[nicetryguy]

I still use Winamp! Why? Well, i listen to video game soundtracks, but not compressed or even high quality recordings, the actual source files ripped from the games and reproduced with plugins much like an emulator would. You can even juice quality settings way past what the original consoles would play them back as, such as being tied to 22kHz on a Sega Genesis or 32kHz on a Super Nintendo, i can reproduce the original songs at 96kHz lol. The sound quality is far superior than any compressed / lossless / uncompressed / or even an original hardware solution for that matter.

Now, there are plenty of individual players for these files, HOWEVER, if i want to play ALL of the music from ALL of the consoles on one playlist, there is no valid substitute for the Winamp plugin system. So yes, valid use cases still exist, and i will be whipping the llamas ass for the foreseeable future.

[Sophira]

My favourite media player (post-Winamp 2) has always been XMPlay[0]. It perfectly supports Winamp input plugins (as well as its own native type of plugins), meaning I wasn't stuck with using Winamp.

The player also sports excellent demoscene tracked music support (the reason for its name - XM is the file extension for FastTracker II tracked music), but really it's a fantastic media player for a lot of formats in its own right.

It supports a lot of formats natively. For anything else you need to download plugins for it separately[1], but even today it's by far my preferred player on Windows. I'd heartily recommend it for your use case as well.

[0] https://www.un4seen.com/

[1] https://support.xmplay.com/

[poisonborz]

Foobar and AIMP support Winamp DSP plugins.

[WithinReason]

how about the foobar2000 plugin system?