I had not used Winamp in ages.. not since college probably. At one point in time, it was what everyone used. It was the only good way to play mp3’s on Windows.
Fastforward to today, I just discovered that Winamp has full library management capabilities, and a vastly expanded UI.
The UI is actually somewhat similar to one of my favorite Linux players: quod libet. It lets you access quite a few layouts for looking at your library, and each view is even customizable (for example, in your list of artists, you can display how many albums are in the library for that artist).
There are only a couple annoyances.
It recognizes Apple Lossless files, but can’t play them. No worry, I can convert them to FLAC, but it’s just a pain. That’s what I get for using an Apple-specific format I suppose.
Second is that the scrollbars in the UI behave in a weird way. I think it has to do with their window hieararchy, but you end up having to click on each sub-pane for your scroll wheel to work there. All this seems to work in other programs like Firefox, so I wish the Winamp guys would just fix it.. but it seems like they’ve always been into having their own custom widgetry, so that’s what they get.
In trying to work around the second problem, I found out about KatMouse, a generally useful utility for Windows. It essentially lets you use your scroll wheel on windows that don’t have focus. This fixes the Winamp problem, but is also useful in other scenarios as well. It’s like focus-follows-mouse, but only for scrolling.