What's the best Winamp alternative now that it is shutting down?
If you have visited the Winamp website recently, you may have noticed a banner at the top of the page stating that Winamp.com and associated web services" and "Winamp Media players" will be shut down as of December 20, 2013.
What this means is that AOL, the current owners of all Winamp properties, has made the decision to shut down the website, all associated services, and all versions of the media player Winamp as well.
Winamp was the go-to program back when it was first released and a lot of years thereafter. The music player had a lot to offer back then, thanks to its great list of features, plug-ins and skins support.
AOL acquired the Winamp team and technology in 1999 and things started to go downhill from then ever since. Updates were still released for the player, and a professional version was created to earn revenue, but innovation more or less stopped.
It was clear though that the player was neglected for the most part, and while it did earn AOL some money -- Ars Technica mentioned that it earned $6 million annually --Â the player lost market share and users to other services and programs.
The shutdown won't have an immediate effect on Winamp installations on user systems. The player will work fine for the most part even after the deadline has passed. Updates however won't be released anymore for it, which means that bugs or security issues won't be fixed anymore.
It is therefore best to look at Winamp alternatives instead.
Winamp alternatives
The following alternatives are divided into Winamp-like media players, full music management solutions, and other solutions.
I have listed a maximum of four in each category. If you think that one is missing, let everyone know in the comments please.
Standalone Players
One of the players that resembles Winamp on many levels is AIMP. The music player supports all popular formats, is lightweight, ships with a Winamp-like interface, supports plugins, and offers dozens of other interesting features.
This includes support for Internet Radio -- and an Internet Radio browser --, the creation and handling of playlists, an 18-band equalizer, file search, fully configurable hotkeys and more.
Foobar is another lightweight and highly customizable music player for Windows. It supports all major audio formats, the ripping of audio CDs, tagging, ReplayGain and Gapless playback, as well as fully customizable keyboard shortcuts and plugin support.
Another player that resembles Winamp on many levels. What is interesting about it is that it supports some Winamp plugins, which means that you can load them into the player to make use of them. While it does not support them all, you may want to give this one a try if you rely on a particular plugin.
The player supports all major audio formats and a lot of other features including DSP, net streaming, gapless output, a library, or full Windows integration.
Music Management
Apple iTunes may not be the most obvious choice, considering that it is rather heavyweight when compared to Winamp. While that gets you a lot of additional features, like the integrated store, it also means that it may take longer before the program opens and music starts to play.
It is free on the other hand, comes with a player that can play local music files or streams, and options to sync data between devices.
A cross-platform music player that supports a wide variety of formats. It offers integration of several streaming services, including those from Spotify, Groveshark or Last.fm, visualizations, smart and dynamic playlist support, and options to download missing cover art.
Media Monkey is available as a free and commercial gold version. The free version enables you to manage your music effortlessly. This includes organizing, renaming and tagging music, maintaining libraries, synchronization, options to play and burn audio files, and to identify tracks among other things.
Not so obvious alternatives /Â Other options
Besides the obvious choices, there are also players that may also be used as a replacement:
- Amarok - Another cross-platform player with a rich set of features.Various web services have been integrated into Amarok, including the excellent Kamendo and Last.fm. The player supports management features, dynamic playlists, scripts, and the option to import the database from iTunes directly.
- Banshee - Banshee supports a wide variety of operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and various Linux distributions. The music management software offers lots of features, including options to sync between devices, display cover art automatically or create smart playlists.
- VLC Media Player - VLC plays video and audio files. While its controls and features are basic compared to pure audio players, it is still a viable choice if all you want to do is play one or multiple songs on your system.
- Windows Media Player - It is the default media player that ships with every version of Windows. While it may not be the best or least resource hungry, it does the job just fine, especially if you have installed all relevant codecs to add support for some music formats that it does not support out of the box.
Closing Words
It is sad to see a program like Winamp being shut down, as it was part of the Internet for a long time. It is not clear why AOL made the decision to shut the service down, and not sell it instead to the highest bidder.
Another option would be to open source the technology, so that a dedicated community could improve and maintain the player and website instead. While it would not generate any revenue for AOL in this case, the company's overall image would certainly benefit from such a move.
What's your take on the shutdown, and which player are you using currently to play music?
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MusicBee is an awesome full-featured player that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
I agree.
