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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUWin_II
Zinf Is Not FreeA*p!
http://www.zinf.org/

it used to be good, don't know now ( haven't been forced to use MS Windows for ages, thank god )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_media_players
for more^more choices

( damn, I wish they'd put that page in OO.o spreadsheet format, so one could sort + delete the items of non-interest, making the finding of what IS of interest to be usefully efficient! )

Freeamp, which is now called Zinf due to complaints from the Winamp people, is what you want. No ads. No phoning home. No DRM. No nonsense. Open source. Runs on Windows and Linux.

It's the zinf audio player.

you could also try http://www.zinf.org/

Does this mean Freeamp can start using its own name again? AOL made them change their name to Zinf or something like that, and they were never heard from again. Especially since one of those directory spammers took over their "freeamp" domains, and AOL did nothing about that.

FreeAMP was reborn as ZINF. http://www.zinf.org/

I found out about Zinf from the last slashdot story and have switched already.

try zinf

Once Winamp tanks completely, Zinf can use the Freeamp name again; you have to use a trademark to keep it alive.

Zinf

what other MP3 players out there have the same functionality as winamp

Well, there is XMMS... Zinf... to name a couple... Zinf has a windows version...

Here you go.

Zinf is what was called FREEAMP.

Hmmm....
What about zinf? http://www.zinf.org/features.php
It's derived from freeamp, and there's a linux version too !

Try ZINF or CoolPlayer.

...when the best open-source *nix audio players (mpg321 & ogg123, of course) will get their skinning enabled?

P.S. By the way, I might suggest that you, the ones still using WinAMP, to start migrating to the more compact (both on the HDD & in RAM), free (as in ``free beer''), almost-equally-featured (expect for the auto-execution of the skinning scripts, emphatically...) and, what really matters, not as baroque, state-of-the-art universal audio players for the win32 & compatibles (and, by using WINE, under the GNU/Linux too), - ``XMPlay'', see http://www.un4seen.com || Alternately, use the open-source, quite reach featured and cross-platform ``Zinf'' (ex-FreeA*p) - http://zinf.org

P.P.S. Or, quite a way better, stop listening to digitized music at all, mha-ha-ha! ;-)

Of course, they had to put in "themes", but at least it doesn't download them itself.

Zinf has long allowed for the saving of digital broadcasts, from shoutcast at least. But I havn't tested it on other formats, like .m3u streams and what-not (and can't 'cause I'm at work)

Thats exactly what makes me cautious about it. If it were Xiph I'd be ecstatic. Oh, wait, thats right... Zinf is a piece of crap.

freeamp - Audio player

1. Firefox
2. The Adblock extension for Mozilla/Firefox
3. mplayer
4. Flash and Java plugins for the browers

Windows:

1. Putty
2. Firefox
3. Mozilla
4. The Adblock extension for Mozilla/Firefox
5. Spybot S&D
6. Flash/Java/Acroread plugins for the browsers
7. WinSCP
8. Cygwin (including XFree86 and Windowmaker)
9. OpenOffice

The only Windows I use is Windows XP Professional as a unix admin in a corporation, so some items may be notably absent. My entire Windows list is software that can be used royalty-free for commercial use )with an obvious emphasis on Free Software).

For example, I use XFree86 shipped with Cygwin for my X server, WinSCP for secure file transfer, Spybot S&D (and not AdAware, which is another excellent product, but would require a licensing fee be paid).

I don't use Winzip at all, since that functionality is built into the explorer interface in Windows XP Professional (don't know about the others), and is also available through Cygwin.

On the occasion I'm visiting a friend who runs Windows on a personal desktop, I also recommend Zinf, the audio player, since it's free software and just plays the music without any corporate spyware tie-ins, eg., contacting a server based on mp3 header fields as WMP and Winamp have started doing.

FreeAmp, now called Zinf, can be downloaded here. Free, open source, runs on Linux and Windows. No advertising. Just plays.

Well, let's look at Freeamp. First of all, it's now called "Zinf", continuing the tradition of stupid names for open source programs. Second, when we go to the Zinf home page, we have to click on "Download", one of a number of options (including "SF", which developers know as SourceForge but users do not.) On the "Download" page, the first option, in typical user-clueless style, downloads the Linux source distribution. You also have to download and build the "MusicBrainz 2.0 client library", whatever that is. "RPMs will be available soon for RedHat 9". No date is given.

Further down, there's a Windows version, but it's three revs behind. But at least there's an installer and a binary.

If you want to build the thing, there are obscure instructions. ("You'll need perl and NASM in order to compile the latest MP3 decoder assembly optimizations. If you don't have NASM, you can still compile successfully, but you'll only be able to use some of the older optimizations written in gas.")

The Windows version is built with MSVC 5, circa 1997. Builds require some workarounds. ("NOTE: In order for the build to succeed you will need to install the SGI STL. ")

Now consider a typical Windows user. Will they be able to figure out what they're supposed to do?

Or worse, someone who bought a Linux machine at WalMart and wants to run Freeamp, er, Zinf. Will they succeed building this on Thiz Linux? What do you think?

I used Winamp2 until 2.91 started randomly stopping in the middle of tracks. I swear it was the upgrade to Dell GX240s around here-- everybody started having problems with Winamp. Winamp3 didn't appeal to me very much, so I went through Sonique, Zinf, and a few others too horrible to remember, and finally decided that foobar2000 sucked the least. Its interface isn't pretty by any means, but I keep it minimized unless I'm switching tracks anyway. Beware: It doesn't do ID3v2 tags, only ID3v1. I rip all my stuff to Ogg Vorbis anyway, so that's not my problem :)

And, of course, themes can be much cooler than skins. You can do this or this with Zinf, for example.

