I like winamp, and continue to like it, because it gets out of my way. All the essential controls were readily accessible, including an EQ which almost all players lack today. The generative, music responsive displays were whimsically cool too. And it didn't constantly bug me to set up a play list for everything.

What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.

I used to use quite a few plugins in Winamp, as well. In particular, I always needed a gapless playback plugin in 2.x. Been so long since I've regularly used Winamp, I don't recall what other kinds I used, but I do know I typically used several. I probably had several visualization plugins, as well, particularly back when I was in college and would have friends over in the dorm. Music on in the background, visualization full screen.

Ah, memories of the dorm, winamp playing music, visuals in the background. good times. (:

Winamp is from a different era of computing. MP3s were new, GUIs were starting to be experimental, "skinning" an application was novel, and of course, the 90s style of form over function had an influence.

Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.

Oh wow, I forgot about Sonique until your post. I even made some skins for it too. I used it at the time because it was a very flashy player, but Winamp was more powerful under the surface.

Winamp always felt to me to be the pinnacle of functional. I ended up turning to Winamp for a whole plethora of stuff outside of music playback, like:

- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast

- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)

- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.

The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.

I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.

Regarding the plugin system: They had a few different categories of plugins. You had input plugins that let it get audio from a wide variety of sources. A few I remember fondly were input plugins that were little emulators that ran playstation / n64 bytecode ripped from games to play their music. Then you could have your choice of DSP plugins applied after that, a visualization and then also an output. The output could play the music, but it could really do anything it wanted, like encoding it to ogg.

Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.

ShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car.

Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.

Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.

I guess if you need those, that makes sense. I have never needed them, and when people talk about Winamp, they usually mention all the skins it had (it’s the same for MySpace and Geocities, 2 other projects I don’t miss).

Same. As soon as I discovered foobar2000 I never looked back. Still using it today.

I probably would, but I found I preferred the library management aspects of MediaMonkey (Windows, proprietary), so that’s what I use today. But fb2k will always have a special place in my heart.

I had to use foobar2000 because Winamp was too heavyweight to smoothly play MP3s on a 486 machine.

What wasn't functional about it? From what I vaguely recall, I remember v2.95 being able to service as well as any other player, and the media library was one of the few that seemed to understand the value of using stable sorts when re-sorting by a different column. And then there were all the plugins...

Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.