First of all, it respects albums. Other players like VLC and Fubar2000 would order the songs alphabetically; it's annoying. Also in the "artist" list "The Beatles" comes right after "Beasty Boys" the way God intended.
Second it has an "always on top" feature so you can easily control it while gaming.
Winamp was made for people who listen to music the way I do. You know, old people.
AIMP on Windows (and probably Wine). Has good converter and tag editor as a bonus. You can try v2 or v3, they are pretty different. Both support Last.fm scrobbling if it's still relevant. The android app is nice too but I haven't used it that much. It kept my evergrowing library nicely structurized, mostly folder-based, with a little effort. It's russian, but I haven't noticed it doing anything funny, and it's probably too niche since most people use streaming nowadays.
Anyone else remember what a huge deal windows 95 launch was? With The Rolling Stones.
It always struck me that “start me up” was used for the launch, since the chorus has “you make a grown man cry” in it. It could just be my 16 year olds sense of humor at the time though.
Apparently I'm as old as DOS 2.13, but only really remember using 5.0 and 6.22, must have been 5 or so at that time.
I remember Windows 2.0 on a b/w screen (more like amber honestly), played Reversi (without knowing how it really works) and used paint to make all black images and then use the eraser to play digital mole.
Foobar2000 has all of these features. You might need some tweaking, but foobar can do practically everything as far as music library management goes. My default sorting is album artist, album year, disc, track number.
As for song sort, if you meant sort by track number, it would be hard to find a player that does not support that. If VLC really does not support that, that is somewhat understandable, it is not meant as a serious music player after all.
Quck search suggests sorting by album will also sort by track number in it. Also I found 4 year old feature request for VLC Android for sorting by track number that was added 4 years ago.
DAE had that one copy of a song that everyone shared with a glitch during the second verse, and now you find it jarring to hear the song without that artifact.
I have an old copy of "American Pie" from Napster just like that. Couple little glitches at the start that gave me a twitch for years if I didn't hear it.
It's also what I tell people who like the sound of vinyl. The pops and hisses of vinyl are objectively wrong, but you can get subjectively used to hearing things a certain way. It's not better, it's just what you have always done.
Even that all said, I do like listening to vinyl because the whole process of listening to it is very deliberate. Like I'm preparing for an event and this is what I'll be doing for the evening.
Seriously. Everyone complains about how it was so much better back then, when you owned your music on physical media.
Meanwhile, the choice of music available to buy on CD's (and even LP's) has never been greater than today.
Plus, you can easily download whatever you want from any streaming service and burn your own CD's (but please don't do that, it violates the TOS and copyright!)
Or you can buy DRM-free music files at higher quality than was ever available on physical media outside of niche formats that were never widely adopted. Costs are not outrageous and you can listen to them however you like on whatever device you like, and the artists actually get paid and there’s no question of legality.
Yeah you can literally buy flac instead of relying on CDs to get lossless quality. Also recording these days is so much better, you could easily get a lot of good remastered version of your favorite songs now.
I bought a CD of Green Day's "American Idiot" and tried to rip it. The version still sold these days has some kind of copy protection on it that gives rippers fits (which isn't very punk rock of them). Tried a few different things, and then gave up and downloaded somebody else's flac rip.
It's entirely possible that I've missed more recent legislation, so take this with a grain of salt. Canada has a "blank media tax" courtesy of the record lobby back in the recording tape days. There was much pushback from consumers when that fee was applied to things like video tapes, recordable CDs, hard drives, etc, but still exists as far as I know.
The recording industry was pushing for laws more in line with other jurisdictions, primarily the US. The government was open to it, but would then abolish the fees on blank media. Industry backed down because they get more from that fee distribution than they would ever get by having more restrictions. Of course, that doesn't stop them from trying to shame us or blow smoke up our asses.
That means we are already paying a licence fee allowing us to copy recorded or broadcast material for personal use. "Personal use" is defined by what it's not: rebroadcast, playing for the general public, and reselling. Thus, making a strictly personal copy is fine, as is making a copy for a friend, copying from an original you've borrowed (from a friend or from the library), recording legal broadcasts (like from radio, etc), and recording concerts unless the terms of admission expressly forbid it, etc.
