I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp's. Basically it had three panels, in order: Artists, Albums, Tracks (you could enable "Genre"/"Year"/... as well but I rarely did).
So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums.
I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks...
> So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).
I think there’s two things at play. One, small screens were never a good fit for that style of multi-panel UI. You could perhaps get away with it now, but we had years of small phones and iPods that were definitely not big enough. (FWIW, iTunes—or “Music” as it’s now called—has a UI option much like what you describe, though not enabled by default. It’s a trash fire of an app these days, but it bears mentioning.)
Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix.
It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.
Being able to scroll out swipe left and right would be quite enough. Foobar2000 has swipe gestures, but that brings you to the "now playing" view (for that one I'd prefer an always-visible area at the bottom, like VLC does, since it's only a single track).
I guess this had never bothered me enough before, but my rant made me research this a bit. After trying a dozen Android apps or so, Musicolet seems like the best option. It does use tabs you can swipe between, combined views, and overall seems to have a ton of useful options accessible by long-press and icons. An app enabling power-users, instead of the usual options over-refined for a single use case.
my preference is to actually combine the 'artists' and 'albums' columns into a single column that is a list of text 'artist - album'. foobar allows this with their great title formatting language https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title... i also now use linux and have a similar thing with quodlibet but it's a bit tricky and i still wish i had foobar2000 sometimes
So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums.
I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks...
[edit: screenshot to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4]