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.
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.
Even just using PC programs makes me feel old in this day and age. That said, I am the same age as Windows XP…
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
Windows XP 2001-10-25
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.
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.
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.
winamp Winamp WINAMP!
It Really Whips The Lamas Ass!
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.
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
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!)
DRM protection on music discs, and general distrust of “cracking” software due to my ignorance in The Scene as it stands today.
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.
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
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.
“…Spotify fucks over artists”
*“This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days”
- someone from the internet"*
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
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.
Further down:
“subscription hell and corporate voyeurism”
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.
