You joke. I still use an old winamp 2.81 on my windows machine.
About 15 years ago I came across some plugin dll files that added flac support.
The only issue I ever run into is some non ascii characters in ID3 tags make that file unplayable. But winamp is perfectly capable of editing them.
It's even pretty good in the high dpi monitors because Ctrl-D enables "Double size" mode on the main window and equaliser. And the playlist window has customisable font sizes.
Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.
If you look at [1] you can see some derivations from Milkdrop/Project M.
There were a lot of other, good visual plugins and software. VJ software, specifically, but also Libvisual just abstracts input and output, therefore allowing you to use all of these (supported) visualization plugins on any supported media player. It isn't much developed anymore these days, but this is the correct way forward.
Looking at the actors in Livisual [3] G-Force is decent but also a couple may be missing from earlier Libvisual releases. You may also like Lemuria [4]. Winamp's AVS is also FOSS [5].
Agreed. I would love Plex (or PlexAmp and then cast) to have some built in visualizations. And I have no idea why some of those streaming EDM channels on YouTube aren't doing music visualizations rather than ten second loops of video.
There are some visualizers in the Mac App Store. I'm using Ferromagnetic right now and like it well enough. There are still visualizers in Apple Music left over from the iTunes days but they're kind of lame.
I stumbled onto one years ago by accident, maybe an Easter egg or something. I came back to my computer (Mac) after several hours of iTunes playback to see a hitherto unknown visualization running, with fairly primitive-looking graphics by today's standards. It was not any of the visualizations available in iTunes at the time.
I filed a bug on it with Apple and they got back to me asking how the hell I had invoked this, because they'd never seen it before. Never did get to the bottom of it.
>Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.
You can still do that. Winamp runs just fine on Windows 10/11.
What was the most fun and least fun you had while learning Swift for this project?
I remember having trouble making a Swift UI for my C app because I forgot to disable sandboxing in Xcode project settings. Spent a frustrating two hours debugging
The skin I saw most often back in the day had some dumb non-rectangular shape with a "texture" on it and the controls scattered all over the place. Right in line with the "skinning" fad of the early 2000s, which defeated the intuitiveness of GUIs and decades of their evolution.
Then came the even-dumber "transparent-UI" fad.
Fortunately both those died. Oh but wait: Here comes Apple, exhuming one of them in 2025! But Apple has always hated customization, so they probably won't be resurrecting "skins" too.
foobar2000 was released for macOS in around 2017, and I'm pretty sure it's still not really at parity with the Windows version. Not that it's bad, but just saying.
Ah I miss the days when my own music felt like something valuable (now it feels like a mess). When I’d turn on music via the computer (using xmms or Amarok hooked up to the amplifier. I feel a bit like Sonos and iOS/Android and Spotify are a trap. And I fell for it. I’m getting old.
404 error? Matt Greenwood's page is still there, but the winamp repository is gone. (Not all that surprising, as I expect "winamp" is trademarked, although there are still some other Github "winamp" repositories.)
Great project, I am using Audacious from homebrew with an XMMS skin to recreate the experience - but it struggles with HiRes displays amongst other things.
You should, however, change the name. I am pretty sure the name Winamp is trademarked and you can get into legal trouble.
It feels like making a UI with skins is a lot easier. Just draw the bitmap onto the window, and set some areas to be clickable (and change the bitmap of that area to "button is being pushed" when the user is holding the mouse down)...
I may not use this but I just had a pleasant five minutes reading through some of the source code. Off topic, but: I currently think Swift is the most interesting non-Lisp language. I tried Rust and didn’t particularly like it and I have given up using Haskell on anything but small fun projects.
Great to see useful open source projects. I now pay for YouTube Music but I still have an enormous library of MP3 music files that I have purchased over the years so I probably will build and run this player, at least for a few days.
This is awesome and I wish I could use it. Like a lot of people, I don’t have a music folder, just Apple Music.
I have a few things scattered across my Dropbox account I could collect. (Unless it could somehow use downloaded songs from Apple Music.)
Streaming music services are a blessing and a curse. I could never afford or collect the vast number of albums in my library. So lack of ownership isn’t a problem for me. The only downside is I have to use their app, which they have zero incentive to improve. :(
It's MIT licensed, so you can add it. they might even take a patch. I agree it's pretty lame when the space bar doesn't play/pause media in players though.
I've wanted a music player like the early versions of iTunes for a while, and this looks like it might fit the bill.
Those who've only known Music.app and later iTunes versions might be surprised to learn that there was a time when iTunes actually had a clean, intuitive UI: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app
Swinsian was the only Mac music player I could find that could come close to replicating my old MusicBee setup. The license fee was annoying but I paid it anyway and have no regrets.
