[mikewhy]

I'm confused, you say you want the "old" versions of Winamp, but Winamp has had a media library since the "old" versions. Maybe you can ignore the current one just as you always have and not base your diatribe off one screenshot in an article?

[autoexec]

The old versions (v2 or older) just had playlist box. You could choose to add folders to it, or drag and drop stuff into it, but it didn't go scanning your system for things as soon as you installed it. It didn't maintain a database of those files either. Even if you saved the playlists they were plaintext m3u files.

I could ignore the current version of winamp, but I'd rather give it a try and see how much of that stuff is able to be disabled and ignored. It might still prove to be better than VLC.

[JoBrad]

A library button which allows you to choose a folder for scanning music files, has been in WinAmp for decades.

[autoexec]

Probably true? v2 came out in 98.

Winamp3 came out in 2002 and it may have had the feature. It was total rewrite, added a bunch of stuff, but killed off a bunch more and a lot of people (myself included) never used it. Nullsoft was basically forced to keep the v2 edition alive since it was what everyone stuck with and Winamp5 was supposed to unite the userbase (it was based on v2) but I never bothered with it since by then Winamp had been owned by AOL for a long time and I didn't really want AOL software on my machines.

Winamp Lite was pretty popular too and helped to bridge the gap

https://download.cnet.com/Winamp-Lite/3000-2139_4-10788894.h...