For creation or consumption?

Fot the latter, definitely Winamp 2.9x

For consumption, I too tend to veer more towards Winamp, there are some early versions that run right on a 486 under Windows 95.

For creation, I use CakeWalk Pro Audio 5. My 486 DX4-100 is one of my DAW. It's surprising a 30 year old CPU can handle 3 tracks of 16-bit 44.1KHz digital audio from guitar/bass/drums. I also use that for MIDI Sequencing from time to time, though I tend to use Voyetra or Presto Arranger for that more often, depending on if I feel like making music like I'm using an actual instrument or making music using Piano Roll, but Voyetra Sequencer Pro is for DOS and Presto actually runs in 3.1x just fine.

Something I've been curious about is Trakkers but I've never really been able to get into it much. Something I've toyed with exploring more down the road.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-01-07, 18:08:

For creation or consumption?

Fot the latter, definitely Winamp 2.9x

I still use Winamp on my Ryzen box when listening to music. Honestly is there anything better?

ldeveraux wrote on 2022-01-08, 14:35:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-01-07, 18:08:

For creation or consumption?

Fot the latter, definitely Winamp 2.9x

I still use Winamp on my Ryzen box when listening to music. Honestly is there anything better?

I use Audacious, but Qmmp is also a good option.

Zup wrote on 2022-01-08, 14:38:

ldeveraux wrote on 2022-01-08, 14:35:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-01-07, 18:08:

For creation or consumption?

Fot the latter, definitely Winamp 2.9x

I still use Winamp on my Ryzen box when listening to music. Honestly is there anything better?

I use Audacious, but Qmmp is also a good option.

Yeah. My main music player now is QMMP. Though partly because on my modern PC and laptop I run Linux.

Back in the Windows 9x days I used to have a piece of software called Cakewalk Express Gold and I would sit there for hours building MIDI files note by note, track by track. I used to really enjoy trying to get MIDI music files to sound good. I guess most people would laugh at someone messing with MIDI files, but I still have my old keyboard that had a Floppy drive and MIDI ports on the back and it still works to this day.

I ran sound forge 5.0 before its better than audacity.

For consumption, I discovered XMPlay recently. it's still maintained and supports Win98 - Win10.