winamp played every audio format perfectly in 1999, Vlc still does it in 2024. It's an achievement.

Winamp did its job flawlessly. Whatever MP3, WAV, WMA, any other file you wanted to play it would do it. No additional codecs needed, no unsupported formats error messages, anything. And this was in 1999.

The exact same thing happens now with VLC and yet people consider it some sort of miracle. "Oh you can't play that file? Well then just use VLC." The solution to a problem which should not even be there anymore after 25 years of media player evolution.

It was solved in the 90s by Winamp with an interface having a llama on it.