[imiric]

It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :)

It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing.

It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.

[qwerty456127]

Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful. Nevertheless I just switched to foobar2000 on Windows and DeaDBeeF on Linux because their UIs just are perfectly bullshit-free practical pragmatic tools and I came to feel I want a tool rather than a show.

[themerone]

WinAmp 3 was bloated, slow, and unstable. It was bad enough that they threw out the code and released WinAmp 5 which was based on the code from WinAmp 2.

[donatj]

Yep, Wasabi, the XML driven UI toolkit was just too slow for PC's of the time.

[a0123]

People got used to a fairly simple and efficient UI. Version 3 was a bit of an abrupt change. A bit like today when your favourite social network completely revamps its UI for no apparent reason and makes it look fancier without adding any interesting functionality (and usually removes a couple).

It's hard to come back from that.

[rchaud]

Winamp 3 with its default "Modern" skin was very sluggish, even on decently specced computers in 2003. If you replaced the default with a Winamp classic skin, it immediately sped up, but defaults are powerful, so most users probably left it as is.

[serf]

>Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful

variety of reasons.

mine: it broke a huge amount of visualizers/dsps/skins.

[rightbyte]

I guess you might wonder the same thing if installing Windows Vista on a recentish computer.

[a0123]

A remnant of simpler times. Foobar and VLC, any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?

[imiric]

> A remnant of simpler times.

I think it has more to do with the authors and their principles, and less with the times. There are plenty of counterexamples from that era: all major browsers, the Sonique audio player (which I loved for the UI novelty), Winamp itself, etc.

> any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?

mpv is in that league for me, and it's much more recent. Then, of course, there are very stable CLI and power user software that has existed for decades: Vim, Emacs, BSD and Linux coreutils, etc. Some of these are not necessarily simple under the hood, but I use them because they do one thing well (or in the case of Vim/Emacs as much as I want them to do :)), and I know that they're not going to disappear or drastically change as so many software does.

[The_Colonel]

"simpler" is not how I remember foobar2000. I used to use it (±15 years ago) because of its extreme configurability (e.g. in terms of layout). Configuring foobar2000 felt kind of like building your own music player. YMMV

[totetsu]

I started using it again recently and was struck by just how much config I had to do to get it back as I remembered it. It is both annoying and amazing

[piaste]

I remember installing some VERY pretty but very complicated setups from deviantart, and then having to fix the inevitable bugs in the panel layout scripts, every one of which was just one right-click away which was extremely cool.

IIRC, they were in a sort of PHP-looking scripting language? I had very little coding experience before then, so it was kind of a trip trying to debug why the lyrics panel would freak out under certain scenarios :D

[defrost]

Simple to use, with a smart editable layout configuration for those that chose to go down that rabbit hole.

I'm still using it to this day, with little more than an album tree, a playlist window, and an album art thumbnail that optionally all fold away.

I've been down the configuration | plugin trail, good fun for those of us that enjoy that kind of thing but it is | was simple and clean from a fresh install.

[orthoxerox]

IrfanView. I tried replacing it several times with something slicker-looking, but no other picture viewer is as fast as IrfanView.

[RunSet]

I thought "I doubt it is faster than FastStone" but when I went looking for benchmarks all I could find was this forum post from 2011.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25334.0

Which does confirm that Faststone is faster but much water has passed under the bridge since 2011.

[orthoxerox]

That's an interesting benchmark, but I am more interested in a cold start test on a much smaller file (think 2MP, not 1200MP), because that's my usual use case.

[RunSet]

I agree. That is another problem with the benchmark- it gives the gold medal to ACDsee, which in my experience has the longest cold start of the three.

[gbraad]

I was a fan of AcdSee, currently using DirectoryOpus, never got close yo the feel as in tbose days... so I get it...

[zecg]

The batch editing is also handy

[potamic]

Anyone knows what they do different to achieve such speed?

[tvshtr]

VLC is getting a a major UI overhaul, it's pretty much finished actually and should be released soon.

[Modified3019]

Media Player Classic The current actively maintained incarnation I use is https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

Irfanview is another “goes on every desktop install”. I even use it on Linux via wine.

[jolj]

Total Commander

[freep1zza]

mIRC

[signaru]

I use Audacious on Ubuntu as I can almost get the same UI configuration as foobar2000, tabs of playlists which can be made on the fly or from saved files. A music player app is something I always use on the background, so all the fancy visualizations or album art are not so useful for me. It's also sad that the default music player on Ubuntu (Mate) doesn't have a volume control out of the box.

[rchaud]

> It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago.

Easy to do when you don't have bosses breathing down your neck about adding in podcasts and audiobooks, then nudging users into engaging with that stuff first so that they don't have to pay as much to the music rights holders.

[raxxorraxor]

It also just has superior functionality.

Want to mirror your front channels to your back channels? Easily done in foobar2k, while many other media players already fail here, even those whose main task is to do audio output.

[codr7]

re: Quod Libet; thank you, these kinds of recommendations are invaluable for finding good tools. Especially these days with all the noise.

[DidYaWipe]

Foobar2000 was always better than WinAmp. WinAmp was the best example of why standard UI affordances evolved.

[rchaud]

No, Winamp was the last example of broadly used "appliance" software that wasn't inextricably tied into a megacorp's business model. iTunes and Windows Media Player were both bloated because of the e-store baked into the back end.

[DidYaWipe]

EphPod was 100% free and didn't bury its functionality in an Advent-calendar UI. It was simple, clean, and did something that iTunes/Music doesn't to this day: automatically sync new files you added to your music directory, with no need to "add to library" every time you acquired them.

iTunes, when tied to a "megacorp's business model," still suffered from piss-poor UI. Take, for example, the "LCD" display at the top of the UI that was even depicted as having a transparent cover over it... yet had undemarcated clickable controls in it (which you were likely to never discover).

So I don't see the relationship between good or bad UI and business models in this case.

[spectre3d]

There was no store in iTunes when it was released in 2001, and those of us using SoundJam MP knew there would be no further updates so we started using it and enjoyed its bulk metadata editing and album art embedding capabilities, with an interface that was intuitive for managing playlists and music. And scriptable!

It wasn’t until two years later that the store was integrated as part of an update.

Although there was an (Carbon?) OS X version for a while, Winamp was Windows-only from what I knew, so my opinion of it was always coloured by having to use Windows to interact with it, although I used CrossOver on Mac and Mint as well.

[mostlysimilar]

Disagree. Winamp skins are the highlight of a better era of computer interfaces.

[DidYaWipe]

Some people don't enjoy meandering through a puzzle game of arbitrary, standards-ignoring UI instead of getting stuff done.

[out_of_protocol]

> the same UI

Haha, it's not the same even for any specific version. With plugins and ability to move panels around, it's hard to say all these UIs are the same player. Search for "foobar2000 theme" in google images