The Buy button is kinda signaling, that they don't understand, what Winamp and this whole time was about... New tools with a frenetic mdding scene behind it, max customization, no tutorials, but digging through every file to see what you can change, bulky windows, which all needed to be arranged aside, like browser, napster, icq, winamp, your cs server chat in a thick browser.

What's wrong with foobar2000? Used to be one of the best music players and you could infinitely customize it.

I see little to no information on whether or not it really whips the llama's ass

Pay software that doesn't have anything to do with Winamp.

Good retro feel. I don't mean to shift the spotlight away from the topic, but a great lightweight alternative is Tiny Player: https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/

Call me crazy but iTunes/Music has always been one of the things I like most about macOS, at least after going through the settings and disabling all the features trying to push you into a subscription. I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection instead of paying monthly.

me too, released two weeks ago on hackernews: https://github.com/chrisallick/light-crime-audio-player getting good reviews!

It’s great to see a modern take on the classic audio player focused on local libraries rather than just streaming. I also appreciate the transparent one-time purchase model in an era where subscription fatigue is so common among desktop tools. This looks like a solid, focused utility for power users who still value fine-grained control over their playback.

Does it support original Winamp skins?

Nice build. Will check it out. Winamp had a simplicity to it that made it great to use. Just enough config to not get in the way. I find that most modern players somehow emphasize configuration for the perfect playback experience when all you want is to just launch & listen with minimal involvement. Definitely onboard returning to owning more your own (purchased) content.

Cog is a dated but pretty good winamp clone that supports mod and s3m like winamp did. Someone should bring that one back to life instead.

Good feels overall, I also missed winamp. Thank you.

Does audacious work on OSX? Theres also xmms if you want to run it in xquartz

Looks very similar to IINA in design (to be clear I like IINA), so I’ll check it out!

Literally just installed QMMP on Haiku with the default Winamp skin because my partner misses the 90s.

DJ mode seems useless for DJ’s and smells like feature creep. KISS, YAGNI.

I love Strawberry Music Player. Works great and does everything I want.

Does it support Milkdrop2 visualizations?

but there is Vox.

Another alternative is Reamp, I’ve been using it for years, it’s macOS and directly supports Winamp skins. The site is a little shady though!

https://re-amp.ru/en

Cool. Now please make it support skins that aren’t rectangular. https://warped3.substack.com/p/direct-win32-api-weird-shaped...

does it support exclusive mode?

Sigh this is the same insanity that tesla brought into the car dashboard UI/UX, They removed physical buttons and now everyone is bringing them back. Same applies to music players.

Vibe coded?

I feel like iTunes/Music gets worse with every version, to the point where I've effectively abandoned it finally after macOS 26.

My music collection is some tens of thousands of files served via a DAAP media server - since macOS 26, Apple Music will only play music for 5-15 minutes before giving up and just stopping.

For years, it's had a trivially reproducible bug where pausing Apple Music while playing from a DAAP server, then restarting the DAAP server will crash Apple Music.

After trying basically every airsonic/subsonic/plex/etc. alternative, I finally settled on simply using foobar2000 to play from an SMB share.

I used iTunes for a long time with a library of around 1,000 albums. If you weren’t too lazy to add proper covers and ID3 tags, it was actually pretty enjoyable to use – especially together with an iPod. But the problem is that iTunes imposes a very “flat” structure on your library, while for some collections a hierarchical folder/subfolder/file structure just works much better. Not to mention that you can keep all kinds of related files alongside the music itself – booklet scans, lyrics, interviews, links, PDFs, and so on.

I imagine the shittiness of iTunes doesn't really show up as much with a music collection as small as 500 files. I remember it being a slouch with more files. I'm currently at 73,000.

I buy mostly music on Bandcamp and iTunes/Music is my sole driver for my 30k local song files. It's unfortunate that it has been neglected over so many years. There is a plethora of well known bugs and the sync with iPhone works most of the times, but not always and is in general quite cumbersome. The UI has become ridiculous over time (for example: it features two search/filter fields). It would be an easy mark to simply fix and polish it a bit. Sad.

iTunes/Music has its merits but in my opinion has been in decline since between versions 6 and 10 depending on the aspects being spoken about. For most of its existence it was subject to constant bloat and always felt a bit "off" compared to other Mac apps due to its nature as a cross-platform Carbon app full of bespoke UI widgets, and though its feature set got pared down and it technically became AppKit-dominant in the transition to "Music", it still doesn't feel right and is out of step with the rest of the OS.

A proper AppKit iTunes-style player with the best parts of iTunes across versions but without the bloat would be a beautiful thing. Even better if it's FOSS so it doesn't get abandoned a few years down the road, as paid players tend to. While there's several apps in this general direction like Doppler[0], nothing really nails it satisfactorily.

[0]: https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

Quasi-normie computer users: Linux will never take off on the desktop. I want to use my computer, not spend all day configuring it.

Also quasi-normie computer users: Windows/Mac is great as long as you go into Settings/the registry/PowerShell and disable all the user-hostile anti-features first.

It seems like most of the iTunes hate has historically come from people who used iTunes on Windows because they needed to use it to sync their iPods. Apparently it wasn't very good on Windows?

I do agree that it had been getting worse and worse on Mac before it was rebranded "Music" in 2019.

I also hate the idea of streaming, but I have been super lazy in the past

I have listened to 44,000 songs on Spotify over the last 13 years. It has brought me a ton of value, but I would love to move back to owning my music as files. I've been getting fancier with managing self-hosted infra at home, especially using AI to help me out.

Maybe I'll get back there, but I also can't imagine only listening to 500 songs!!!!

iTunes is still the best I have, mainly because it syncs well with iPhone, but also because it (kind) of just works, and I have a pile of applescripts to beat it when it doesn't.

I still wish it was a bit better at finding lost files, but maybe I'll vibe code something to do that for me someday.

(I'll have an album in the folder it doesn't see anymore, point one song at it, and it can't "find the rest" of the album, but I have to point each one out)

> I still manage my own ~500 file mp3 collection

Huh?

Just checked my 'collection':

     Total Files Listed:
           17250 File(s) 232,520,192,270 bytes
            6431 Dir(s)  1,053,563,486,208 bytes free

Not audiophile scale, for sure - but only 500 looks quite low. No wonder iTunes can manage it snorts.

complete opposite, i hate it

ITunes and Aperture were the apps that made me buy my first mac. Music and photos were just handled so easily, unlike anything else that came before. Smooth, intuitive and quick, everything else felt stale or broken.

These days Aperture is long gone and Itunes will let me make playlists where if I own the song, I can't play it cause it's not synced. If I don't own the song, it plays fine.

It's like nobody cares anymore, and back around 2008 that was the killer feature of the Mac - it was the computer and OS where it seemed like someone cared, about every little thing.

you're crazy