I recently began de-corpoing my life, and spotify is my most recent cancellation after I was a premium subscriber since soon after its launch.
Took a bit of effort to convert my library, but I found a useful app to automate the process. And now I have my library back, offline and on my devices forever and for free.
It's actually kind of empowering, reclaiming your life from subscription hell and corporate voyeurism.
This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days. I'd love to have a massive media library stored locally, so that I'm not chained to streaming services.
Or just buy on Bandcamp if the artist is on there. Support artists really directly (they get 85-90% of what you pay for an item) and you usually get a royalty free lossless download as well as subscription-less streaming.
Hope recent dealings doesn't fuck up this absolute gem of a site.
I did a bit of web searching and found spotDL on github, you can give it Spotify playlists to convert and it will search them on YouTube/YouTube music, and output them as local files.
Includes metadata and can output in different formats too. It works great about 99% of the time, though you sometimes need to search manually for individual songs it couldn't match somehow. But that were about a dozen tracks out of over 4k for me.
If you are interested in the other things I did/found aside from music feel free to ask
I'm not an audiophile or anything, but on my in ears it sounds fine to me. Though I only made mp3s so far, but iirc it can do flac too. I'd imagine those have better quality
Just today I was listening to a Tidal Playlist amongst friends and the whole thing seized up and just stopped playing music all together when it ran into a song on the Playlist that apparently Tidal lost the rights to. Really frustrating when your music library is in flux at the whim of corporate dealings.
For me, this is just a place I knew to never go. The writing was on the wall when Warcraft 2/3 became World of Warcraft, one of the first subscription based game.
I'd already been pirating software, music, and games by then and just, stayed on that path. Never so much as used Netflix or Spotify.
Definitely did. Dad was a stoner, I was too young to get stoned, we both sat and watched it for ages while dad shared his favorite tunes with me. Ah, good times.
Not that I was (much obliged to lets just forget present tense exists and is a thing) popular enough to go to pool parties let alone get drunk at one,
But aside from eminem and robbie whoever, i definitely have a playlist on winamp on my computer at this moment with those exact songs in it. It was probably created when i was a teenager lol
Back in my day, I had an old computer I stuffed under my desk that I installed Linux on. It's only job was to connect to a cifs share where I kept my (totally legally obtained) music, and play it using xmms2.
I did that so I could reduce the fairly minor load that winamp would put on my system while gaming. I had my PC and this music box both connected to a small mixer where I plugged in my headphones. So I could listen to whatever I wanted and had a dedicated screen and keyboard to control xmms2, so I didn't have to alt-tab my gaming computer when I wanted to change tracks. Between the convenience of the control and the small benefit I got while using my computer, it was a nice setup that lasted me a long time I eventually stopped using it when I moved one time, I just didn't bother to set it back up, and I eventually found that all the sliders in my mixer were messed up. From lack of use.
I'm sad to hear that xmms2 also had a similar problem of being more or less ignored and falling into disrepair. It was a good alternative to winamp on my desktop. Everything was very very similar, so it was very easy to swap between them.
I also similarly stopped using winamp, because reasons. I suppose the go to music player is now foobar2000.
I was still using Milkdrop 2 visualizations on Foobar until I stopped using Windows a couple of years ago. If anyone knows how to use Milkdrop with MPD on Linux, you'd make me very happy.
Maybe some part of https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm would work for that? I had milkdrop visualizations working on an osmc [Kodi] install on a Raspberry Pi so I'd assume there must be a way.
I've converted my music library to opus and it's all offline, on my phone and PC. It's the only way to listen to some things that get caught in licensing hell, and that's only going to get worse over time.
It's an open source codec. I convert from FLAC (lossless) to Opus (lossy), I couldn't hear much if any difference between FLAC and 128kbits opus, your mileage may vary, but it saves me 10x space, very useful for a big library on an SD card compared to lossless.
Reasonable audiophiles usually agree that 320kbps mp3s are as good ar raw/wav/FLAC. They're maybe twice the size of 128 ones IIRC, who everyone notice the drop of quality in. 160 is okay IMO for walkman or car territory.
