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It's windows only, but...
Winamp plug in

You may already have stumbled across this little surprise on your system.
I found it apparently bundled in with other downloads I had made from
RealNetworks.

Of course, they could have borrowed a lesson from Winamp, who's had a little browser in their MP3 player for a while. But then, maybe the guys at Winamp (Nullsoft, whatever) should learn from this and incorporate Mozilla into their player.

They are seeking to turn the tables on the browser with this move. I'm sure if this is greeted warmly by the general public, you can bet they will position it more agressively as a "stream" browser/player, unlike what they said about their intentions were not to create a "browser".

I know this is a nitpick: httpQ, Winamp Control Center (alt), and Muse all offer some control of Winamp or streams from an HTML interface, and they offer source code too. Other general purpose plugins for Winamp expose hooks in Visual Basic and stuff. If you feel like it, you can build a wholly different interface with entirely different capabilities, and a set of new problems - like people complaining just because of a new interface. Oh well.

I know this is a nitpick: httpQ, Winamp Control Center (alt), and Muse all offer some control of Winamp or streams from an HTML interface, and they offer source code too. Other general purpose plugins for Winamp expose hooks in Visual Basic and stuff. If you feel like it, you can build a wholly different interface with entirely different capabilities, and a set of new problems - like people complaining just because of a new interface. Oh well.

I know this is a nitpick: httpQ, Winamp Control Center (alt), and Muse all offer some control of Winamp or streams from an HTML interface, and they offer source code too. Other general purpose plugins for Winamp expose hooks in Visual Basic and stuff. If you feel like it, you can build a wholly different interface with entirely different capabilities, and a set of new problems - like people complaining just because of a new interface. Oh well.

Check out the Palm theme for WinAmp, at the linked site (I had a link, but Mozilla crashed -- hey, a good excuse :-). There's also a MacOS X theme (pretty, my favorite actually).

For us Linux folks, they all work perfectly in XMMS too!

There's a nice (and I do mean nice) plugin for WinAmp called RockSteady (you can grab it and a whole bunch of other plugins at WinAmp.com).

"Saves you from the varying volumes of your MP3 collection" (or something like that)

I can't help you for Unix. (but did you notice how familiar that DOS shell script was in another comment? Bourne shell code below all that? Without the source, you'll never know...)

Is it me or does the site look like a complete rip off of http://www.winamp.com? At first, I thought Winamp was evaluating the product!

Or being given away. Thanks Justin! :)

A very good point. Justin Frankel has helped to radically change an industry that hadn't changed for decades previous...

Not many people can say that :-)

For the uninitiated, Justin Frankel produced and designed the WinAmp MP3 player.


--

Just clarification...
While WinAmp started out as shareware it is now freeware. Justin must have given up on people registering with his company (Nullsoft).

Skins can give you the basic look and feel of any interface you want for your XMMS / WinAmp player.

XMMS uses WinAmp skins, and a huge mass of them are available at winamp.com.
As much as all you linux junkies hate going to anything with Win in the title :), there's some good stuff there... you can find just about anything. Or go to a search engine and search for "winamp skins".

Personally, I've found the BeAmp skin gives a good BeOS feel, if you want something that's like standard GUI widgets.
There are also nicer skins with custom UI's-- the Fusion based ones are nice, I believe one of those is XMMS's base skin (it is in the version I have, anyway), or try X-perienze for a quasi-futuristic look.

You can always design your own skin too.
--
Talon Karrde

I make no excuses for my paranoia, but here goes.

Anyone here use ICQ?

AOL bought them out a while ago, if I remember rightly.

Anyone remember that registry hack on Win95/98 you had to do to stop it checking your HD? I never wanted to find out what happened to the information it got on our users' PCs.

Now add to that thought that AOL owns winamp and will probably increase its stake in the MP3 world...anyone here ever download a dodgy MP3 off a warez site? I know I have (Themes from crappy kids TV I grew up with, if you're wondering).

Ok, so it's a Windoze app, but the Big Brother idea isn't just tied up with existing TW/AOL users, they could potentially get info on just about any half-clued up newbie who actually uses ICQ#. And heaven knows what other nefarious apps they'll come up with in the months ahead.

Privacy? What a quaint 20th century idea...

Of course, regardless of my fears, look forward to a big, BIG push in MP3 sales in the coming year. AOL won't just be combating ISPs/cable etc, it'll be going up against music formats, CD/MC/MD, whatever, in the years ahead. Not particularly of interest to slashdot, I know, sorry...

There, paranoid rant over and done with.

Woah, I'm sorry, did you say "WinAmp's MP3.com site"? I'ma afraid you made a factual error there, as MP3.com is owned and operated by Zco, Inc. You probably meant to say something like winamp.com, or nullsoft.com.

I suppose a 24kbps mp3 would be OK, though not nearly as good as using Real's G2 stuff that adjusts the quality to your available bandwidth. And you'd have to stream the audio...I suppose shoutcast would work, but that still requires Windows (Winamp) to send the stream, AFAIK. And no, HTTP streaming is not the answer.

You are correct that fifos may be used for streaming encoding but there are a few problems, for one there really isn't any encoders that will go 24 or 32 hz for encoding a low end mp3 as needed and those that can to it do it very slow and the encoded stream will lag over 30 seconds from the input (which imho is terrible). There's not much that can be done about this because of patent issues on encoders and most encoders being closed source.
I think there's also extra header information that is intered in the stream at key intervals so if a client joins late they are able to read the next header and pick up the stream from there. I don't think there is support for this in linux encoders.

I'm planning mostly on getting the webserver to understand the shoutcast headers and play a pre generated file and afterwards let someone else fill in the encoder part.

basic http header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html

shoutcast header:

ICY 200 OK
icy-notice1:
This stream requires Winamp

icy-notice2:SHOUTcast Distributed Network Audio Server/win32 v1.0b

icy-name: something
icy-genre: something
icy-url:http://whatever
icy-pub:1
icy-br:24

Note that even the connection accept codes (200 OK) are the same, all that really needs to be done now is to figure out what winamp sends to the server and how to tell that apart from a web page request at which point you can use the shoutcast header above as a template and send it any mp3 stream you want. This is also why you can use mpg123 to play a shoutcast stream.


- MbM