Yeah, I have been using MusicBee (previously using Zune) for several years and never been happier. Developer also frequent on the forum to address users’ feedback. Feature requests are often implemented.
I totally agree the only alternative that supports all of the features of Winamp is MusicBee, The rest are lacking in some way or other.
I tried most of these before, and in my opinion you missed the best alternative available: MusicBee. It is also in the Music Management category, and it’s much lighter and works better than iTunes or Media Monkey.
MusicBee has support for Winamp plugins, the interface is completely customizable, includes classic visualization plugins such as MilkDrop, functions for renaming files, auto-tagging, downloading album art and lyrics, has internal support for scrobbling songs to Last.FM, devices synchronization for iPods, other MP3 players and smartphones, and can be remote controlled by Android apps (perhaps iOS as well, but I wouldn’t know).
It took me a long time researching for a good music manager and player, but MusicBee is the real deal.
Thank you!
Since I have Winamp on my desktop, laptop (both Win 8.1) and phone and tablet (both Android 4.3), I’d like a single replacement for both platforms. Any suggestions?
AIMP is available for Windows and Android.
This is what I see at AIMP’s downloads page:
AIMP v3.55 Build 1324
15.11.2013 | 7.27 MByte | MD5: bf99c6fffab7102e224e7b8916b19b0f
Preview
Requirements:
Windows XP SP3 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8 (8.1)
I don’t see an Android link anywhere (unless it’s in Cyrillic).
Here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.uas.media.aimp&hl=en
@steve hall: maybe look in the play store?
Here you go: https://www.ghacks.net/2013/06/05/a-first-look-at-aimp-for-android/
I like Aimp. Has ASIO support.
It also supports Winamp plugins like MAD decoder.
Foobar would be my choice, but no MAD support.
And it’s ASIO decoder sucks.
“After more than 15 years and millions of users, Winamp Media Player will cease forever as of 20th Dec 2013.
Winamp is the best media player ever built. It can’t be left to die. It must live on.
If AOL allows it to go open source it WILL live on forever and be in the hands of people who love it and use it every day.
Please help by asking AOL to allow this software to go open source.
Preferably GNU General Public License.
By signing this petition you are proving to AOL that:
1) there is a need to keep this project alive
or
2) that if it cannot be kept alive then it (the source code) needs to be released to the public”
https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/attention-aol-let-winamp-go-open-source#share
I have no intention of going back to Winamp and I’m not surprised that it’s being taken down either.Like many people,Winamp was the first video player I downloaded when I got my first computer.But I began to find out that there were many videos Winamp wouldn’t play.Some, just the sound would play,others just the video.There were even some videos that had no sound or video — the only way you knew there was a video playing was the time line moving along! I finally got tired of this,looked for another video player and uninstalled Winamp.The main player I use now? VLC video player.Plays almost every video out there{the few it doesn’t,then I use Gom video player}.But that only occurs a very few times.Go back to Winamp? No way! Sign some sort of petition to keep it going? You’ve got to be kidding!
Video was never the strength of Winamp and neither was the reason it became famous in the first place. So if that is the reasoning for not using Winamp (which would apply to other audio players such as Foobar), You’ve got to be kidding! :D
I bet you even didn’t ever install a plugin!!
@Marc, I completely agree, I think I used winamp for video like once, but after that I made winamp my dedicated music player. I never really heard of anyone actually using winamp strictly “for video” until now, and given they had a bad experience, I am not too surprised.
Winamp’s power is its plugins. The fact that I can still play some old VQF files and run visual plugins from the 90s makes it just that great.
JPS: Just like Marc, I really doubt any of Winamp’s fan started loving it as a video player. I don’t mean to be rude at all with you, but you need to be more informed on the topics you discuss about. Winamp is and will be the best media player with just its audio playing capabilities, even though is probably never was one of the best or more popular video players.
I was a fan of MusicMatch Jukebox (long before Yahoo bought it and killed it) I stupidly even thought by paying the meager license fee it might stave off the inevitable, but not the case. WinAmp has been my consolation prize ever since. Maybe when the Winamp AOL divorce settles out, it might be better. Pffft, what, am I dreaming? Whoever buys it (CA? Dell?) will try to squeeze blood from a stone and see their user base plummet.
