You are romanticizing Winamp 2. It did many things, and not all well. It played a lot of audio formats besides MP3 as well as video formats. It was a damn SHOUTcast server. It had a frustrating playlist manager. It was skinnable. It had a hardware-accelerated, extensible visualizer. It had a damn RSS aggregator and website scraper for automatically downloading songs. And let’s not forget that it had support for syncing to many portable audio players, including the iPod. It was every bit as full-featured (or bloated) as iTunes.

> And let’s not forget that it had support for syncing to many portable audio players, including the iPod.

I'm pretty sure you're thinking about Winamp 3 or 5. Winamp 2, upon release (in 1998!) had no such feature IIRC. It didn't even have a "Library view" of all your MP3s, it only had a very rudimentary playlist.

The main thing about Winamp 2 was that it was fast. For example, the skins were just bitmaps (none of the crazy theming that Winamp3 enabled). The visualizations were delivered by a set of plugins -- all of which you could get rid of.

It's much more enjoyable to use, though. Perhaps it's the dark theme, or the analog-looking EQ but when I listen to music from iTunes, it just feels like I'm launching songs from an MS Office application or something.

I also believe that WinAmp just sounds better. Even after playing with the EQ on iTunes, I can't get it to sound as good as WinAmp.

> I also believe that WinAmp just sounds better.

I really dislike iTunes, but I find this claim hard to believe. In the audiophile community, we usually test such claims with double blind tests. Interestingly enough, a metal wire coat hanger held up just as well against $100 premium Monster audio cables.

It was a tiny file with tiny memory consumption and the UI was instantly responsive. It may have been full-featured, but it didn't feel bloated.

I've tried iTunes only once on Windows many years back and at that time it used to for download a small OS alongside it consuming huge amounts of memory even when it was not running. That is just wrong.

Reportedly it took a lot of convincing to get Jobs to OK the release of iTunes for Windows.

I've reverted to using Linux but I do miss just one piece of software. I miss JetAudio, the earlier versions. I think I first got it with an MP3 player that I bought on a trip to Australia. I'd later just pay for the app.

It eventually got some bloat with new features but the features they added were pretty nice, like ability to burn discs.

I do miss that app. I could possibly get it going in WINE, I guess.

In the beginning iTunes was really focused; fast and to the point.

Now i'm afraid of touching the media control keys of my keyboard and risk launching it.

I wish Android phones had something like Itunes. Can you buy an app or music on the play store then sync that content on with your phone, offline? with every possible Android device?

Apps purchased from the official Google Play store can only officially be installed through having the phone itself connect to the internet. You can buy the app from the web site and tell it to queue an installation to a device, but officially the device itself must be connected to install or update apps.

Android does support unofficial app distribution as well though. If someone gives you a .apk of their app you can just copy it to the phone and select it from the file browser to install it. You can update apps installed from the Play Store in this way as well, just the first install needs to be done the official way to get the license loaded.

Music is just files, you can copy them on and off the device in basically the same way as an old MP3 player unless you bought from a DRM-based provider in which case they'll be "protected" somewhere else.

There's no real need for an iTunes-like setup with Android. Your PC has no need to be involved in the app installation process and everything else is just normal files you can manage with the file manager you already have.

I pay for Google All Music Access and it lets me get any song they sell normally and stream it as well as download it for offline listening. Has worked wonders for me. The only thing I wish is that my Android phone had the 3 audio buttons I miss from my iPod Classic: play, reset / go back a track, skip track. At least my steering wheel lets me do it...

This doesn't tick all of those boxes but in case you don't realise - in the last few versions of Android I've had installed I've been able to set a long press of the volume up/down hardware buttons to act as next/previous track. I can currently do it through settings/buttons but not sure how it worked in the past, it might have been app-specific

Yep, can buy apps in a browser on your computer, and have them install on your phone. Music is a tad different, Play music on the phone can Auto download music it thinks you might like, and I would guess that it might do that if you bought a particular album.

Or if you want more manual control, Play Music can also be set to download the contents of a playlist (or artist or etc.) Add your new album to that playlist and it'll be downloaded.

Isn't that possible with play music with every Android version since (I think) 4?

The latest iTunes update removes the possibility to handle apps though.

I just use Groove on both android and windows. All my music is synced to both places and I can get music I acquired elsewhere onto everything by just sticking it in OneDrive

and you can get groove subscription for free by participating in the microsoft rewards program!

though its 70k points/year makes it the most expensive reward.

There is a glaring downside to that service though. I can't open the website to stream the music from ubuntu. The website just doesn't load.

Not sure, but maybe play music can do this?

Try 1by1

There are opinions that it did its main purpose of decoding mp3 not very well:

- http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/decoders_winamp2_62.html

- https://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin/

Most versions of Winamp 2.x had their own Nitrane decoder which is "inaccurate", some versions had Fraunhoffer decoder which is ok. However, I'm not sure if differences in sound are noticeable on non-high-end hardware, some people say that very noticeable.

Also, UI was super-cool and iconic but usability was not the first concern (back then, software had to be cool and spectacular, everyone used screensavers and players had to include visualizations). It was very small (I used 800x600 resolution but it looked too small), it relied on Windows file select dialog to add tracks and file select dialog is one of the slowest and most frustrating UIs in most OSes.