
My all-time favorite MP3 player is, hands down, Winamp. I found winamp at a giant all-night Action Quake 2 lan party in the middle of 1999. Prior to that night, the only MP3 players I had heard of were hardware based units that were thousands of dollars, so when the dude next to me opened winamp, I was dumbfounded. "What the hell is that?!" I asked, and he responded by tossing me a floppy with WinAmp on it (and also said, "check this out" and opened a small program called napster).

But as the world moved on, WinAmp got left behind. Not because it wasn't still awesome, but because mainly AOL bought it, and then subsequently fucked it all up with WinAmp 5. In the Linux world, WinAmp was cloned into xmms, which was my default media player for years, but it's stuck on the i386 architecture and is a pain in the ass to get working on modern linux.

I've been on a quest to build a modern linux PC with all my favorite things from 1999, like an OSX aqua skin, and thus getting some form of WinAmp up and running was a main objective for me. It's 2020, and WinAmp should still live. Yesterday, I spent some time and got XMMS built by changing a lot of the source code by hand, but more than half of the features didn't work:

GSSKGNm.jpg


That's when Sappharad pointed me out to Audacious and my entire world has been flipped upside down. Audacious is actually a fork of a fork of xmms, the spirit of WinAmp directly lives in this media player. The best part is that it directly supports Winamp skins and even milkdrop. And thus...

ilTfvRR.png


Only thing Audacious doesn't come with is this file: Demo.mp3

Audacious is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows: https://audacious-media-player.org/

2020 is already off to a good start!
 
Sappharad

Sappharad

Member
Oct 25, 2017
290
Krejlooc said:
Audacious is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows: https://audacious-media-player.org/
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Correction: It's not available for OSX. It was years ago when I used it, but they removed the CoreAudio output plug-in for Mac and I stopped using it then. Even then I had to build it from source. I don't see any mention of Mac on their current downloads page, but it may be possible to build recent versions from source with the correct packages, especially now that they're rewriting the UI in QT for 4.0
 
Pickman

Pickman

Member
Nov 20, 2017
2,266
Huntington, WV
Neat. I had a bootleg copy of Photoshop back in 2001 and made anime themed Winamp skins back then that were unreasonably popular. I felt like hot shit in a very small niche of a community. That's a lot of nostalgia you just brought back to me, so thanks. If I still used mp3s I might check this out, but nowadays it's all on Spotify.
 
signal

signal

Member
Oct 28, 2017
40,186
Krejlooc is obsessed with ironic retro. Also audacious only works with classic winamp skins.
 
OmniGamer

OmniGamer

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,754
Just had flashbacks to my Winamp days loaded with .nsf and .spc files and cold fusion skin
 
Failburger

Failburger

Banned
Dec 3, 2018
2,455
FOOBAR2000 is my new love but Winamp was my first kiss.

I remember spending hours getting that UI just right.
 

pez2k

Member
Apr 21, 2018
400
I'm still using Winamp 5 all these years later because it lets me have just a simple playlist with shuffle and search, no stores or libraries to get in the way. Audacious sounds interesting though - I've had quite a few ideas over the years of minor changes I would have liked to have seen in Winamp, and an open-source player that looks and feels similar to what I'm used to seems like it'd be worth playing with.
 
Pbae

Pbae

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,223
Oh god oh god oh god YESSSSSSSS.
Thanks OP!
Does anyone know if theirs a Winamp kind of app for iOS?
 
Rover

Rover

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,417
It's 2020 and I'm lamenting where software has generally ended up after Winamp.

It's almost inconceivable now that you go to a website and download a piece of software to run on your computer, and it isn't tied to an account, isn't part of the cloud, it isn't trying to harvest your data, and is just free and works really well.
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

User requested account closure
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Oct 27, 2017
24,537
Sappharad said:
Correction: It's not available for OSX. It was years ago when I used it, but they removed the CoreAudio output plug-in for Mac and I stopped using it then. Even then I had to build it from source. I don't see any mention of Mac on their current downloads page, but it may be possible to build recent versions from source with the correct packages, especially now that they're rewriting the UI in QT for 4.0
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

corrected in OP. Fucking deprecation...
 
theSoularian

theSoularian

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,247
Winamp was my main music player for years. Windows 98 -- > XP --> 7. One of reasons I stopped using it was because I became really lazy (and eventually losing interest) in managing all my music files lol. Plus my music listening habits has changed a lot.

I tried foobar, but I found it difficult or too much work to customize compared Winamp.
 

Deleted member 7148

Oct 25, 2017
6,827
I used to be a heavy WinAmp user, but that was until iPods came out and basically killed that program for me. After that it was always iTunes/iPods and then eventually streaming services like Spotify which put the nail in the coffin for MP3 files for me.
 
Resetta Stone

Resetta Stone

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,515
Nothing, Arizona
I had to switch to Winamp recently because iTunes has recently decided to just...stop playing in the middle of songs or completely fuck up the EQ and have everything sound flat.
 
mute

mute

â–˛ Legend â–˛
Member
Oct 25, 2017
25,064
I use Musicbee these days but Winamp was nice when my library was smaller. I'd love to tinker with foobar but have never had the time.
 

Deleted member 1627

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
2,061
Bwahaha I was on a Winamp nostalgia kick a few weeks ago.

Such an amazing piece of software that defined that period of PC usage for so many.

RIP.
 
Pyccko

Pyccko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,869
Was just reminiscing about my favorite WinAmp skins the other day. Good to see others are keeping the dream alive
 
Teiresias

Teiresias

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,211
Seeing screenshots of Winamp immediately transports me back to my freshman college dorm room in the fall of 1997.

Since I don't play music on a PC as a matter of course anymore, I don't really have any preferred PC music player.
 
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