I used to use foobar, which is a really nice clean player.
But I moved to Trout a few years ago (http://skwire.dcmembers.com/fp/?page=trout) and never looked back.
Trout was written by one of our members on DonationCoder.com and it’s a wonderfully clean and standard user interface, for those who prefer such things. Especially good at handling audiobooks.
-mouser
@mouser
Trout is really good but it does not support Cue Sheets.
I use VLC for everything.
I tag and organize my music with MP3Tag, and write my own M3Us. VLC queues new files to the current playlist, so it’s super-easy to create on-the-fly playlists just by selecting files or just launch a pre-made M3U.
There are skins, but I just hide the GUI since I use hotkeys to control it anyway.
I go along with that! VLC video player is hard to beat!
Will Shoutcast shutdown too?
That’s a good question that I cannot answer. I did not mention Shoutcast as there is no notification on the site that it will shut down.
Most likely shoutcast will end according to their post. But others like Icecast will stay
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=373778
I wonder why AOL is not selling Winamp or the shoutcast website instead.
I’m guessing because they don’t see it being profitable or wish to hold on to the source code / license. I am not surprised as the past while we have seen a lot of small companies and software being bought out and then shutdown with no real apparent reason. It’s a shame really.
The right Winamp replacement depends on HOW you used Winamp.
Did you use the classic Winamp design, a small player with a dropdown playlist filled with tracks?
AIMP is for you. It’s free and has everything you need in a tiny audio player.
http://www.filehippo.com/download_aimp/
Did you use the full-page iTunes style Winamp design?
MediaMonkey is for you. It has excellent advanced features and does everything out of the box. Audio conversion, podcast subscriptions, cd-ripping…
MilkDrop visualizations! All without needing to hunt down one addon or plugin.
But if you DO like hunting down addons or plugins, MediaMonkey has ’em too. My favorite re-numbers mp3 tags with leading zeroes, so you just select a mess of MP3s and tag them as track 01, 02, 03, etc.
http://www.filehippo.com/download_mediamonkey/
P.S. I used FileHippo download links so ya’ll’d feel safe downloading from FileHippo. It’s by the same company who does CCleaner. So. Good people.
Other free alternatives besides the above mentioned AIMP, foobar2000, XMPlay (which has an outrageous GUI) and Clementine:
1by1, Qmmp, Xion, Calaym, Audacious, Quod Libet, MusicBee, Winyl, Jaangle, Jajuk, aTunes, Nemp, and the ultra-minimalistic Hokrain and Mcool. Other two good, but now dead (abandoned) players- Spider Player and ALSong.
AOL destroys anything it touches- first Netscape Navigator, then- ICQ (in fact re-sold), now Winamp.
1by1 is fantastic. It’s my most-used audio player. But I think it’s a bit too stripped down and weird for the average Winamp user. You pretty much need to have your music arranged by folder, with numerical filenames and whatnot, since it *is* a directory player and basically ignores file tags.
What I like most about WInamp is that it can play virtually all audio formats, even exotic ones via plug-ins and this is the reason I still have it although it is not my default audio player. In fact Winamp has the hugest plug-in and skin base- the number of Winamp plug-ins and skins is amazing.
Perhaps the players that resemble Winamp most are AIMP (I don’t like its default skin) and Qmmp (which is available for both Linux and Windows).
There are two petition for open-sourcing Winamp:
PETITION – SIGN NOW to ask for Winamp to go open source
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=373763
AOL: Keep Winamp alive or let it go open source
https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/aol-keep-winamp-alive-or-let-it-go-open-source
Great, thanks for letting us know about those.
By the way I would rather stop listening to music than touching iTunes again- the worst, the most bloated, the most abominable program I have ever seen.
Yup. I’ve used some bad software before (Kazaa’s remade… whatever it was) But nothing was as awful as Itunes. I’d use ZUNE before I’d use Itunes. It’s slow, clunky, and has bigger memory leaks the Firefox (which at least gives you something for being a memory-use black hole, not so much with Itunes)
I have a spare install file for Winamp, so if nothing else…
Nightingale a fork of Songbird. Songbird was shutdown June 2013.
He said he didn’t like bloat.
