That and MySpace will be enjoying a come back very soon.
Very soon?
That’s a bit out of character, if I may be forgiven the insolence of saying so.
But Winamp itself never went away, as others have noted.
Very soon! That’s what I said…
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Ya know, it wouldn’t take much to rewrite yr post to describe Windows in general…
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Winamp skins? Pishaw.
Back in my day we used the Enlightenment window manager and had to randomly click through bizarre, nonrectilinear UIs uphill, through the snow, both ways, just to find a bash prompt!
Follow up - holy cow Enlightenment still exists.
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but it hasn’t been updated for 18 years, it’s probably riddled with vulns 
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it clearly says 2000 in the name
that’s the joke
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Not only does Winamp still exist, it’s quite simply MUCH better than iTunes ever was, and likely ever will be.
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Speaking of millennium aesthetic, I dug into my “backgrounds” folder (which has been built up since 1998) and some real gems. here’s a sample:
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I really hope people don’t know that phrase only as the Winamp slogan
I actually did, so to save all the other people’s time…
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that screenshot above is Windows ME, a truly special windows. loved as much as bob or vista.
I agree iTunes has been a trainwreck since the beginning and should be nuked from orbit. The number of egregious things iTunes has done over the years, I’m surprised anyone who has ever used it remembers it fondly at all.
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I miss winamp and still used it till i upgraded my pc last Christmas, as most of my media playing is now just done threw the inbuilt vuez player.
The internet moves so fast these days and is so phone based the current generation never mind the next one will have such a different experience of being on line.
I fondly recall using a winamp skin that made it absolutely miniscule, just a thin line at the top of the screen, with the song name, and some buttons - but also very importantly that thin line could sit above everything else, so the keyboard buttons would still work to make music play/pause and skip ahead while playing Counter Strike.
Did that in turn lead to me being accused of cheating at a lan because some guy running a server who was also at the lan saw this unfamiliar box sitting at the top of my screen and assumed it was somehow allowing me to cheat? Sure, but the fact that I sucked at CS helped disabuse that idea pretty quickly.
I miss lans 
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I still use Winamp to play music. There might be ‘better’ UIs, but I started using Winamp back in the v1 days (when it would take 10 mins+ to turn a WAV into an MP3, uphill both ways in the snow etc.) so it makes intuitive sense to me. I’ve not tried the latest release yet, I think I’m still on 5.6ish
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Oh man, these were what taught me how not to design a user interface. I hated these things with a passion.
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The itunes AAC encoder is considered to be the best. Thankfully it can be extracted from the installer so you don’t need to have the rest of it.
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For a long time they force re-encoded any song you added to your iTunes, it was a good day when they allowed you to control that. also when they switched to DRM free aac that was a HUGE improvement!
Apple is one of the industry drivers of aac and is doing a lot with hvec. they have good engineers.
iTunes itself is a franken beast that has always been fighting between what it is and should be and apple knows best weirdness. it always has been one of their most hated pieces of software because there have always been many things wrong each version, they improve one thing and add in another.
A buddy of mine, one of the key winsmp devs, had the llama in his garage until recently.
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