If you haven't seen it, check out foobar2000 [1]. It was created by the same dude that made the original Winamp (which is now owned by Yahoo, IIRC).

[1]: https://www.foobar2000.org/

According to WinAmp folklore, he was a contractor for WinAmp 3 skins and not necessarily a full-time dev: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118192

You might be thinking of Justin Frankel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel

The connection is still kind of cool though!

Ah, thanks for the correction. I remember being told they had the same creator; that's what got me interested in foobar2000 in the first place, years ago.

Justin Frankel of NullSoft, WinAmp, WASTE, and now Cockos is a legend. (Also Gnutella IIRC)

He has nothing to do with foobar2000, which BTW has a very poor view of FOSS.

Foobar still can not do proper crossfading on track change!

Yeah, I guess I got the story wrong. Thanks for the correction.

yes foobar goes back almost as far! i prefer winamp's approach to libraries and playlists though. i also found the dev community around foobar not very welcoming (many years ago)

I switched to foobar2000[0] sometime in the early 2000s after Winamp 3 completely changed for the worse. I still use foobar2000 today.

[0]: https://www.foobar2000.org/

I use the latest winamp with Bento_Classified skin - resembles the v2.

MusicBee is much better

I have used the following in addition to WinAmp:

foobar2000

MusicBee

MediaMonkey

Foobar is almost perfect except the lack of crossfading and broken WASAPI exclusive mode output, which every other WinAmp clone seem to have gotten right, e.g. AIMP.

It really kicks the llama’s ass.

I found that XMPlay replaces Winamp perfectly. Tiny footprint (less.than 1MB), support for all modern codecs, active development, API and plugin environment, streaming. Combined with the minimal skin, it's my first install on any new windows machine.

In order to play HVSC[1], I switched from XMPlay to the far more heavyweight Foobar2000 because the former had a habit of crashing on files it disliked, losing playlist position.

[1] https://www.hvsc.c64.org/