I still use Winamp.
"But it's 2024, Hazelnut!"
And?
"But it's oooooold! And outdated! And ugly!"
The last version plays every conceivable type of digital audio, be it WAV, MP3, AAC (I think), WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, and similar, uses next to no system resources (0.3% CPU time and 87.5 megabytes memory on a Ryzen 3700X based system with 16 GB RAM even playing hi-res FLAC) and contains no advertising and is ultimately responsive. Which is a breath of fresh air in current year when even most text based websites are so bogged down with ads and popups and shite that exists solely to chew up bandwidth and annoy you into clicking on AI-generated sludge.
"But it's ugly and outdated and has a horrible user interface!"
No it doesn't. You're just used to the dumbed down and yet obscurantist user interface of modern applications. Winamp has a panel at the top left with the transport controls, the current playlist beneath, and tables sorting your tracks by album, artist, and title respectively, and clicking one of those tables and typing the name jumps to the first entry starting with that, and adjacent to the transport controls is a graphic equaliser for adapting to your chosen set of speakers of headphones or environment. What could be more intuitive. Everything is just there and laid out nicely. Or you can rearrange it how you like if that's too difficult for you.
"But it doesn't sync to portable media players!"
It does, and better than iTunes. Whereas iTunes will only let you sync what is on your PC to your iPod or phone or whatever, Winamp will do it vice versa also. That is, you can plug in a portable media device, click to sync to a PC, and it'll copy everything from the device onto your PC that you don't already have. Have fun killing music!
"But it doesn't make suggestions for you like streaming services do!"
I don't want an algorithm to tell me what to listen to. I want to listen to what I already want to.
"But it doesn't use AI!"
I don't want AI, I want to listen to music. Fucking hell. Can we stop putting AI in everything like a selling point. AI gets things wrong and makes things difficult by thinking it knows better than you what you're trying to do. Stop helping me, for crying out loud.
"But it's 2024, Hazelnut!"
Yes, yes it is. The fact that I'm still using a program that was first designed over a quarter century ago and which still runs perfectly on every version of Windows from 9x to 11 (albeit it has to be run administratively from Vista onwards) and does exactly what I need it to do in a bug free and super responsive way is proof that it is objectively better software than all its competitors. It also doesn't contain ads and is free. It can rip things from a CD or other optical media as well as burn to optical media also if you want. The only thing it doesn't do is accept an analog mic input so you can't rip vinyl or cassette tapes or 8 tracks with it. And you can save the output to disc in any audio format you see fit.
"But streaming services exist!"
Yes, yes they do. And I don't use them. I like to have local copies of all my music because things have a habit of going missing from streaming services for arcane reasons outside your control. Also they cost money and have ads and chew up internet bandwidth, especially if you like listening to the film scores of Basil Poledouris in Hi-Res FLAC like I do.
And that, boys and girls, is why Winamp still really whips the llama's arse.
(IN24/14)