My humble opinion: you should not worry about shutting down site for that player .. but if they are about to shutdown shoutcast.com, that’s something which affects way bigger audience and have more impact to many who doesn’t even use winamp for mediaplaying… someone should now raise question towards AOL, if they are planning to shutdown shoutcast.com and if that’s their plan, are they willing to pass that site and it’s functionality to someone else who could continue it…
It could be good time to act now until it’s too late.
Why is xamp not mentioned?
Do you have a link for that?
Here you are Martin. I made a typo (I’m at work :P) I mean xmplay.
EXTREMELY lightweight and customisable….
http://www.xmplay.com/
Hej XMPlay is mentioned :)
I have to admit its been years since I “exclusively” used Winamp… while I do agree innovation had dropped off once AOL got a hold of it (big surprise there, eh?) … if i remember correctly my reason was “just to try” what else is out there. I still do use Winamp for music, though it splits time with XmPlay (listed above in the article and I highly recommend) and the one I use all the time now (also in article) Foobar. Winamp didn’t “lose me” … the other choices I found (mainly the two I just mentioned) just seemed good TOO.
For Videos I use Pot Player, Gom Player (good for the few times VLC has issues with a certain video file, I find Gom Player plays that same file just fine), and of course my “go to” Media player for Videos, VLC.
I do have a few tools (including the mentioned Media Monkey) though I only use it for getting ID3 tags from the web.
Personally (like on my older PC with older hardware … I am sticking with Windows XP on that one), I am not against sticking with Winamp long after the development stops. IF it still works, then “why not?”
To me this is (another issue I admit it) Thunderbird not being developed (i remember there was an article here on Ghacks about it) … i mean there is not too much more they can do with it, not counting the obvious security bugs that are found for it. I rather a program “die off” then get bigger and bigger and bloated and almost useless
-Xmetalfanx
I also agree (though I do not see AOL doing it) that making Winamp open source and even possibly having different “forks” (if they are that different) that different developers can do and it all will pay “respect” to Winamp in a way
Aimp is the best !
I’m with you! Been using it for years now, never lets me down. I dont need another or better player.
Best music player is jetAudio.
Yes, jetAudio is good player for music. It has so many features like song editor, internet streamer, timer, converter and more. But for simplicity, foobar is still the winner.
Actually, given Windows’ superb compatibility, there isn’t any need to find an alternative for Winamp just yet. Winamp is not obsolete by any means, there’s an active community developing plugins and even the oldest versions to the very latest run fine on any version of Windows. In fact Winamp’s plugins for many of the stuff it supports add rare functionality than what most features have out-of-the-box. I will stick with Winamp as long as possible.
I will agree with your decision and has been first and last player since I started computer. But now, after upgrade to Windows 8.1 it started to crash and AOL shutting down the site, I have to switch anyway.
I’m getting familiar with AIMP since i can’t discover how to use foobar in “play, close and forget” mode, without adding files to the library. But i find also foobar most useful player hence the playing from archives and supported formats.
And I’m not so sure about iTunes as alternative to Winamp… It’s overloaded with useless features for simply playing the music.
Yeah, iTunes is a mess. A big reason why I jumped ship to Winamp in the first place was because it had ipod support and wasn’t iTunes.
Ya, iTune is a big mess. I even doesn’t use it with my IPhone and IPOD.
Foobar 2000 has been superior to winamp for a long time – another choice is PotPlayer running with a audio player theme.
just because it’s being withdrawn, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to work any more!
download an installer now, and keep it for posterity.
Sure that is right. But, as I said before, don’t expect any updates that fix bugs or security issues. Then again, I know some who have been running Windows 2.95 for nearly a decade without issues.
i prefer jetaudio or blaze media
Hi all,
I would highly recommend JetAudio, Free version. It is excellent and well done.
Cheers !
i used winamp, then mediamonkey and since a while now jriver (www.jriver.com).
and yes, i bought all 3 programms, and jriver won.
fast, nice gui, for me perfect (with a big library).
so for me jriver is the best :-)
I started using Winamp in the late 90’s and stopped a few years ago because I wanted something lighter that used fewer resources and foobar2000 (portable) turned out to be the best for my needs. But I did love Winamp.
Over time I have tried others including a lot of what’s mentioned here but I’ve stuck with foobar2000. It may not be the prettiest or most customizable, but I’m happy with it.
iTunes sucks but I need it for my iPod.
