Ioannis Canellos iocanel

Prologue

I am old enough to have used Winamp. And XMMS after it.

I get a bit nostalgic about them. Not for nostalgia’s sake, but for usability. Those players were direct. You pointed them at a folder, they played it. The controls were right there. There was no library to curate first, no import step, no waiting for something to index before you could hear a song.

Since those days I tried a lot of players. MediaMonkey, Amarok, Rhythmbox, and a few others I have forgotten. I appreciated what they were doing. The media management features were genuinely good, and my library did need managing. But the directness was gone. Playing an album became a small project.