http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/20/5126666/winamp-media-player-shutting-down-after-over-15-years

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/

What's wrong with XMPlay? I've used that for years over WinAmp. Though, it is sad to see the software go, I mean it was awesome back in the days when my 100Mhz PC could barely decode mp2 format files... yes there WAS an mp2 format. Mp3 was too choppy on that PC

Winamp was awesome back in the day. It could play friggin SNES music files. VLC compiles all its codecs in static, i believe. So that makes it hard to support the really niche-y formats.

I use Pithos.

"Yngwie Malmsteen -- I'll See the Light, Tonight"

Rather appropriate since that song is 28 years old.

I also listen to J. S. Bach, Mozart, Handel, I think they're older

I blame Winamp for introducing skinned interfaces.

I don't even use media players except those embedded in browsers.

I used XMMS for bloody ages when I switched to linux from windows. It even supported winamp style themes. You couldn't lose.

After a while xmms was getting kinda old and unsupported, so I eventually switched to Amarok 1. And man I really loved its smart playlists. A lot. Best feature ever.

I had it set up to play a pseudo-random stream of songs based on a couple criteria, 1. it hasn't been played recently, and 2. It's automagically calculated "score" (amarok would keep track of how many times you've listened to it, and if you listened to it all the way through or not).

Basically what I'd get out of that after a while is a non stop non repeating 24-28 hour stretch of my favourite music.

Amarok 2 had some bugs in its new implementation of its smart playlists that made that annoying or impossible to set up properly, but I've sense stopped listening to music much at the computer, since I mostly sit in front of the TV/MediaBox on my laptop. So if I do listen to music, its playing out of my media box and surround sound receiver, rather than my desktop or laptop computers.

The winamp I'm familiar with didn't have a media library. And at the time I didn't want one.

Amarok 2 is actually better than Amarok 1, if you can get past the bugs it originally had. I haven't used it in a couple releases at best, so I don't know if the smart playlist features I like to use are fixed yet.

To be honest, there isn't a huge difference between the two players. Amarok 2's biggest change is the middle area that you can put widgets in. Which you can completely hide if you don't like it.

And the actual music list seems like a big change at first, but you can make it look and behave just as it did with Amarok 1. So its really not a huge deal. Even though I actually like some of the new ways to sort and group music using the new playlist.

I only stopped using it for two reasons, 1. I stopped using my desktop for much of anything, and 2. Amarok 2 was pretty buggy at the time, its been a while now though, so I have to assume a bunch of it was fixed.

I never used Winamp, it looked too fancy to me... I have been using VLC for year now.

I'm sorry. We all make that mistake once in awhile.

I use it for videos but by God, if it works you're lucky, if it doesn't, it's one of the biggest P.O.S.'s to configure and get functional with a terrible UI, unhelpful documentation, and downright elitist forum community. It's also not easy to get special codecs working. And their global hotkeys are both hard to setup (UI) and buggy as hell (won't take effect).

I've had to move back to Media Player Classic numerous times.