It would be nice if AOL released the source code, but what motivation do they have.
I doubt that we’d have Mozilla today and all that’s come from them including the dethroning of IE, Chrome, an open Internet, etc, if AOL had acquired Netscape before Netscape had released the source code to Netscape Communicator.
Honestly, whenever I see the word AOL, all I think of is constantly getting floppy disks in the mail and seeing them everywhere for free being used as coasters and things other than for Internet service.
Geesh, now I feel old. :|
So, you can try this one
[removed]
I wouldn’t try that one. Good chance it will install malware on your computer. If you want to download Winamp, go directly at the source.
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=374929
I will be sticking to Winamp for more years. I still believe that they can take it opensource and continue the project with more energy. If you have a look at Blender which was a closed source 3d modelling tool going for the cutting board and is now an actively developed open source modelling software.
Wait…. Blender was closed-sournce!? O_O woah, didn’t know that.
And the bunch doing that still has a user-base. AOL, take note. And I’m glad that Netscape managed to release it’s source code (which is where Firefox comes from) before AOL ate them.
Nice article, Martin. And great posts.
I purchased a license for Spider Player (someone else mentioned it above) years ago. When the developer gave up on it, I just kept using it. It has a great sound that I never could squeeze out of Windows Media Player. Periodically, I’ve done half-hearted searches for something to replace Spider, but I’ve never gone so far as to actually download anything. It was great to see all the info about these audio players in one place and with pics. I don’t want some great big thing. I want to hear music, not look at it or fiddle with it. It must be small, useful, and out of the way. You’ve given me some good choices and the posters added even more. Thanks guys and gals.
I suggest paying for Media Monkey. It is an excellent alternative and allows skinning, modding, and multiple plugin supports for various devices.
They offer a free version, but I would pay for the full version. Definitely worth it.
http://www.mediamonkey.com
XMPlay is my favorite of all that I’ve ever used for a few years now. Very lightweight, faithful reproduction of sound from virtually all formats, .pls streaming (shoutcast etc.) and winamp plugin compatibility (milkdrop 1 and 2 is all you need for visuals, though I rarely use them).
If I needed a music player that does what Musicbee does, I’d use it. It looks nice, albeit a bit heavier than I want or need. For how I handle music, XMPlay is the best.
I used Foobar2k for a little while, but by the time you bother with the hassle of making it look decent, it gets pretty bloated and defeats the purpose of using it at all.
RIP Winamp, my first music player.
XMPlay renders Cue Sheets (CUE) in an awkward and unpleasant way.
using Foobar since quite a long time now and to be true for me it has completely replaced winamp. So I would recommend it as the best alternative for winamp, atleast for me.
I think I haven’t used WinAmp for nearly or more than a decade now. JetAudio is the general multimedia player that I’ve been using ever since I stopped using WinAmp. I do use other players as well but I mainly utilise them for other purposes that specifically require other media players.
The aspect that I find most appealing about this player the capacity for the user to switch the programs default skin program layout into a ‘bar’ format which essentially slims that media player into a toolbar layout which can then be clingged to either the taskbar or the top portion of the screen and this is what I find most convenient about this player because once JetAudio is clingged to either one of these places in bar layout skin, all the other open windows will make room for the player giving the user unobstructed access to the player at all times, this is what I appreciate most about this media player and its the main reason why I haven’t switched to any other player, JetAudio does pretty much everything that I need it too, it comes with a multitude of other useful functions (which I mostly do not use) and it can play a vast array of different audio and video formates, the only crutch to this player is that it is depended to codec packs (like K-lite Media Codec) so that it can support certain types of audiovisual media containers.
I´m using Nightingale and Clementine.
I don´t know why but I never liked Winamp.
Give it a try http://getnightingale.com/
As being a user and big time fan of winamp since 1998, this was some sad news to me. I guess it was inevitable with AOL’s lack of support for it and every using itunes just cuz they have ipods.
At least the program will be fine in the coming years, there hasn’t been many radical changes in the past few years, but I was really looking forward to the winamp cloud service they were about to start.
I guess this is a long shot of a hope, but it would be awesome to see Justin Frankel buy back the program and get back to maintaining it.
I am stupid enough to have an iPod but not stupid enough to maintain it using the disastrous iTunes.
