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Comment by tuoret | Hacker News Reader

Ironically it's the kind of terrible modern UX design that would make me want to use classic Winamp in the first place (if foobar2000 wasn't a thing).

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Whoever is Winamp today, what they want to revive is not their old cool audio player, but just ride on the name and sell some modern piece of crap that has nothing to do with classic Winamp.

I imagine that in the age of streaming music it would be a hard sell to produce a new offline music player.

Yeah, and we don't really need one, either. Winamp5 and VLC and others all still work fine for those of us who keep offline collections.

I do both: stream and play offline stuff. For the former, I use YouTube Music, which is incredibly awful, but at least it does work.

The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.

For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.

Let's be serious, you're not the target market. Anyone who is using minimalist software is not the target market for any corporate software. The fact it would drive you away is a feature and not bug.

Pretty pointless to call it "winamp" if they're not targeting that kind of user.

Winamp was never a minimalistic player, it was one of the feature rich players. It allowed for all the UX/UI hacking you could get wayback then. It's just compared to today it was really simple.

You don't have to be minimalist to perform well. Like most other software from the era of 32MB-of-memory Windows desktops with two-digit-Mhz single-core processors, it had to be lean or everyone would hate it. That doesn't mean lacking features.

It wasn't lean in comparison to other MP3 players at the time. This is the thing I think people are forgetting. It was in comparison pretty much what that website is promising.

What MP3 players? Windows Media Player with the MP3 codec installed on your system? I don't recall there being a lot of options for Windows, at the time.

There were a few options. Napster for one. It's just the reason we don't remember is because we all installed Winamp and forgot about the rest. I spent more time looking for skins for Winamp that I did a replacement for it.

https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.

As someone who at the time had a Pentium processor at 100Mhz and 32Mb of RAM, I feel confident enough to say that Winamp was lean as hell.

Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.

Not even at 8000 hz in ZSNES? Also, by setting the frameskip to "2" the games were prefectly playable.

A Pentium 100 with 32 MB was a monster box.

If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.

There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.

The OS got in my way, rather than the player, trying to use 486 machines as mp3 "jukeboxes" back in the day—"the day" being when high-hundreds Mhz single-core machines were the norm, and 486s could be had at garage sales and such practically for free.

MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.

It was featureful but it was also high-performance. It was originally popular because it could play MP3s on systems where other players couldn't keep up.

...and the target audience has probably never even used or heard of Winamp, so if they're trying to ride on the name with that audience, it's going to be another fail.

Lots of people who originally used Winamp way back when are using Spotify, Deezer, etc. The target audience isn't an age group but people who want that style of music app.

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