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Comment by bcraven | Hacker News Reader

I use the community update of Winamp, WACUP, and it's excellent. I've tried other media players but always come back here.

I'm not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.

https://getwacup.com/

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They seem to be just as cagey about the licensing. Not that there's any obligation for people to be FOSS if they want to give software away, but the intentional avoidance of the question is always instructive. Just say that it's not FOSS, it's fine.

> Will it be free ?

> Yes WACUP will be free to download & to use.

> This is an independent project & due to the amount of time & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where the future will take me & this project.

I love QMMP ( https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/ ). It is compatible with Winamp Skins, supports network playing (shoutcast) and works pretty well in my Linux Mint installations. I may be old fashioned, but man my brain has got so much "muscle memory" on years and years of Winamp use during the 90s ...

I cannot live without stuff like equalizers, visualization plugins, Last.FM scrobbing and even automated track "ripping" of radio stations.

It makes me so sad the state of current audio players like YouTube Music, Spotify, Tidal and the likes. featurewise they are so... bland. Millenials and GenZs just don't enjoy music the same way I used to enjoy it. Maybe it is because there so much of it now that it doesn't matter so much

Have you checked out foobar2000? To me, it always felt like the true successor to Winamp.

foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata all at once.

A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.

> A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case,

I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy to customize almost any way you want. There's even a scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current layout.

As for the functionality they find it lacks, well, there's probably a component for that.

Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of functionality out of the box that other media players don't have, like the very robust features found in the "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.

to be fair, it's a lot easier to tell if you do or do not like something than it is to design something you do like. I run into that with vim colorschemes all the time

I find it amusing that modern foobar2k theming is based around Javascript.

you'd have a hard time replicating this UI [1] or other winamp skins in foobar2000, so i'm not sure i'd call it a successor except in the sense that it can play anything you throw at it.

[1] https://getwacup.com/screenshots/

I consider it a successor in that it's compact with an emphasis on user customization and community-designed plugins/components. Like Winamp, most functionality you get out of the box is provided by bundled plugins, and they can be replaced with alternatives.

Out of the box, you could certainly customize it to have a similar layout to winamp even if none of the dressing looks at all the same.

My layout[1] is certainly very different than Winamp, but still conforms a lot more to the basic shape of Winamp than the usual giant screen-filling squares that are iTunes, Windows Media Player or the Spotify desktop client.

1. https://i.postimg.cc/R0JzVTK8/image.png

I'm working on my own cross platform music player that I think has a more polished interface than foobar. I have mac builds now and will start doing windows builds soon:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

It's made in Flutter, well done!

Thanks!

Overall I’ve had a great experience with Flutter. I tried a few cross platform stacks before settling on it and it feels like the most polished and mature choice.

foobar2000 is great! I love the minimal (default) UI. Never even bothered to customize.

musicbee is my favorite

It's windows-only? Weird.

It's Windows only for now.

The architecture of Winamp is made of various plugins. WACUP is replacing them bit by bit.

Once everything is replaced then porting could be possible, though it's been only built for Windows so there must be a lot of Windows-isms in there.

There have been Linux-based clones of Winamp for a long time, such as XMMS (which directly supports Winamp skins).

XMMS is the O.G. but audacious and Qmmp now also support classic winamp skins.

5.666 installed and is running well under wine for me.

Weird? It's Winamp lol

Who's gonna build TempleAmp?

Music does not sound good on a PC speaker.

There are DOS-based MOD and MP3 players that output to the PC speaker.

With the source code someone can port it to make Linamp.

There once was xmms

Qmmp is still being developed: https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/

Before that it was called x11amp, and after that it's been succeeded by a fork that ended up being Audacious, apparently.

don't forget Macamp.

Remember that before Winamp, there was DOSamp! I used to use version 0.8. Playback was jerky on a 486DX2/66 but once I upgraded to a Pentium, it was smooth sailing.

Actually yeah I had forgotten about that alpha version awkwardly called “Winamp:Mac” because “MacAMP” was already taken by not-Nullsoft https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/winampmac https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macamp-10-preview-edition

And the Android version which I used briefly around 2010 before getting into Subsonic/D-Sub https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-for-android/29...

Yeah, if you want something similar for other systems, try x11amp.

(Yes I know it's not called that anymore and I'm showing my age).

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