Winamp always felt to me to be the pinnacle of functional. I ended up turning to Winamp for a whole plethora of stuff outside of music playback, like:
- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast
- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)
- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.
The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.
I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.
Regarding the plugin system: They had a few different categories of plugins. You had input plugins that let it get audio from a wide variety of sources. A few I remember fondly were input plugins that were little emulators that ran playstation / n64 bytecode ripped from games to play their music. Then you could have your choice of DSP plugins applied after that, a visualization and then also an output. The output could play the music, but it could really do anything it wanted, like encoding it to ogg.
Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.
ShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
I guess if you need those, that makes sense. I have never needed them, and when people talk about Winamp, they usually mention all the skins it had (it’s the same for MySpace and Geocities, 2 other projects I don’t miss).
- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast
- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)
- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.
The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.
I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.