VLC UX kinda sucks, but it does everything I need it to.

I use audacious. It's perfect.

i use musicbee for audio. vlc for video. musicbee is the most like mediamonkey used to be and free. got into vlc because of its better support of the unusual video formats

Same even my school used vlc wayy before I knew floss software

It's more likely to survive the company if it's FOSS. The app was dormant for a long time.

What a shame that it isn't open source.

I'll happily continue to use Audacious with a Winamp skin.

But does it whip the llamas ass?

And you can set the visuals to unlimited fps, which is fun on a good screen

And it's not like deleting will fix it now, it's been copied millions of times now.

The current revived version appears to be tied to a content streaming platform for "creators," and also sells NFT's. The mothership certainly gets a cut of all of those sales. Just like seemingly every other techbro venture nowadays, their business model entirely revolves around being a "service," and the media player itself is apparently just a side hobby. (Note that this is basically exactly the same mutation that happened to Napster. That worked well.)

Otherwise, the answer is sponsorship by a corporate sugar daddy. Even the OG Winamp was sponsored by and then ultimately bought outright by AOL.

They're sponsored by WinRAR. Those guys are loaded.

...That site's UI looks like someone saw the marketing literature for the Frigidaire produce preserver and said, "Yeah, that'll do."

Lovely that it is open source, but dear lord that UI is a blast from the past 😂😂 👴👵🏚️

Foobar is still the best there is, although the classic style interface might not appeal to younger people.

In its day Winamp was the most comprehensive media player and users were super into its skinability which was a big deal at the time. Nowadays the "plays everything" throne is very firmly occupied by VLC, with a little cushioned stool next to it for Media Player Classic to sit on. However, neither of them offer the user interface experience that Winamp does/did.

Winamp was iTunes before iTunes. It was Spotify before Spotify. It did an excellent job of managing the hordes of totally legitimate MP3's we all had back in the day, and did so with an aplomb that nothing else seemed to manage. Really, its playlist and library management was top notch. Newer apps still piss me off because none of them do it the way Winamp did.

Side note, if you have an old iPod kicking around and don't feel like dealing with Apple's ecosystem, Winamp can still, to this very day, stick music on your device natively without having to install or use iTunes. Just saying.

But this source code release thing really baffles me. I have no idea what the point of that was supposed to be.