The Winamp media player was developed to run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The last stable release of the software was released about three years ago on April 26, 2023. If you need a native Linux alternative to Winamp, Audacious is a free and open-source audio player that has a GTK-based interfrace (GTKUI),but which can also be configured with a Winamp-like interface and which supports Winamp 2 skins, i.e., Winamp .wsz files (a type of ZIP archive file). You can also migrate Winamp playlists into Audacious; it supports the standard .m3u and .m3u8 playlist formats, though you will need to modify the Windows-style file paths to be Linux-style file paths. To use Winamp playlists on a Linux system, such as an Ubuntu system, you can take the following steps.

1. Locate your Winamp playlists, which are .m3u or .m3u8 files typically located in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Winamp\Plugins\ml\playlists where username is the relevant username. You can view the contents of that directory from a command prompt window using the command dir %appdata%\Winamp\plugins\ml\playlists since %appdata% is an environment variable pointing to the account's AppData\Roaming directory.

   A list of the playlists is contained in the playlists XML file. In that file, which can be viewed in a text editor such as the Windows Notepad, you will see data like the following:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
   <playlists playlists="35">
   <playlist filename="plf8064.m3u8" title="Moonzic (Top Favorite Mix)" id="{8B45286F-9CF9-4A14-9045-F27EDC1ED72B}" songs="217" seconds="0"/>

   The first line above shows the version of XML in use is 1.0 and the character encoding is UTF-16. The next lines shows that, in this case, there are 35 playlists. The next line shows the filename of 1 of the 35 playlists and the title for the playlist in Winamp.

2. If the music files, e.g., the .mp3 files referenced in the playlists are not accessible from the Linux system, copy them to a location that is accessible from the Linux system. If you preserve a similar folder structure, if you need to copy or move the files, editing the playlists files will be easier. E.g., if the Winamp playlists contain paths like:

   C:\Users\Alice\Music\Artist\Album\song.mp3

   You could have a similar folder structure on Linux like the following:

   /home/alice/Music/Artist/Album/song.mp3

3. Edit the playlists files. You could use a global find and replace function in a text editor or you could update all of the files at once with sed (short for stream editor), which you can run from a Terminal window. Sed will likely already be present on a Linux system. You can verify that by using the which command, i.e., which sed, which will show you the location of the program, if it is present. Sed is also available for Microsoft Windows systems at sed for Windows. A sed command like the one below, if executed from the directory where the playlist files are located, could be made to make the needed changes if the the Windows and Linux file paths were like the ones above.

   sed -i 's|C:\\Users\\Alice|/home/alice|g; s|\\|/|g' *.m3u8

   • The -i tells sed to edit files in place, i.e., to make the changes to the specified file rather than create a new file.
   • The commands sed will use are enclosed in single quotes.
   • The s at the beginning of the command instructs sed to perform a substitution. The vertical bar is being used to separate the old string from the new replacement string. Another character could be used, such as a colon, etc.
   • The string to be replaced, C:\\Users\\Alice is placed within the first pair of vertical bars. Each backslash must be preceded by another backslash because the backslash character has a special meaning — it is an escape character. If you have a period in the replacement string, you should also precede it with a backslash, since the period (.) has a special meaning in a regular expression, also. The replacement string is enclosed within the second set of vertical bars.
   • The g that follows the 4th vertical bar indicates it is a "global" replacement operation, i.e., it should occur everywhere the original string occurs in the file.
   • The semicolon separates the first command from a second one, which indicates any backslashes in the file should be replaced with forward slashes. I.e., the backslashes that occur later in each line should also be replaced.
   • The *.m3u8 indicates that the sed commands should be applied to all .m3u files in the directory.
4. After updating the .m3u8 files, within Audacious, click on Playlist and select Import.
5. Navigate to the location of the playlist then select one by clicking on it and then click on the Import button.
6. The playlist name, e.g., plf68B in the example below, will match the filename for the .m3u/.m3u8 file. You can rename it to match the name for the playlist in Winamp by opening the Winamp playlists.xml file, which will be in the same directory as the playlist .m3u8 files, in a text editor or web browser and looking for the corresponding entry, e.g.:

   <playlist filename="plf68B.m3u8" title="Disney Classic Tunes" id="{AAD2A93E-93E9-442B-B24C-88D0BFBB4607}" songs="44" seconds="8231"/>

   Right-click on the playlist name in Audacious and choose Rename.

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