It is a credit to Winamp that it remained usable well into the
twenty-teens as a way to mange large libraries of .mp3
files. Winamp is not quite dead, but it is stranded on an operating
system that I have left behind (along, I suspect, with many other
technically-inclined music aficionados today). The MP3 format itself
is showing its age; Fraunhofer IIS announced in 2017 that it was
ending its licensing programs for MP3. AAC is now the standard for
digital music.
And yet, I have several thousand .mp3 files in my personal
library. Since both MP3 and AAC are lossy formats, transcoding them to
AAC would not lead to good results even if I were inclined to do the
work. The original sources of many of the .mp3s have been lost,
so re-encoding to AAC is not possible.
Perhaps scribbu (See The scribbu Program.) will
support AAC in the future, but it seems that MP3 & ID3 will be
relevant to my musical life for some time. I wrote this tool to
help me manage them, and I offer it to anyone else in the same
position: if you need to manage ID3-tagged .mp3 files, and
especially if you enjoy hacking in LISP and/or C++, I hope you find
scribbu useful and enjoyable.