One thing I hadn’t got round to doing with my new laptop was to decide on which media player to use to access my music collection. This morning, I was doing a bit of personal data entry work (feeding in gardening data from paper-based notes), which is exactly the kind of task where it works well to have some tunes running in the background.

On my desktop Windows box, I’ve been using Clementine, which I carried over from when I was more Mac-based. It has worked well but appears not to have been updated since 2016. That would be a security risk if someone develops an exploit for it and the software is also still 32-bit when my system can take full advantage of 64-bit programs. Probably time to move on (and also for the other Windows system too).

I remembered that an old favourite, WinAmp, was designed by Justin Frankel, the same person who is behind the excellent Reaper DAW that I mainly use nowadays. There is a recent version of WinAmp available but the software has been sold on between several developers since I last used it. I downloaded and tried it but, although it looked very familiar, that wasn’t entirely a good thing – software has moved on in many ways since the 10-15 years ago that I last used it.

It turns out that there was a fork of Clementine called Strawberry and that is still being actively developed. I’ve downloaded and tested that and it feels familiar in a good way. Indeed, so far, I haven’t spotted anything that seems to distinguish it from the experience of using Clementine except that it opens direct rather than (as Clementine does) putting itself in the system tray and having to be clicked on from there.

I’ll give it a few more days to be sure but I think this one will be a keeper and I’ve already uninstalled WinAmp (no point keeping unused apps around).