I loved winamp. I miss winamp. The problem is, I don't have any mp3s. In college I found a giant CD book in a parking lot in the dorms. Realizing that it's owner was no where to be found, I walked off with it and ripped all the CDs to my hard drive (500gb at the time I believe) and forgot about the CD book. A few months later I was at a party listening to a girl talk about how someone stole a giant CD book out of her car in the dorm parking lot. That someone was me. I gave her back most of her CDs. I think some of my friends had pilfered some from me. Today, I don't have a CD player to rip CDs from, I don't have napster or limewire (thank god). I don't really know where to get mp3s from. I supposed I could torrent a giant stack of them. But there was a time when I downloaded all the music I listen to. I don't think it is a good thing. I don't seem to listen to new music as frequently. Streaming algorithms all seem to be unable to recommend new things and only recommend me things I have already heard. So while this project is great, I don't know how I would use it.
I go onto bandcamp and click around randomly listening to songs. I try to not focus on overly synth-y/lofi stuff on there (which is a whole supra-genre that's overflowing these days).... and you find a lot of decent stuff there.
Collecting up mp3s of stuff I like, sticking them on my NAS and walkman, and having it is a fun exercise, even if it's not my everyday listening collection. I do often open up a music player and listen to my MP3s pretty often, just to listen to an album I owned.
I do like listening to internet radio a bit, tho honestly a lot of that is "greatest hits" stuff, so discoverability isn't what it used to be.
Youtube used to be really good for discovering new music! But their algo is now "your recommendation feed is the same on every video" leading to getting Ben Eater recommendation vids after watching some video about biking down a mountain or something absurd like that. I miss real recommendation systems...
If you want all the "Name Brand" music, you can still buy a lot of it. I've heard iTunes/Apple Music is pretty good for such things. Personally I've been getting a lot of my favorite artist's music through BandCamp on FLAC. You can also buy singles on Amazon Music.
The indie scene is so much more vibrant these days. Literally anyone can self publish, and there are hundreds of thousands of amazing artists putting out excellent stuff. Usually I'll wander into some rabbit hole on Spotify and then go buy some music on BandCamp for my lossless collection.
I grabbed a USB BluRay player, which happens to work great as a CD player/ripper as well.
Thrift shops, library shops, and even second hand "media" shops are everywhere and completely drowning in CDs. (DVDs too but that's another story)
For a couple bucks, you can go grab an armload of CDs, rip them, play them whatever, and donate them back or resell them, get yourself some random seeds for music discovery.
Yep I see the same thing, thrift stores are drowning in stacks of CDs and selling them for super cheap. It will not be like this forever and feels like a golden age right now to snag good CDs.
I can't help you with the MP3 problem, but in regards to finding new music, I actually have found the SiriusXM service to be pretty decent. Between four or five different stations I do find myself regularly checking out music I wouldn't ordinarily listen to, and occasionally find stuff that makes it onto my normal playlist.
One thing that I wish Spotify (or any offline player, really, but we'll start with Spotify) had was the ability to track when there's a side break in an album for albums released and designed for listening on vinyl.
For an example of why this would be useful, listen to Abbey Road by the Beatles and notice the jarring transition from "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and "Here Comes the Sun" on, say, Spotify.
Then listen to it on vinyl - you'll notice you have to get up, flip the record, and then start it again between the two songs which gives a natural break without the instant tonal shift instead of a smash cut from one song to the other.
This would play out the same on cassette tapes, flipping the side of the tape between the two.
It's only with the advent of CDs and streaming music that this has become a problem. It's not the end of the world, but I'm kind of baffled that there's not a way to automatically do this using some sort of metadata tags and intelligence in the player.
The main thing Spotify is missing for me is to respect me as a paying customer and not shove down ads for other artists down my throat. Full-screen popups, not just once.
Seems like that's a scam? "It has been brought to my notice that my artwork has been misappropriated and used to deceive individuals into believing that they can purchase an actual physical device." [1]
Just wanted to add something in case anyone thinks Wesley Willis was just a bit of a joke act people enjoyed ironically[0], there is one album produced by Steve Albini where he performed with a band under the name "The Wesley Willis Fiasco" that's genuinely quite good. They also did a really fun cover of Girls on Film by Duran Duran that iirc isn't on the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arFMBo_W9io
[0] - listening to a whole album by Willis in one sitting can be a bit of a challenge, but his lyrics are undeniably stupendous
> As a solo artist, Willis filled his albums with funny, bizarre, tense, and often obscene statements about crime, fast food, cultural trends, bus routes, violent confrontations with superheroes, and commands for his "demons" [delusions brought on by schizophrenia] to engage in bestiality
Honestly the lyrics are so good, I cannot fault them. My only problem is that, as I said, it's a little hard to listen to a lot of him - he really leaned hard on a few stock keyboard beats so when you put on a whole album it's a little bit challenging. I truly love his work though, it's worth pushing through especially when you can slip a track like "Suck a Cheetah's Dick" or "The Chicken Cow" into the playlist of someone's house party.
This is interesting. I think they actually made Winamp good. I was around back when Winamp was big, and still don't get the appeal, to be honest.
Looking at the ESP32 version that seems kinda nice, but it's odd to see a program become more appealing well after its time. It's almost like Nullsoft accidentally designed a program that fit a tablet well before tablets were a thing.
In the original Windows app incarnation UI is very meh. The main appeal seemed to be making gaudy skins for it, but since they're just skins they don't change anything besides graphics. The big thing that was neat is the Geiss plugin, but that had little to do with Winamp itself, it just happened to be written for Winamp and not something else.
Now what I was really in love with was the old version of KDE Amarok (which now goes by "Strawberry"). Well done player, solid standard UI that's not limited by the fact that changing anything would make hundreds of skins useless and make lots of people angry.
I may be biased because the NSIS installer still somehow hangs around and is still a complete pain to deal with.