You cannot compare kbps numbers of files encoded with different codecs and make assumptions on quality.
Each codec is able to compress differently good, so a 64kbps in opus sounds much better than 64kbps in mp3, for instance. 128 kbps in opus for stereo is plenty, quasi-lossless, while on other formats it is pretty bad.
I used Coolplayer and had a totally awesome Phantom Menace podracing viewer tablet skin I made myself. There was transparency, and the red light I included for shuffle had shading like a real LED, and you could put the buttons ANYWHERE!
I forgot about Winamp! I'm going to have to give it a try again. The last time I used it was in 2013, because there was a plugin for extracting the music from Turbografx roms to .wav files. The soundtrack of my childhood.
This I can't speak to, so I'll have to give it a shot. But VLC for a desktop media manager overall is on par with MPC-HC. Like, sure you can force it to do that. But it's never going to be as competent as a dedicated app.
Hell even the Winamp revival project WACUP would dare better I wager.
They aren't cut off in the middle, the wrong song, labeled with the wrong artist, a "rip" from somebody with a microphone and FM radio, corporate honeypots, or literal viruses.
At least now it is pretty simple. Not sure about Spotify, but you can download exact audio files Deezer has. That's my favorite method unless Deezer has a bad remasters of older albums, then I fall back to Soulseek to do some hunting of better version.
None of that is more simple than clicking a link and having everything on all of your devices.
I'm not saying Spotify is the end all. They have a lot of terrible shit. But none of the torrent/usenet based shit or open source crap is easier to use. Nobody is going to secondary sources on Spotify for bad remasters. You are handwaving away the pain in the ass part.
Depends how far back you go maybe? I remember being able to suss out pretty reliable rips on usenet in the 97-98 timeframe really easily through the alt.binaries groups, and eventually on tpb without too much trouble. On top of that, FLAC just a smidge later.
I see your point, but piracy has at all times provided me the music I wanted with the portability I wanted with the quality of files I have wanted.
I guess it's a matter of perspective.
Is there a simple way for Spotify to give me high quality files that I can play offline or host myself with no DRM? (Maybe the answer is yes, but I haven't had that impression.)
That's been my criteria for listening to music pretty much since mp3s came into existence.
I can't argue with you very hard though - if the goal is just "something that lets me play music" then I suppose spotify is simpler.
148 replies
I use Winamp on my PC.
First of all, it respects albums. Other players like VLC and Fubar2000 would order the songs alphabetically; it's annoying. Also in the "artist" list "The Beatles" comes right after "Beasty Boys" the way God intended.
Second it has an "always on top" feature so you can easily control it while gaming.
Winamp was made for people who listen to music the way I do. You know, old people.
I am still looking to find an alternative to winamp that does the album sorting well
AIMP on Windows (and probably Wine). Has good converter and tag editor as a bonus. You can try v2 or v3, they are pretty different. Both support Last.fm scrobbling if it's still relevant. The android app is nice too but I haven't used it that much. It kept my evergrowing library nicely structurized, mostly folder-based, with a little effort. It's russian, but I haven't noticed it doing anything funny, and it's probably too niche since most people use streaming nowadays.
Aimp is awesome!
I have it installed in Windows and android. It's good and the developer is constantly working on it.
Why not, y'know, just use Winamp? It's still available to download and you can even get installers for older versions if you prefer.
Yes I do do that :p
Even just using PC programs makes me feel old in this day and age. That said, I am the same age as Windows XP...
Jesus Christ, get off my lawn! What is a 10 year old doing unsupervised on the internet??
checks Wikipedia
Damn, you're old enough to drink.
Yeah, this feels wrong.
Anyone else remember what a huge deal windows 95 launch was? With The Rolling Stones.
It always struck me that “start me up” was used for the launch, since the chorus has “you make a grown man cry” in it. It could just be my 16 year olds sense of humor at the time though.
https://youtu.be/P0AJM6HMYjM?si=A8-pv0n03c_l7g7x
That still makes you a young'un then, maybe just an old soul?
Yes, I grew up on hand-me-downs so I was still playing with floppy disks in 2013
Hah! I’m as old as MS-DOS 2.0! (But really got comfortable using computers on my own with Windows 95/98/NT 4.0)
...I was already eight years old when MS-DOS 1.0 was released.
