foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata all at once.
A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.
> A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case,
I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy to customize almost any way you want. There's even a scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current layout.
As for the functionality they find it lacks, well, there's probably a component for that.
Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of functionality out of the box that other media players don't have, like the very robust features found in the "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.
to be fair, it's a lot easier to tell if you do or do not like something than it is to design something you do like. I run into that with vim colorschemes all the time
you'd have a hard time replicating this UI [1] or other winamp skins in foobar2000, so i'm not sure i'd call it a successor except in the sense that it can play anything you throw at it.
I consider it a successor in that it's compact with an emphasis on user customization and community-designed plugins/components. Like Winamp, most functionality you get out of the box is provided by bundled plugins, and they can be replaced with alternatives.
Out of the box, you could certainly customize it to have a similar layout to winamp even if none of the dressing looks at all the same.
My layout[1] is certainly very different than Winamp, but still conforms a lot more to the basic shape of Winamp than the usual giant screen-filling squares that are iTunes, Windows Media Player or the Spotify desktop client.
I'm working on my own cross platform music player that I think has a more polished interface than foobar. I have mac builds now and will start doing windows builds soon:
Overall I’ve had a great experience with Flutter. I tried a few cross platform stacks before settling on it and it feels like the most polished and mature choice.
A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.