thingsmykidswontknow:

MP3s and file sharing ruled the early 2000s. A lot of people used the new technology to download the latest music from their favorite artists. I was more concerned with obtaining every single song that I heard between 1986 and 1991.

As I’m sure you could guess, I had amassed a pretty impressive (or terrible, depending on your tastes – though if you’re reading this you probably have a similar collection) library of classic songs from my youth. But once the files were in my hands, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

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Fuck this post. Winamp still whups the llamas ass.

I gave iTunes a shot - multiple ones actually - and after each dance with Apple’s music player, I came away with the same thought: “Why is this so complicated?” Nothing about iTunes is intuitave. There are some cool features there, but getting them to work in a way that isn’t frustrating is damn near impossible. And let’s not even talk about the amount of system resources it takes up.

If my kids don’t know about Winamp, it won’t be because I switched over to iTunes, it’ll be because I will no longer have any music stored locally on my hard drive. While I currently have Winamp installed on my computer, it very rarely gets used. Spotify - with its ability to stream and play local content - has become my de facto music player. But even with Spotify slowly taking Winamp’s spot, as a kid of the late 90s/early 2000s, I’ll happily rep Nullsoft’s baby until the day I die. Sure, some of that loyalty is due to nostalgia, but a lot of it is due to the fact that they created a product that still works. Usability goes a long way in my book.