[mathnode]

Nope. Even way back then, I was using iTunes on mac and windows to rip and organise my music collection. A quick rsync or an smb mount from a Linux machine made it easy to access my media in VLC or Rhythmbox. The winamp/foobar aesthetics were really cool, but overall offered nothing to the practically or ease of actually buying/ripping/playing your music.

But you know, everyone is different and some folks had memorised a sequence of characters that were something like "FCKGW-...", install limewire, just to play that live acoustic version of Everlong.

[anthk]

This. With alsa-plugins and any console music player (cmus or mocp, cmus it's more collection oriented, mocp enforces you to just use directories and files) and a -rt kernel it was more than enough (if not better) to play huge collection files under Linux.