Turns out these times are forever gone - never to come back. The huge disappointment when I tried this on the first run to play a mp3 file from my local disk and it initiated outbound connection. Why a local CLI player needs outbound TCP connection to play a local file from my local disk?!?! The answer was in the source. It is called telemetry. Back then when I used mp3blaster we used to call this spyware, but the times had changed since then.
Should be easy to nerf, but the build instructions are kinda vague. Clone, and then what? Something like "go build" or something I guess.
Looks cool though
Also I just compiled mp3blaster and I am listening to it again. So cool!
That seems reasonable to me.
All such surveillance behaviour should strictly be OPT IN.
IP address (which can be geolocated) along with a unique identifier is not considered "personal data"? This is basically a tracking cookie. It also seems to use HTTP, which is itself widely fingerprintable based on what request headers it sends.
No playlist or even file management - they do show id3tags, that's about it. No telemetry, SaaS chicanery or "improvement" upgrades every few days, either.
As a friendly request, I'd love to be able to use up and down keys to seek one minute forward or backward during playback, like with mpv. I play a lot of mixes that are an hour or longer in length, so this functionality would be a nice-to-have. I'll likely submit this idea to GitHub, anyhow.
To share some honest criticism, I was disappointed to discover built-in telemetry. Although it can be disabled with a flag, I dislike how it's enabled by default and unknown to the user unless one specifies the -h flag. I don't understand why user diagnostics data is needed from a console music player. Make this anti-feature opt-in and instead rely primarily on bug reports, or make the user aware of this telemetry upon initial invocation and provide instructions on how to disable it. Constructively, know your audience.
But overall, thank you to all the maintainers for this cool software!
Meanwhile some other GUI showed up, I forgot the name. I kind of gave up on winamp, mostly because my use cases shifted. I went to mplayer, then mpv, and now I am too used to using mpv for literally anything related to audio and video (which in turn uses ffmpeg of course). I kind of built a commandline helper variant that just plays anything I have local - audio, video. I could probably go and find a nice UI again, and that may have advantages such as simply scrolling through the list or setting ad-hoc favourites, but I don't quite need it anymore; I am faster with the keyboard too, so my use cases changed. To play all audio from Hans Zimmer, for instance, I may type "rsong Zimm" or something like that. (I also alias a lot so I may just type "zimmer" instead, but most of the time if I use it I just have it default to random selection as I don't care what is played normally.)