ICQ plus Winamp was peak PC
I still use IRC to this day, just the client and the OS are different.
Winamp hasn't aged so well, sadly.
Meanwhile today Teams seems to think that it needs a whole screen dedicated to itself… a place that I get nothing done.
Everything wants to make a "universal media library manager". Jesus, doesn't anybody just want to name their MP3 correctly and then use file management, and then have an audio player that just plays audio?
IIRC, the last time I used Audacious, the default interface was a loosely-inspired-by-itunes kinda UI, but tweaking the right knobs in the configuration screens could get it to a Winamp-like UI (or at least XMMS-like)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_(software) confirms a lot of my recollection.
Audacious... eh. Setting aside the bad default interface, my experience with that is the same as with most media players. The developers decided how your music should be organized, and they're going to do that for you whether you like it or not.
Edit: Hmm. Looking into it more, I don't think Audacious was changing my media library. I've no idea what it was that was doing it now, I just remember fighting with something managing my library until I stopped using Audacious.
As an early fan of Winamp, what I have found is that most people do not want the Winamp experience these day. The problem with Winamp is it came with no music, only a JJ McKay promo.
There are many players that seek to emulate the Winamp experience but much of the audience for something like that have moved on to Spotify. Today's audiences want a fully curated experience from their "Player", which Winamp was never designed to do.
That's not outsourcing curation. That's basically cloud storage + file sharing.
Take the somewhat-recently popular Kpop Demon Hunters on my "cloud storage" music player of choice. There was originally just a good, cleanly mixed version.
Then up pops a Netflix-version that had wrecked mixing. And when my kid types in the name it'll give them the "official" version - the fucked one.
And don't get me started on all the other versions of their songs that then pop up of people trying to ride the popularity wave to get some plays.
I have to curate what the "cloud storage" player gives me so hard I'm thinking of dropping it...
no because sometimes I care about artist, sometimes about title, sometimes about year of release, album name, etc. Using proper metadata is important. I almost never look at a filename unless I'm moving data from one machine to another.
In an era of indexing and lightning-fast search of documents, there's little reason to care about filenames.