Winamp was the king of all the media players for more than a decade as far as Windows is concerned. Then AOL bought it and the development of the amazing software went downhill after that. Finally they decided to discontinue the awesome audio player and ever since everyone started to look for alternatives. VLC Media Player is great but it not really designed to be used as an audio player. I recently came across QMMP (QT based Multi-Media Player) that looks and functions exactly like Winamp but is powered by QT and therefore can be used across a number of Linux distributions along with Windows. And since it is open-source, if you know a little bit of QT programming, you can compile it for your OS as well.
The user interface can best be described as “Winamp Lookalike”. There are skins you can choose from the settings, you can set hotkeys, set proxy settings for internet connection, change the way it loads playlists and more. The player supports all the popular audio formats, including MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WavePack, ADTS AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Monkey’s Audio and PCM WAVE. It can also play MIDI files and the audio CDs.
Just like XMMS or Winamp, it supports visualizations. You can start playing an audio file in QMMP and then right-click on its window to bring up the context menu. From the context-menu, you can choose Visualizations sub-menu and then select three supported visualizations – analyzer, Goom and Project M. The Goom analyzer plugin is taken from another open-source Goom media player.
If you want to enhance the features and appearance of QMMP, then you can download and install plugins available from its website. For example, you can choose to add plugins to support listening music directly from Libre.fm or Last.fm.
You can download QMMP from http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/.