Ugh.
At least I'm likely to die of old age before the resource wars really get kicking.
Apparently I'm as old as DOS 2.13, but only really remember using 5.0 and 6.22, must have been 5 or so at that time.
I remember Windows 2.0 on a b/w screen (more like amber honestly), played Reversi (without knowing how it really works) and used paint to make all black images and then use the eraser to play digital mole.
Simpler times...
That's what I'm thinking. As for me, I better start hoarding sand or something
I was 2, but we had an Apple 2 and then Macs until I was in college and built a PC right as Win 98 released.
I just finished a Windows XP rig so I could relive some of my classic gaming moments. From my college years...
Foobar2000 has all of these features. You might need some tweaking, but foobar can do practically everything as far as music library management goes. My default sorting is album artist, album year, disc, track number.
As for song sort, if you meant sort by track number, it would be hard to find a player that does not support that. If VLC really does not support that, that is somewhat understandable, it is not meant as a serious music player after all.
I still use tortoiseSVN, does that count?
Still used for CAD software for whatever reason. I had to setup a SVN server for schematics.
How do you want to order them?
They said Album order: track 1, then track 2, etc
Quck search suggests sorting by album will also sort by track number in it. Also I found 4 year old feature request for VLC Android for sorting by track number that was added 4 years ago.
Winamp is the only method I know to update my 60gb hdd ipod
winamp Winamp WINAMP!
It Really Whips The Lamas Ass!
Llama noise
"Damn Son, Where'd You Find This.mp3"
We used to own our music!
Totally didn’t download all of it from LimeWire.
DAE had that one copy of a song that everyone shared with a glitch during the second verse, and now you find it jarring to hear the song without that artifact.
I have an old copy of "American Pie" from Napster just like that. Couple little glitches at the start that gave me a twitch for years if I didn't hear it.
It's also what I tell people who like the sound of vinyl. The pops and hisses of vinyl are objectively wrong, but you can get subjectively used to hearing things a certain way. It's not better, it's just what you have always done.
Even that all said, I do like listening to vinyl because the whole process of listening to it is very deliberate. Like I'm preparing for an event and this is what I'll be doing for the evening.
100%! There’s a whole second breakdown in Jamiroquia’s Virtual Insanity that I never knew about.
I miss when you could buy CDs and rip them to your computer so if your shitty mp3 died, you could just move everything on there.
Degrees of freedom revoked
What's stopping you from doing that now?
Seriously. Everyone complains about how it was so much better back then, when you owned your music on physical media.
Meanwhile, the choice of music available to buy on CD's (and even LP's) has never been greater than today.
Plus, you can easily download whatever you want from any streaming service and burn your own CD's (but please don't do that, it violates the TOS and copyright!)
Or you can buy DRM-free music files at higher quality than was ever available on physical media outside of niche formats that were never widely adopted. Costs are not outrageous and you can listen to them however you like on whatever device you like, and the artists actually get paid and there’s no question of legality.
Yeah you can literally buy flac instead of relying on CDs to get lossless quality. Also recording these days is so much better, you could easily get a lot of good remastered version of your favorite songs now.
DRM protection on music discs, and general distrust of “cracking” software due to my ignorance in The Scene as it stands today.
Unless I'm mistaken, this hasn't really been a thing for like 15 years.
Interesting, thanks for sharing
I bought a CD of Green Day's "American Idiot" and tried to rip it. The version still sold these days has some kind of copy protection on it that gives rippers fits (which isn't very punk rock of them). Tried a few different things, and then gave up and downloaded somebody else's flac rip.
Did you try to rip it on linux?
Yes, that's what I tried first. There's a Windows ripper that some people had success with, but didn't work for me.
And it didn't work? Wierd. Was it mount and copy as files or dding without mounting? Did vlc play cd?
Or go to the library, rent the CDs, rip them, and return them. Good times
You still can. I do it all the time.
It's entirely possible that I've missed more recent legislation, so take this with a grain of salt. Canada has a "blank media tax" courtesy of the record lobby back in the recording tape days. There was much pushback from consumers when that fee was applied to things like video tapes, recordable CDs, hard drives, etc, but still exists as far as I know.
