Winamp Sucks

so i've switched from PC to Mac and I'm having trouble finding a media player that works properly. I just want to be able to play music. I'm not interested in creating a media library or making playlists or any of that jazz. Just want to be able to drag and drop a folder or double-click a file and get it to play.

iTunes - is just fucking awful in every way. It's as though the people who invented it had never understood people's needs. I'm sure last time I tried to use it, it tried to automatically copy all 2TBs of my music collection into low-bit m4a files on a hidden folder on my computer. Also, I never worked out how to get it to play an album all the way through without randomly shuffling to some other tune I played a few weeks ago. Terrible.

Winamp - Ah Winamp. It really kicked the llama's ass back in the day. Easy to use, not fussy about putting things into playlists etc. Just drag a folder into the window and it plays straight through. Sadly doesn't seem to enjoy life on my Mac. When I try to drag/drop a music folder into the window it says the files aren't supported. Lovely.

VLC Media player - Can't go wrong with this? Wrong. If I drag a folder into the window, it doesn't expand into tracks, it just sits there as a folder until I click to expand it. Rubbish if I want to copy a bunch of album folders into it. I've tried all the settings, including one which seems to say it affects this, but it doesn't do anything.

Elmedia Player - insists on showing me the album cover instead of my tracklist. The tracklist comes as an optional floating window which you have to toggle on. Not useful.

In conclusion: Media players are awful and Macs are terrible machines invented by a terrible company who prize compactness over functionality. Somebody help me out here before I lob this over-priced piece of crap out the window and go back to my trusty 2012 Asus.

Clementine?

i'll check it! thanks!

"Clementine Quit Unexpectedly"

*Sigh*

And people told me that Macs 'just work'

foobar?

let's try it

working so far!! :-) thanks!

crikey, that was a saga

foobar is still good yep

i mean Apple sucks but it works pretty well for me on the PC

I have not touched QCD in decades but apparently it was still being updated as of last year:

https://quintessential-media-player.en.softonic.com/

not convinced that that's a real QCD update

for macs i'd ask elvis telecom what he uses

so I spoke to a Mac expert friend who suggested I really do look into iTunes again and that the functionality, particularly in relation to things like Serato which I use a lot, can outweigh some of its shortcomings.
I've never put my music into libraries, rather I've always kept it in folders which are carefully alphabetised on an external drive and which I access via Explorer (and more recently Finder).
But the idea of chucking all 2TB into a library and risk a jungle of broken/mislabelled ID3 tags does put me off. Will it mess up the already labyrinthine personal system I've cultivated over decades? Will it confuse Serato and mess up its own very finnickity Crate system?
Maybe the wrong thread for this question I guess...

lol have fun

I use Small Player (https://www.igorware.com/small-player) for playing sound files. It's a tiny program, starts instantly. It's great. Just plays stuff and nothing else. I haven't used it much for listening to music for hours on end or anything like that (I do all that in Spotify), so I can't guarantee how it performs. I use it mostly for listening through single mp3/wav files/folders of my own stuff, and it's always worked perfectly for me.

Oh shit, I got your PC-Mac switch the wrong way round. Tough luck.

Foobar2000 still rules. It can use your folder structure to organise its browser and it's also pretty flood for managing metadata tags. Not sure where the Mac version is at in terms of development.

Pretty *good.

iTunes - is just fucking awful in every way. It's as though the people who invented it had never understood people's needs.

Alternatives on the mac are limited. There's Swinsian and a fairly crappy foobar2000 version (PC version is much better).

For mass-tagging on the mac there's Yate, Musicbrainz Picard and (if you like command line) Beets.

Don't know about mac but foobar runs very well under wine in linux and Peter is actively looking for bugs to improve compatiblity

people like IINA as a kind of better VLC for mac.
https://iina.io

but just to preview a file, hitting spacebar after selection lets you play it immediately.

toaster plugin suddenly stopped working correctly and i can't figure out why

ffs

Happy 25th anniversary to @Winamp!

The first version of ⚡Winamp⚡ was released as freeware on April 21st, 1997!

⚡🦙⚡

Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass! pic.twitter.com/sLYQUa0g5P

— Daniel Albu (@danielalbu) April 21, 2022

Lol

i always expect more from DJ Mike Llama after that, but he peaked with the Llama Whippin' Intro

I still use it! Just for double-clicking files in Windows to listen to individual tracks or preview things. I don't use it to organize music or listen to albums or anything. But whenever I double-click an audio file in Windows it pops up and it's somehow comforting that it functions and looks exactly the same as it did when I started using it 20+ years ago.

it remains my main music player tbh

scrolling back and reading dog Latin's Mac woes, i think i had similar problems when i changed job and settled on Vox, which has worked fine ever since

I've been using Winamp since the late 90s, and it's still my main music player.

My one complaint, which isn't really a complaint to be honest, is that the Media Library is really overspecced for what I use it for - namely managing multiple playlists. It seems like an overly complex early 2000s file explorer, kind of at odds with the main window and Playlist Editor.

Foobar 4 life motherfuckers

!

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/winamp-releases-new-version-after-four-years-in-development