Older software like this runs extremely fast on my newest hardware. Switching to lightweight native apps is sometimes more of a speedup than dropping >$3000 on new a workstation class laptop.
Of course, you usually need the latest hardware to eat through modern workloads. But aside from that, I sometimes forget clearing out software bloat is a much more effective way to gain performance, productivity and improvements to the overall user experience.
This. I'm honestly not quite sure what kind of supercomputer would be needed to have Teams not lag.
I'm kind of OK with having to wait around for a compile or other heavy "modern workload" (though I must say I don't do this all day every day). But it drives me absolutely crazy to have basic software lag when I type. This absolutely kills the experience for me.
I use Teams daily on a MacBook Pro with 32 GB RAM. If I walk away from the laptop and Teams detects idleness, it starts consuming 100% CPU and the fan turns on. Returning to the computer, everything is dog slow for several minutes. Drives me crazy.
The other thing that drives me crazy about Teams is there still is no “temporary mute” for channels. I can’t mute a channel for say, an hour. I have to suffer through notifications about topics I’m not interested in. I know there is a “turn off notifications” by conversation. But that’s not helpful when there are new conversations all the time.
Phew, only those two things? How about not being able to copy stuff from chat (for some reason this does not work since Skype for Business times)? How about being kicked off from the current chat if one dares to open MS Word/Excel from within the chat? And that's just the beginning of the annoyance.
But, luckily, we can easily integrate our chat with MS Stocks application, and, even better, with MS Power BI!
I have always impression that MS employees cannot use Teams, otherwise they would have noticed that something gone really wrong here. On the other hand, those are people who gave the World the (in)famous Windows Millennium Edition, so everything is possible.
I always here that Microsoft employees should know that their software never works that great. I often wonder somebody must know what Microsoft employees think. I mean, don't Microsoft employees talk to people outside of Microsoft?
Whatsapp drives me crazy with this too. You can only mute for 8 hours, 1 week, or forever. No other options. Just let me choose how long to mute for, a billion dollar corporation could surely afford that. And a single 'custom' button wouldn't ruin the 'clean UI' or whatever they're trying to maintain.
This problem is an annoyance. The slowness of Teams, however, is unforgivable. There's no excuse why a chat app from 2022 should run slower on an 8 core Xeon with 64GB of RAM than MSN Messenger did on my Pentium box in 2000.
By just 4X the RAM and an AMD Athlon XP you could do inline LaTex, embedded video and images and a lot more under KDE3 and Kopete as the IM client (KDE3's "gaim/pidgin").
Now 1GB is not enough, not even with 2GB, that's borderline usable with XFCE4 and Alpine Linux and ZRAM (my Celeron notebook setup). You can browse stuff fine with UBo and Chromium with privacy and performance tweaks (git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters), but if you launch heavy stuff (Glibc gcompat stuff such as Teams) will keeping a bunch of tabs open, the speed grinds down a lot.
Surely you don't expect a lean, resource starved company like Microsoft to build native applications, do you? Microsoft doesn't care if the net power use of their very popular application burns up gigawatts of electricity every year rather than megawatts. At least not when the development cost is 1/4 cent per user rather than one cent per user.
If you just need the chats, its actually lighter and faster in MS Edge than in the app Ive found. They are using some newer Edge shit in the web thats not yet ported to the app.
Hmm, I just launched it on Edge and it does seem a lot faster than the desktop application. Hoping performance improvements are coming sooner rather than later.
I use a 14" M1 MPB. The ARM version of Teams running on it is by far the best Teams experience I've had. I still loathe Teams overall, but we have to use it at work. It's definitely much less bad than it was on my 16GB Ryzen 4800u laptop.
Older software sometimes runs just as fast on older hardware, too. It’s anecdotal, but I never remember waiting on Winamp to start up. iTunes, on the other hand, has always seemed slow.
Me neither, but I remember I was annoyed few times it took "ages" to load a "library" of few (thousands) tracks and then consumed considerable amount of RAM. Maybe TENS of megabytes even (!!1!).
So I remember the relief when I switched to Billy audio player [1], that was way more "spartan" and had just those few features I really needed, and then joy of even faster start time and negligible memory footprint.
I'm not overly familiar with that period's iTunes, but I remember when I bought my first iPod, a 4th gen click wheel (don't remember the year, but it was already an "older model" at the time) I was using Amarok on Linux on an AMD Thunderbird with 256 MB of RAM. That thing would fly. And it did more than Winamp: it had an actual DB-backed music library, iPod interface, etc.
Yet, a few years later, when I got a MacBook Pro with a dual-core CPU and 16 times the RAM, iTunes would still be painfully slow. And I don't remember it doing much more than Amarok. As a matter of fact, it was inferior on pretty much every metric I could think of.
> it had a lot of features/bloat like the music store and iPod synchronization.