The recording industry was pushing for laws more in line with other jurisdictions, primarily the US. The government was open to it, but would then abolish the fees on blank media. Industry backed down because they get more from that fee distribution than they would ever get by having more restrictions. Of course, that doesn't stop them from trying to shame us or blow smoke up our asses.
That means we are already paying a licence fee allowing us to copy recorded or broadcast material for personal use. "Personal use" is defined by what it's not: rebroadcast, playing for the general public, and reselling. Thus, making a strictly personal copy is fine, as is making a copy for a friend, copying from an original you've borrowed (from a friend or from the library), recording legal broadcasts (like from radio, etc), and recording concerts unless the terms of admission expressly forbid it, etc.
27 years later, it still really whips the llama's ass
You stop that right now!
I recently began de-corpoing my life, and spotify is my most recent cancellation after I was a premium subscriber since soon after its launch.
Took a bit of effort to convert my library, but I found a useful app to automate the process. And now I have my library back, offline and on my devices forever and for free.
It's actually kind of empowering, reclaiming your life from subscription hell and corporate voyeurism.
This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days. I'd love to have a massive media library stored locally, so that I'm not chained to streaming services.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is today.
Also, Amazon Music sells DRM-free MP3 files, if you don't feel like sailing.
Or just buy on Bandcamp if the artist is on there. Support artists really directly (they get 85-90% of what you pay for an item) and you usually get a royalty free lossless download as well as subscription-less streaming.
Hope recent dealings doesn't fuck up this absolute gem of a site.
I was prepared for that to go the other way.
*"This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days"
Don't tell me you've never dreamed of being an entertainment industry leech!
Do you mind sharing any details on your process / tools?
I did a bit of web searching and found spotDL on github, you can give it Spotify playlists to convert and it will search them on YouTube/YouTube music, and output them as local files.
Includes metadata and can output in different formats too. It works great about 99% of the time, though you sometimes need to search manually for individual songs it couldn't match somehow. But that were about a dozen tracks out of over 4k for me.
If you are interested in the other things I did/found aside from music feel free to ask
Is the quality of the YouTube rips good?
I imagine it's not the best, but Spotify's isn't great either
I'm not an audiophile or anything, but on my in ears it sounds fine to me. Though I only made mp3s so far, but iirc it can do flac too. I'd imagine those have better quality
Thanks for sharing!
Just today I was listening to a Tidal Playlist amongst friends and the whole thing seized up and just stopped playing music all together when it ran into a song on the Playlist that apparently Tidal lost the rights to. Really frustrating when your music library is in flux at the whim of corporate dealings.
Dude what is the app?? I've been looking for exactly this.
Further down:
https://lemmy.zip/comment/9758344
Amazing thank you!
After you've done so, if you have interest in hosting your own music server, have a look at Navidrome.
I was wondering if there was some way to do exactly that earlier - excellent & many thanks friend
You got it. Come back to me if you have a hard time finding a good android client. There are a lot of mediocre ones. For IOS I don't know...
For me, this is just a place I knew to never go. The writing was on the wall when Warcraft 2/3 became World of Warcraft, one of the first subscription based game.
I'd already been pirating software, music, and games by then and just, stayed on that path. Never so much as used Netflix or Spotify.
It still whips the llamas ass on one of my machines.
Every so often I download Winamp just to hear that intro, takes me back to being a kid everytime.
I know it's probably on YouTube, but it's not the same when it's not playing through Winamp.
If you weren't staring at a zooming vortex visualization while high on shrooms, you were missing out.
I was staring at it completely sober. I think it still produced the same effect.
Definitely did. Dad was a stoner, I was too young to get stoned, we both sat and watched it for ages while dad shared his favorite tunes with me. Ah, good times.
I really missed those, i only recently discovered vlc still has them. Was a little nostalgia trip
Hoooly shit! I was today years old when I learned of this - thank you, internet stranger.
"Geiss" was the shit!
