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by vunderba 687 days ago
Bit of a tangent but it's kind of infuriating to me that I still haven't found anything better than Winamp (or Foobar for that matter) on a modestly powerful Windows machine. Even 20 years ago, I could literally just right-click on an entire folder sitting on my external hard-drive, and it would immediately enqueue all of those files into Winamp.

I even had a bunch of Winamp plugins that could automatically handle my NSFs, SID files, tracker files—any format I threw at it, it could handle them seamlessly.

It used very little CPU, it never crackled, it never popped, and it never crashed. This wasn't even using any low-latency ASIO drivers or anything fancy.

Fast forward decades later and I'm sitting on my Mac M1 desperately trying to find anything that even comes CLOSE to this.

The closest thing I found is Cog, but it takes minutes to queue up larger folders. It's ridiculous, and of course I'm one of the lucky individuals who ended up with a Mac with core audio issues where if I'm using more than 35% to 40% of my CPU, the audio pops once every minute/minutes despite clearing out the plist files and trying every other trick, it seems like the basic core audio drivers of Mac are awful stuff. I had a better DAW experience on my Windows machine with ASIO4ALL which shouldn't even be possible.

6 comments

For macOS Ionica is really really good: https://ionica.app/

For iOS I would suggest my own app Muziqi https://apps.apple.com/us/app/muziqi-for-music-lovers/id6468...

I use mpd and plexamp, but thank you for sharing...I really UX/UI of Ionica and hadn't seen it before.
>Even 20 years ago, I could literally just right-click on an entire folder sitting on my external hard-drive, and it would immediately enqueue all of those files into Winamp.

VLC? Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player

Works with any media file. Takes like 2 seconds to open my Youtube local backup folder with +10k videos

Thanks I'll give it a shot, I've never even tried VLC with audio files before - but I just did some reading up and apparently it has built-in support for SPC and other game music formats out of the box.
Have you used VLC? It's powerful and compatible, sure, but the UI is janky as all get out.
Yes I'm using it every single day
I can recommend Swinsian on macOS: https://swinsian.com/

It's a wonderful music player that handles large libraries and is quite customisable (especially smart playlists).

Totally agree. On Windows, Dopamine https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine is close to giving me what I want but it crashes frequently and simple things like dragging a directory of music onto it just don't really work. Has to be imported to the DB first.

Musicbee https://www.getmusicbee.com/ was kinda promising for a while but bloated and clunky.

VLC and Foobar get the job done but the UI is meh.

Streaming and iTunes really wrecked everything.

On a mac you could give my new app a try:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

Try Deadbeef.