This is a hilarious statement to read, cause that's probably what 80% of people were using iTunes exclusively for and relegating their music listening to their iPod/iPhone, especially in the later part of the 00s.
to be fair, Winamp is probably one of the smoothest softwares ever. A lot of new "native" apps have transitions and fancy effects that makes them as slow as the electron-based ones.
This sounds weird. Have you abandoned native apps altogether? You must be using notepads, pdf viewers, terminals, etc. People are still constantly in touch with low latency and low-bug UI and I like to believe that because of this native apps will prevail in some form someday.
I've said this a few times on here but I'll say it again. Starting from 86Box, archive.org, and winworld, I've been building a VM of my 1996 Gateway 2000 with Windows 95 and re-installing all the old goodies. I also did a find on my mp3 library and found everything last modified before 1999 and loaded them up on there as well. So now I can actually go into a super realistic VM experience in full screen and use Winamp 2 just like I remember. It's a very satisfying type of active nostalgia.
I have Encarta 96, MS Bob, Windows Entertainment Pack (including SkiFree), Arcade (Asteroids/Missile Command/Centipede/Tempest), MS Golf 2, Cooking with Julia Child, Tonka Construction, Winamp, Netscape Navigator, Space Cadet Pinball, MS Works, etc. Even My Briefcase is there!
I turned on a sound profile so there are little jungle clicks everywhere. Mystify your Mind works great as a screensaver. The Microsoft Windows Sound still is clicky when it runs during boot. Great times.
Anyway Winamp 2 works like a charm and the j-hotkey still is unsurpassed in my experience for rapidly searching a music collection.
I’ve considered setting up an old OS VM for various types of serious usage, but as snappy and responsive as they are you can feel a certain reduced crispness compared to real hardware, probably due to latency increases coming from the hardware and software layers involved.
I’ll have to try with Windows but it’s apparent when running Mac OS 9 and early releases of OS X in qemu-ppc or SheepShaver — despite the machine the VM is running on being vastly more powerful the old Powebook G3 Pismo in my closet (modded with an SSD of course) feels more snappy.
What’d I’d really like to see is reproduction old hardware on modern process nodes with a modern port outlay, screen, etc. Something like that Pismo could easily fit on a card the size of an rPi compute element which would make it easy to fit in just about any laptop chassis imaginable.
I have something similar as well - basically reliving my childhood computing experience when computing felt so exciting. I got all my childhood games (Age of Empires, Midtown Madness, etc.) installed as well as software from the day as well. I found Digital Blasphemy wallpapers which capture the late 90s/early 2000s feelings as well. It feels good to power the VM on and just listen to an old MP3 collection as well as play some games.
Foobar didn't really scratch the same itch for me as Winamp. Foobar felt more like it wanted to ingest/organize my entire library, which never appealed to me because my library was 1TB+ and it would take a lifetime to fix every album with some bad tags.
Winamp much better fit my workflow, which is: I wanna right-click a folder on my desktop that houses the specific album I want to play, click "Play in Winamp", and have the music player launch quietly in the system tray and throw up the occasional notification when the track changes.
No disrespect but your experience with foobar seems like the inverse of how it works? It definitely has a Library function, but my workflow for using foobar for years now is:
- Install
- Turn off visualization
- Drag and drop folder full of audio on the main window
That's one of the things I like about it the most: I do a ton of reorganization of my audio, so the fact that foobar can run in 'dumb' mode is a godsend.
The last time I checked (year ago), the MacOS version is much less configurable. I don't think you can really change the interface with config files like you can with the Windows builds. This might have changed though.
I've used both Foobar and MusicBee (on Windows) and personally I prefer MusicBee's interface. It works well with my library of 21k files - not sure how it performs with libraries much larger.
The beauty of foobar2000 is that you can lay out the user interface however you want. The built-in layout editor is very intuitive, and the UI can be extended or even replaced with numerous third party components.
I'm a huge MusicBee fan. For my money, nothing touches it. It's running on all my Linux boxes (via wine 7.x) with playlists and music kept in sync using Syncthing. I would love to be able to use a native Linux app, but they all suck in comparison.
Foobar has horrible UI, couldn't even make it use mouse wheel to control volume same way as Winamp. And honestly what it can bring me over software I am using daily for 20+ years just to play some songs and nothing else?
I never got on with Winamp and switched to foobar2000 after getting hold of a fairly early release (pre-v0.3) sometime in 2002. It's been my mainstay audio player ever since.
I think it's my longest used app in desktop already since previous millennium, followed by TCMD and IrfanView.
edit: tried to install new Winamp and unlike WACUP ir requires me to install also Microsoft Visual C++ which also requires computer restart, all of this to use dumb music player? not very user friendly, no other app in desktop missed it
Most of the crashes tend to be due to the parts re-used from 5.666. Also it's a preview build (aka public beta) so it can & will be unstable.