I was a fan of Goom.
winamp can play online stuff too
AND offline stuff
and it has skins
and its free
and it has no ads
Aside from eminem and robbie whoever, i definitely have a playlist on winamp on my computer right now with those exact songs in it
Edit: replied to completely wrong comment, soz
i couldn't scroll past this without at least giving Webamp a mention
This is a wicked site. Thanks. Real easy to get a quick dose of nostalgia
Ha ha wtf, excellent!
Holy Fuck that playlist makes me want to get drunk like only a teenager at a pool party could
Not that I was (much obliged to lets just forget present tense exists and is a thing) popular enough to go to pool parties let alone get drunk at one,
But aside from eminem and robbie whoever, i definitely have a playlist on winamp on my computer at this moment with those exact songs in it. It was probably created when i was a teenager lol
I crossed the streams and made a Spotify playlist of the playlist seen in this photo of WinAMP:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0do6Ech8s3etvYUteF321m?si=127f8f2aa9d9490e
Egon, you said crossing the streams was bad.
Fuckin hell I can feel this in my bones
Back in my day, I had an old computer I stuffed under my desk that I installed Linux on. It's only job was to connect to a cifs share where I kept my (totally legally obtained) music, and play it using xmms2.
I did that so I could reduce the fairly minor load that winamp would put on my system while gaming. I had my PC and this music box both connected to a small mixer where I plugged in my headphones. So I could listen to whatever I wanted and had a dedicated screen and keyboard to control xmms2, so I didn't have to alt-tab my gaming computer when I wanted to change tracks. Between the convenience of the control and the small benefit I got while using my computer, it was a nice setup that lasted me a long time I eventually stopped using it when I moved one time, I just didn't bother to set it back up, and I eventually found that all the sliders in my mixer were messed up. From lack of use.
I'm sad to hear that xmms2 also had a similar problem of being more or less ignored and falling into disrepair. It was a good alternative to winamp on my desktop. Everything was very very similar, so it was very easy to swap between them.
I also similarly stopped using winamp, because reasons. I suppose the go to music player is now foobar2000.
But my dreams, they aren't as empty
https://getwacup.com
I mean, it lets me use my old winamp themes...
Wac me up
WAC ME UP INSIDE
Audacious is a good spiritual successor.
Meh they surprised us and released a new version of window like a year or 2 ago if you really wanna use the real thing.
No, this was the simpler time:
You don't gotta go all the way simple just to be simpler.
We need to go deeper...
Ok
Me, an actual skeleton:
amiga soundtracker
I was still using Milkdrop 2 visualizations on Foobar until I stopped using Windows a couple of years ago. If anyone knows how to use Milkdrop with MPD on Linux, you'd make me very happy.
Maybe some part of https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm would work for that? I had milkdrop visualizations working on an osmc [Kodi] install on a Raspberry Pi so I'd assume there must be a way.
I'll give it a try, thanks.
you can still download old winamp, and it still works!
I'm still using foobar2000.
on Linux. yes.
I've converted my music library to opus and it's all offline, on my phone and PC. It's the only way to listen to some things that get caught in licensing hell, and that's only going to get worse over time.
First I've heard of opus - checking it out now.
It's an open source codec. I convert from FLAC (lossless) to Opus (lossy), I couldn't hear much if any difference between FLAC and 128kbits opus, your mileage may vary, but it saves me 10x space, very useful for a big library on an SD card compared to lossless.
Reasonable audiophiles usually agree that 320kbps mp3s are as good ar raw/wav/FLAC. They're maybe twice the size of 128 ones IIRC, who everyone notice the drop of quality in. 160 is okay IMO for walkman or car territory.
GBs are cheap nowadays too :-)
I even have encoded the audio on some older videos down to 64K still cant hear a difference over bluetooth.
Bluetooth is pretty lossy unless you are using LDAC. That said so is a 128k or 64k music file. LDAC is 990kbps
You cannot compare kbps numbers of files encoded with different codecs and make assumptions on quality.
Each codec is able to compress differently good, so a 64kbps in opus sounds much better than 64kbps in mp3, for instance. 128 kbps in opus for stereo is plenty, quasi-lossless, while on other formats it is pretty bad.
oh man i googled winamp skins and had the biggest nostalgia flashback
Nowadas we have better open source software but people have nostalgia for Winamp.
