Back in my day, I had an old computer I stuffed under my desk that I installed Linux on. It’s only job was to connect to a cifs share where I kept my (totally legally obtained) music, and play it using xmms2.

I did that so I could reduce the fairly minor load that winamp would put on my system while gaming. I had my PC and this music box both connected to a small mixer where I plugged in my headphones. So I could listen to whatever I wanted and had a dedicated screen and keyboard to control xmms2, so I didn’t have to alt-tab my gaming computer when I wanted to change tracks. Between the convenience of the control and the small benefit I got while using my computer, it was a nice setup that lasted me a long time I eventually stopped using it when I moved one time, I just didn’t bother to set it back up, and I eventually found that all the sliders in my mixer were messed up. From lack of use.

I’m sad to hear that xmms2 also had a similar problem of being more or less ignored and falling into disrepair. It was a good alternative to winamp on my desktop. Everything was very very similar, so it was very easy to swap between them.

I also similarly stopped using winamp, because reasons. I suppose the go to music player is now foobar2000.