> WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media.
Related to GP's "Software was a lot less capable back then." - somehow, WinAmp 2.x seems to be peak capability of music players; I don't recall any player made later that would be comparable in features for playing local music (with maybe the exception of Foobar2000).
My rose-tinted glasses have some scratches on them, but I still maintain that software of today didn't gain many meaningful features over the late 90s / early 2000s, and yet it grown tremendously in size and resource use.
WinAMP 2.x was nothing short of a miracle, it was a revolution in audio players. I wasn't a huge fan of the skin-based interface, and the playlist did some odd things once in a while, but on the whole, it was a damn good piece of software.
These days I'm using Foobar2000 and Quod Libet, and have looked at other "music library" type apps, but I'm considering just going with a simple player such as DeaDBeeF, and handle everything else through the file manager, since I've taken the time to properly plan the folder layout. I don't need ratings or playback statistics or all kinds of other things. I need a simple playlist to add music to, with basic playback controls. If I need to add tracks, I'll drag and drop from the file manager.
Basically, I don't need in-between applications between simple WinAMP 2.x style and the all-singing all-dancing streaming services such as Spotify, that do a much superior job with ratings and especially smart playlists.
Related to GP's "Software was a lot less capable back then." - somehow, WinAmp 2.x seems to be peak capability of music players; I don't recall any player made later that would be comparable in features for playing local music (with maybe the exception of Foobar2000).
My rose-tinted glasses have some scratches on them, but I still maintain that software of today didn't gain many meaningful features over the late 90s / early 2000s, and yet it grown tremendously in size and resource use.