Who even has mp3s and music files lying around locally anyway. I miss Winamp and want to run it again, but since I mostly use streaming services I can’t anymore
These days executing random code is standard and if you don't do it you're wierd. Case 1: browsers automatically execute code from random sources. Case 2: People tell you to curl someurl.whatever | sh to install compilers (ie, the only way to use the rust rustc on non-rolling distros). And it goes on and on. It's not really an exception to standard practice to install applications. The only difference here is that it is from an actual human person instead of a corporation. They are at least somewhat trustable, unlike corporations which always have their profit motive to sell you.
Also, if you only run programs that have been approved by a third party organization first you're really restricting yourself.
1. Browsers aggressively sandbox the code they run.
2. If you’re running curl | sh on random urls you don’t trust, you’re asking for trouble.
Running random executables you find online is a good way to get spyware and ransomware installed. I’m not saying that’s the case for re:Amp, but it’s absolutely still valid to tell people not to run random programs they find online.
I’m not entirely sure we need a Winamp clone on MacOS anyway. It seems unreasonable to expect that everyone who ever builds consumer software should make it work on every machine, though.
Why not also insist that it should work on iOS and Android? Those are undoubtedly the most commonly-used OSes at this point.
At the time there were. Between 1995 and 2001 or so most Windows applications had largely consistent interfaces (yes i can think of exceptions, like WinAMP :-P and even Microsoft's own Office didn't always follow the rest of the OS, but in general at the time following the OS style was considered desirable).
Same, actually... I'd probably just say "for macOS" at this point, since it is the current term from what I understand.
Aside: the project seems interesting enough, didn't see support for (icecast) streaming listed in the project though, which although less common today still exists.
That's how I read it, too! I got excited! "Finally," I thought "I can run WinAmp on my OS/2 Machine". Then I clicked to the repo and saw it was just a Mac thing.
The page itself has a more accurate description (Winamp *clone* in swift for OS/X) than the headline here.
Since the actual Winamp had a questionable source code release, it could feasibly have been ported to other platforms, so we need to know that it is in fact a clone, and not a port of the real Winamp.
The "About" section on that page says "Winamp clone in swift for OS/X" but their description says "Winamp macOS [...] A native macOS application..." Not sure I understand what OS/X is--I thought it said OS/2 for a second.
Joking aside, there's Audacious[1], which is an excellent and cross-platform player, with support for Winamp skins. Also check out WebAmp[2] and the skin museum[3].
IBM won the long game. They secretly acquired Apple, but you weren't meant to know that yet. Not even Tim Cook knows. Big Blue's lawyers will be writing politely to the author of this project, and teaming up with the gutted remains of Nullsoft to sue them for copyright infringement.
I know this was in jest, but had some of Apple’s and IBM’s 1990s plans came to fruition, we could’ve ended up with an operating system capable of running both OS/2 and Taligent (the original planned successor to the classic Mac OS) applications on PowerPC hardware (one of the few parts of the Apple/IBM collaboration that was realized):
I wondered initially if this was a winamp port for older macs.
It requires macOS 13.0 (High Sierra, 2017) or later, which is several releases after it stopped being called OS X. 10.11 (El Capitan, 2015) was the last OS X.
(I personally would accept someone referring to High Sierra as “OS X” because it’s still version 10 of the Macintosh OS, even if Apple dropped that branding a few years earlier.)
Not taking anything away from the project, which looks very cool, but it also probably doesn’t compile on OS X. Looks like minimum macOS version is 13.
Had Apple given their OS a proper name, I assure you people would use it. You shouldn't use the "OS" moniker as part an OS's name. It's redundant, like naming your child "Human Child Jimmy". Obviously people will take all sorts of shortcuts around it, which you will not have control over, leading to weird "HC/Jim" and the likes.
It's a bit like "U.S.A." not being a proper country's _name_. I mean, would you name you children "Coherent-Enough Assemblage of Bodyparts"? You keep that long-form stuff for the _description_ field! Somebody fucked up when they filled out the form, ain't no fixing it now.
Indeed. We in "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" made an even bigger fuckup filling out our form, particularly when the Short Name field is populated with the generic-sounding "United Kingdom" instead of a proper name.
I mean, muscle memory & fatigue may be part of it. I used MacOS for a number of years, then I used Mac OS X for 8 years, then OS X for 5 years, and now macOS for 9 years.
During that time I also used Windows and Linux from time to time. Their names didn't change in a way where just calling them that was perceived as incorrect.
If you want the original Winamp experience with full support of M3U playlist then don't go further than Re:AMP
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