Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.
I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
Nothing will ever beat the joys of finding new "skins" for the Winamp player -- I had so many amazing ones lined up, and loved nothing more than switching them all out.
I still do that fairly often. Audacious can load Winamp skins. Sometimes its interface borks on my collection (35,000+ songs), but it's responsive enough.
My desktop still looks very much like it did in the 1990s...
> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
MediaMonkey [1] is awesome to find something. It's mainly a music organizer that just happens to be able to play music but it works great even with scattered single mp3 files. Autoplaylists [2], scriptable and extensive search options. Been using it for over 6 years now and never looked back :)
I definitely recommend MediaMonkey Gold. It will keep your library organized, but however you want it, with no hassle at all. And if you're insane like me and keep a flac library, you can keep an mp3 mirror for your mp3 player/phone.
And you can switch between space used and time/processing power needed. Instead of keeping mirrors you could tell it to convert the files (depending on what you connected) on the fly into whatever format you want.
As others have said, foobar2000 for the minimalist, free approach with lots of configuration options, or MediaMonkey for a really good bit of paid software. The paid version of MM syncs perfectly well with iDevices and pretty much anything else too. Highly recommended. Also it doesn't force you into any particular directory structure in your music library so it'll take what you give it.
> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a player as winamp was but it did manage the library / tagging bits quite well. It seems to still be active so may be worth a look.
For a multiplatform solution, I used a MusicBrainz Picard client for batch autoidentification and ID3 correction. However currently I feel that I wasted too many hours of my life hoarding and caring for a local mp3/soulseek library and nowadays only listen to online music.
I recently fixed the id3 tags of all the mp3 music I own using MusicBrainz picard. Very useful software that uses a global database of music signatures.
Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.
I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.