The return of Winamp–and this could be very useful
If you’re of a certain age, chances are you’ll remember using Winamp as your digital music player/ripper on a desktop back in the day. Time has moved on, but 80 million people are still addicted to the program.
Winamp returned back in March but as a seller of NFTs, so you’re forgiven for not noticing. This new pivot, however, may warrant giving Winamp another look.
The relaunched Winamp will be an aggregator of streaming music services, podcasts, and radio stations. This will save users having to look around for all the different apps and then starting them individually. Everything will be consolidated on one dashboard.
This will be especially helpful for people who have subscriptions to multiple streaming services. If you can afford it, there are good reasons to have subs to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. You might even want to add Tidal and SoundCloud into the mix. It would be nice to have them all in one place, wouldn’t it? Add in access to online radio and podcasts and you have a handy little thing.
Learn more here.
If someone is still looking for or open to a different MP3 player, I cannot recommend Foobar2000 enough. It’s what I replaced Winamp with way back in the day. Originally it was really designed for power users to customise literally every single facet of it (appearance, behaviour, menus, plugins, etc), but it’s long been much more casual user-friendly. It was also originally lauded for having better sound quality on most PCs … basically it was able to skip sound drivers in Windows that could be colouring your music.
But the main reason in modern times to be using it if you still use MP3s or other digital music files, is that it can handle playlists or libraries of hundreds of thousands of songs, probably millions, without any lag. It’s lightning-quick.
I would love to see the visualizer modernized for VR using the Quest 2 so that the visual effects wrap the music around you in various ways. It would add at least a couple of more dimensions to the experience.