Justin Frankel will not buy back Winamp, but there are runours that M$ is negotiating to acquire both Winamp and Shoutcast.
You and me both, I have an ipod but I refuse to install itunes on my computer, winamp works just fine for my ipod
I have downloaded and tried many of the alternatives listed.
One huge question for those more knowledgeable – my music collection is close to a TB in size.
WinAmp was great at managing such a large collection (on an external HDD) without much slowdown.
One feature I really need is a ‘library’ feature, where I can view all albums quickly by any artist.
I love the light footprint and speed of things like Foobar, but every time I give it a look it just seems too basic. Can anyone suggest a good player for me to use, please? Grazie.
Have you tried MediaMonkey? Same here, TB in size, roughly 100,000 songs. http://www.mediamonkey.com
i really would suggest jriver (http://www.jriver.com).
my library is about 2.5tb of music and about 1tb videos and it works like a charm.
all on external harddiscs and its really, really fast!
using it since 2 years and still love it. worth every dollar.
Why not just keep using Winamp? I’ve used tons of software years after development, and some I have used older versions because they run better. Winamp will still work just fine, and plug-ins will still be updated by some of the developers.
Looks like everybody has different experiences with different programs. I never liked Winamp, was always a shitty program imo, so many other programs that people have mentioned that are better. I have a huge library of music and have tried them all!! MediaMonkey doesn’t look nice like some others but just my opinion, it does the job better then any other program, that is if you have a huge library like myself. If you’re a casual user and don’t have many files then maybe something with lighter resources might suit someone else. These other programs that people have mentioned don’t play nice with my library of music, oh, if you’re using iTunes, please don’t, much better alternatives out there.
Ahh! The good old days of TechnoAMP, er, WinAMP! Way back then, I had a system that would choke rendering mp3’s that were > 128 kbps. Then I discovered CoolPlayer (http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/). It’s amazing how things have changed over the years!
Winamp supports music playback using MP3 , MIDI , MOD , MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC , M4A , FLAC , WAV and WMA . Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default.
Any suggestions for an alternative player that supports ASIO out and plugins system (including VST) ???
sure, http://jriver.com/audio.html
I am in morning about the loss of winamp upgrades.
I looked at jriver.com. Maybe I am missing something there, but it looks like an itunes clone. One of the reasons I love winamp is it has a great user interface, not a crapy one like itunes…
If I wanted a giant list of every song in my library then I suppose I would just use Iturds
AIMP supports ASIO just fine.
I use it with a MOTU 828 MKII Firewire
Also uses Winamp plugins etc.
Don’t know about VST plugin support.
Any alternatives that support ASIO out and plugins system (including VST) ???
> What’s your take on the shutdown, and which player are you using currently to play music?
I’m mostly sad for nostalgic reasons. I started using WinAmp as my premier music player very early on in 1997 when the software was still in a pre-release status. From that point on, I was an enthusiastic user until Nullsoft, by then already bought by AOL, released the dreadful version 3. After I went back to 2.x again and tried the 5.x for a short while, I started drifting away to alternatives like foobar2000.
Today I manage my music collection with the Helium Music Manager (www.helium-music-manager.com) and use either AIMP or Mpxplay (mpxplay.sourceforge.net) for regular consumption. AIMP feels to me like the spiritual successor of WinAmp and with modern hardware under my desk I don’t mind the additional requirements any. If I’m on a slower machine or on my notebook, I love to use the command-line application Mpxplay, because it’s one of the least resource hungry players ever without missing any important features.
i’ve tried some alternatives for some years now …
wimamp + v 2.5 was bloated 4 me
can’t even remember some of the players i tried..
but i am a fan of MPC (media player classic) BE (black edition)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/
open source, built in codecs, basic layout with modern touch, fast, …
BILLIONS for nonsense like snapchat, and WinAmp shuts down.
It’s a Madhouse
I’m going to miss Winamp. I’ve used it for nearly ten years and had very few issues, compared to the slow, bloated crap that is iTunes. AIMP looks good, though. Guess I’ll start there.