I mean, winamp had playlist, shuffle, and played music. What more do you want?
I can't listen to music without data collection, subscriptions and ADs
cue list, but winamp had that too. I like my cue list separate from my playlist.
name names
foobar
quod libet. very configurable
vlc. its kludgy on desktop, but will play anything and the mobile ux is perfect.
Yeah but I always had weird playback bugs, like a hickup after a minute or two in many mp3s.
On two different PCs (like 5+ years apart).
I'd love to use winamp for music again, it was my goto player in I around 2000.
Edit: removed brainfart.
I haven't noticed anything weird in the past decade, not that I couldn't trace pretty easily, anyway.
depends on the mobile platform perhaps, vlc on iphone is garbage in my experience
that makes sense; who the hell still uses an iPhone? why?
I know it’s a small backwards country but roughly 3 out of 5 people in the US do
Americans lol
I recently went back to og Winamp!
Man, I spent thousands of hours with Winamp blasting in the background while gaming in my teens.
I used Coolplayer and had a totally awesome Phantom Menace podracing viewer tablet skin I made myself. There was transparency, and the red light I included for shuffle had shading like a real LED, and you could put the buttons ANYWHERE!
I forgot about Winamp! I'm going to have to give it a try again. The last time I used it was in 2013, because there was a plugin for extracting the music from Turbografx roms to .wav files. The soundtrack of my childhood.
Wait until you hear about boom boxes... 😅
The (full) Shrek OST isn’t on Spotify. So messed up.
I wanna stay hooome todaaaaay.
Use VLC
For music?
No, thats awful. Why do you hate good things.
The mobile version is pretty good.
This I can't speak to, so I'll have to give it a shot. But VLC for a desktop media manager overall is on par with MPC-HC. Like, sure you can force it to do that. But it's never going to be as competent as a dedicated app.
Hell even the Winamp revival project WACUP would dare better I wager.
Finding a decent copy of music was in no way "simpler" than Spotify/YT.
Spotify sure isn't providing a sonically decent copy today though.
Not the point now what I suggested but
Nobody but niche users care. It's good enough for 98% of users and their speaker quality.
In fact they are out there in droves buying shitty quality records for the warmth introduced by the format.
They aren't cut off in the middle, the wrong song, labeled with the wrong artist, a "rip" from somebody with a microphone and FM radio, corporate honeypots, or literal viruses.
Kids these days... 🤣
At least now it is pretty simple. Not sure about Spotify, but you can download exact audio files Deezer has. That's my favorite method unless Deezer has a bad remasters of older albums, then I fall back to Soulseek to do some hunting of better version.
None of that is more simple than clicking a link and having everything on all of your devices.
I'm not saying Spotify is the end all. They have a lot of terrible shit. But none of the torrent/usenet based shit or open source crap is easier to use. Nobody is going to secondary sources on Spotify for bad remasters. You are handwaving away the pain in the ass part.
Obviously it's not more simple and never will be, but at this point pirating music is as simple as it was using ITunes
How many people you know using iTunes for music? The apple folks I know are streaming from Apple music.
Nobody, everyone is streaming since it is more convenient. All I was saying is that getting local music is also more convenient now.
Depends how far back you go maybe? I remember being able to suss out pretty reliable rips on usenet in the 97-98 timeframe really easily through the alt.binaries groups, and eventually on tpb without too much trouble. On top of that, FLAC just a smidge later.
Look I used a lot of Usenet, it had a lot of benefits, but take a real close look at yourself in the mirror when you ask yourself this.
Did you just suggest that Usenet is simpler than Spotify? Usenet is great for a lot of reasons, but simplicity is not one of them.
I see your point, but piracy has at all times provided me the music I wanted with the portability I wanted with the quality of files I have wanted.
I guess it's a matter of perspective.
Is there a simple way for Spotify to give me high quality files that I can play offline or host myself with no DRM? (Maybe the answer is yes, but I haven't had that impression.)
That's been my criteria for listening to music pretty much since mp3s came into existence.
I can't argue with you very hard though - if the goal is just "something that lets me play music" then I suppose spotify is simpler.