As for what place it has, I'm going to still make it because I've very clearly been made unwelcome to remain as a "winamp" user plus I don't like where it's owners are taking it with all of the ntf related stuff & taking the piss out of the user base for so long. So if I want to have something that can keep my plug-ins working then I've got to make my own player which is what I'm doing.
I had been doing that much more early on along with replacing some of the plug-ins & dlls. After a point the reality dawned that I was replacing so much that I was on the road to making my own player. Also how things have gone with the owners I just don't want to be doing anything that uses their offerings
There's still some live patching / splicing needed for some of the plug-ins that are still re-used from 5.666 as part of the current beta builds along with WACUP having the ability to run minus EQ & modern skin without the winamp core exe. As there's a few things from that exe which the modern skin plug-in requires to work which I've yet to work out all of the interfaces to allow the plug-in to work. It's part of what's been holding up a new preview build as I just need to be as free from having to leverage bits from Winamp as possible.
In my opinion, WACUP is a truer Winamp than Winamp is. Winamp was bought and sold and none of the original developers are there. It looks like a cash grab on the name to my eyes. On the other hand, DrO was an original developer and keeps the spirit of Winamp living in WACUP.
Sorry to hear you were having crashing issues. Mine has been stable but I also spent some time going through all the settings and dialing it in exactly as I wanted. I run it at 2x scaling on a 4K monitor and it looks terrific in all it's pixelated glory.
It's a gradual reimplementation whilst using some of the pre-compiled 5.666 exe / dll (how much depends on the build being used) with the end goal for WACUP to not require the 5.666 files, be plug-in compatible & it's own thing.
Everyone over here lauding the speed of Winamp and comparing it one-to-one to iTunes forgets that Winamp never stopped existing and they were free to continue to use it. Comparing it to iTunes is silly if Winamp did everything you needed and wanted.
But, we all know that iTunes did a lot more than just play music. And you can argue the merits of whether those things were good or not, but again, Winamp never stopped existing, and it never added the additional features people clearly wanted.
When Winamp was popular Macs were <5% of the market. I hope they release a version for macos. I don't think the current developers own the IP to Macamp.
SoundJam MP owned the Mac side of the market back then. Until Apple bought it out and converted it into iTunes (which was surprisingly good the first few versions, back when it focused on ripping and playing back music and wasn't stuffed with stores, video content, multiple library management UIs, Podcasts, etc.).
I actually like the podcasts integration and I'm glad that on Windows iTunes hasn't (yet?) been split up the way it has been on Mac.
Not so much (with some little exceptions) for actual podcasts [1], but rather for managing my collection of various radio comedies – its handy being able to sync them over to my phone together with the rest of my music collection, but by manually setting their media type to "Podcast" [2] they don't clutter up my regular music library, I get the handy unlistened/listened visual indication, and it remembers the playback position in case I can't listen to an episode in one go [3].
[1] I was never that big a podcast listener, plus now that my mobile music player hardware has its own network connection (because it is in fact my phone) I can download episodes directly there without having to go via my computer.
[2] No longer possible on Mac in the post-iTunes age, and the successor Podcasts app apparently doesn't support manually adding files as episodes to it.
[3] Okay, so you can turn on remembering the playback position for any file in iTunes, i.e. even regular music files, but that doesn't work with my Android phone.
Does anybody know whether any of these new versions has fixed the bug whereby gapless playback didn't use to work for AAC (m4a)-files?
I know it's been fixed in one of the WACUP builds, but last time I tried I would have had to manually migrate my Winamp settings, which seemed to much of a bother given that I mostly use Winamp just for playing back one-off music files, so the partial lack of gapless playback is only slightly annoying.
I'm really happy about this new Winamp version. They've modernized their stack and dependencies (modern compiler, support for today's codecs, you can now use a modern toolchain to build plugins), fixed bugs and introduced some subtle new features (like a Podcast directory - love it!). All without breaking any of the things that make Winamp great.
Been using it since it was around but it's now too tiny on 4K. I've long migrated to AIMP with a signature "Heavy Metal" equalizer present which I just can't leave.
When I got 4k monitors, I enabled double pixel mode, and adjusted the fonts to be bigger. Solved 99% of visibility issues (playlist buttons are small, but the playlist itself is fine).
In a way genre-specific EQs are stupid because the music is already mixed and mastered for the genre, EQs are there to adapt your monitors to your room, or correct your headphones.
Well, Winamp 2 skins were basically just BMPs that were drawn directly onto the desktop. How would that work on Android? Would it show the player as a traditional window with microscopic buttons?
no, as a normal app, just with the winamp skin zoomed in full screen.
If I take my phone an place it over my desktop monitor, where I run winamp, the sizes roughly matches (in cm, I mean), so it would be possible to zoom the .bmp without stretching to much the pixels
Of course, you usually need the latest hardware to eat through modern workloads. But aside from that, I sometimes forget clearing out software bloat is a much more effective way to gain performance, productivity and improvements to the overall user experience.