Besides the ever growing plugins and features, the basics of Winamp has barely changed along the years. Even without any plugins/skins or whatever, I want to say that, for me, it is still the best one around. I have been using it all the time since it was born and I will keep on doing so. There is no need of alternatives for me. I am staying with Winamp. Of course, I won’t attack any of the other media players currently available, but for me Winamp is more than a choice, since there was never another one better than Winamp and staying longer. You can find tremendous ones, but terribly heavy and not really much better. But here’s one thing I will keep saying once and again. AOL never deserved Winamp. They never felt it as theirs and since they bought it I always knew that can’t be a good thing. I miss the Nullsoft’s Winamp times. I just hope that MS finally will decide to buy Winamp and make a better work than AOL did.
I was trying to compare the remastering of old recordings such as Pablo Casals. As I result I tried a few different players on Win 7.
I originally chose Foobar but then became frustrated trying to find the simplest plugins. I also started using it with its own WASAPI plugin and don’t like the way it sounds at all.
I’m a little confused by the lack of discussion here about the actual audio quality, and addons that do or do not improve audio quality. Are there suggestions on the best player(s) for audio quality?
Thanks.
That question really depends on the ear of the hearer, but make sure that the format you are trying to listen to is a lossless format, 96khz/24 bit if available, but make sure it’s lossless (like flac or alac, not mp3/aac in other words). Next, is the hardware you are using. If you are using your motherboard audio outputs, it’s usually subpar compared to some of the soundcards on the market today, and if you are running them to poor speakers, then nothing can really make it sound good.
Finally, and jumping on my original point, there isn’t really a player that’s best for audio quality on the computer, especially if you are playing mp3s or some lossy format. Decoding is pretty much the same, but at least with winamp they have a lot of plugins and their EQ allows you to tweak your sound to allow it fit your preference.
try dfx … and notice instant improvement (sort of equalizer, but really good)
i use built in hd-audio (realtec or so) with THX certified 2.1 speakers from logitech
sound is (very) good, but with dfx, it rox !
AOL is such a disastrous company, they were also the one who made to stop the development of Netscape an ICQ. I hope their company will be shut down.
Here is an interesting & still valid take on Winamp. DSD Jukebox. It is a front end for Winamp which acts exactly as a physical Jukebox would. Created by a German outfit years ago, but the website is still up (http://www.dsd-jukebox.de/pages/english.html), just been there. Recently copied this to a brand new Windows 8 Laptop & works perfectly (not quite portable – does make some registry entries – but does not require reinstall). Great for parties, connect Laptop to large screen TV via HDMI & people can easily pick their own choice of tracks or leave it alone & it plays randomly. Handles large number of files but does have to scan. Comes with a version of Winamp built in. Try it, I have used it for 10 years.
Well of course there is that had been mentioned before like mediamonkey, foobar and vlc. I use jriver media center 19 (not free), xbmc and especially in Linux I use vlc.
VLC media player for Windows is my first choice for the last 3 years but the Addons, Skins and Plugins in AIMP could tempt me away..
Al
stopped reading at “mentioned of”. I need a recommendation from someone who knows how to write.
There is another option, continuing to use Winamp using some form of community support through Winamp’s ability to use plugins to atleast extend Winamp’s life until Windows, drivers or software eventually makes Winamp unable to keep up.
I am very sad to see winamp “die”.
I use Winamp since the 1st version (1997). When i bought my Iphone (1st version) I had to install Itunes (piece of Sh#t). Now I use other programs to manage Iphone files, Itunes never!!!
To listen music winamp was my choice, now I will after 15 years need to choose another program :(
It’s sad…
Why isn’t Quinnware listed on this? QCD Player supports freeform skins, plugins, several languages and it quite useful as a standalone player.
I am still using Winamp as i ever did. I don’t think it’s really necessary to change it. BTW Winamp.com is still up and running so get there and grab what you need while it’s there. :D
I’ve used Winamp for more than 13 years. After I had reinstalled Windows 2 days ago, I learned that I could no longer download the Winamp installer from the Winamp site and since I don’t trust archived versions hosted on free file hosts, I decided to look for an alternative.
I am now using foobar2000 and I like it. It’s fast (I HATE bloatware) and it has a portable version which is always a big plus for me.
I use J.River Media Center with lifetime licence. This is best! :-)
J. River Media Center is not the best but glad you enjoy it and that it works for what you need it to do but not even close to being the best. :-)
“best” is subjective :p
Avdshare Video Converter possesses every good feature of Foobar2000 while avoiding the limitations or issues or bugs.