Although I like Zinf I still have WinAmp 2.x as my default at home due to laziness. Zinf handles the playlist a little differently, and everyone is used to the WinAmp/XMMS style playlist interface, so that's the only disadvantage I see to Zinf so far. Does anyone know if Zinf can be made to have an XMMS-like playlist interface?

And, of course, themes can be much cooler than skins. You can do this or this with Zinf, for example.

Although I like Zinf I still have WinAmp 2.x as my default at home due to laziness. Zinf handles the playlist a little differently, and everyone is used to the WinAmp/XMMS style playlist interface, so that's the only disadvantage I see to Zinf so far. Does anyone know if Zinf can be made to have an XMMS-like playlist interface?

It runs on Linux and Windows and supports nifty themes.

http://www.zinf.org
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zinf/

I realize most people (with the Slashdot crowd exception) don't know much about Ogg Vorbis and don't have any problem with MP3. But the battle's just begining.

Microsoft wants to push its DRM with the WMA format, iTunes and iPod use other methods of DRM through the devices and software with the MP3 format. But both WMA and MP3 suffer from a major problem in that neither compression codec is free or open.

MP3 players/burners (hardware or software) must collect some money with which to pay royalties for use of (de)compression codecs. WMA is the same way if anyone besides Microsoft provides the software to (de)compress the format. Enter Ogg.

Ogg Vorbis was developed in the open source community and is free of royalties and most restrictions (no more than any other open source software). Some tests have shown that Ogg Vorbis does a better job of retaining sound quality at high compression ratios. And finally, the best reason to switch: There are Ogg Vorbis player for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X that don't suffer from any restrictions. (In linux, XMMS no longer plays MP3s due to licensing restrictions.)

For the curious, a couple places to start looking for players and more information about Ogg Vorbis are:

• Ogg homepage at Xiph.org
• www.whamb.com - Ogg Vorbis player for Mac OS X
• www.zinf.org - decent Ogg/Mp3 player for Windows/Linux

There's something called Musik (don't have a link). Also, zinf (formerly known as freeamp, I believe) sorts things according to id3 tags. None of these are quite as polished and functional as iTunes looks, but they're steps in the right direction.

Categories? I open playlist, and there's my categories, in neatly arranged .m3us.

Album cover display? I don't know why people have such an obsession with the looks of the music. I tend to listen to the music with my ears, not my eyes. Cover displays are useless. Visualizations are useless.

Skins? Skins suck. I far more prefer global, uniform UI look - yes, this is why Rhythmbox rules and why I'll be using it once gstreamer gets 1.0 out or something like that. I mean, come on. people actually use these? They're stronger than I am and have a freaking huge screen, I tell ya. I use the NeXTAMP skin on XMMS, goes well with the WindowMaker!

I used to have a huge playlist, but these days, I just split the thing in several files.

There are some other things I don't like about XMMS: GTK+ 1.x, the plugin API isn't as cool as it could be (the plugins can't get song metadata from player), and there's no built-in crossfade (there's a plugin that does this nicely, but it makes the wave display or the FFT display go way out of sync - not that I much care about any kind of visualizations anyway).

Categories? I open playlist, and there's my categories, in neatly arranged .m3us.

Album cover display? I don't know why people have such an obsession with the looks of the music. I tend to listen to the music with my ears, not my eyes. Cover displays are useless. Visualizations are useless.

Skins? Skins suck. I far more prefer global, uniform UI look - yes, this is why Rhythmbox rules and why I'll be using it once gstreamer gets 1.0 out or something like that. I mean, come on. people actually use these? They're stronger than I am and have a freaking huge screen, I tell ya. I use the NeXTAMP skin on XMMS, goes well with the WindowMaker!

I used to have a huge playlist, but these days, I just split the thing in several files.

There are some other things I don't like about XMMS: GTK+ 1.x, the plugin API isn't as cool as it could be (the plugins can't get song metadata from player), and there's no built-in crossfade (there's a plugin that does this nicely, but it makes the wave display or the FFT display go way out of sync - not that I much care about any kind of visualizations anyway).

I've had good luck with Zinf.

I usually install Zinf, formerly known as FreeAmp. It's pretty similar to WinAmp. I can't speak to all it's features, as I only use it to play my Ogg files, but I've never had a problem with it. Troy

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

Outside of Office software, Audacity is a great free audio editor

SciTE or the java-based Jedit are good text editors.

The GIMP is a good image editor, available here for Windows.

Mozilla or one of its components for mail/web browsing

For media playing you might want to try Zinf (formerly FreeAmp), Foobar2000 (nice light weight music player), WinAMP for Windows. MPlayer is a good video player for Linux (and Windows) and XMMS is a capable music player for Linux.

Celestia is a nice space exploration program.

Jabber is good for instant messaging or Trillian or GAIM if you need to chat on MSN, AIM, ICQ etc.

GNUCash is a capable accounting program.

Oh yeah, and for email, I suggest setting up an IMAP server on an old machine and using that to store your email. This can be quite difficult, though allows you to browse your email from Linux and Windows. Thunderbird is rock solid and good even though only in the early stages of development.

Although others have said Mozilla as a web browser, I feel that it's too bloated and slow. Try K-Meleon or Opera instead.
CDEx is a great open-source program for ripping your legally-owned CD-audio tracks. Rip them to OGG and feel your 1337ness potential expand.
Try using ZINF instead of WinAmp (bloatware ... I haven't cared for WinAmp since early 2.x) for your sound-playing abilities. The skinning abilites are also a lot better on ZINF, plus it supports more formats than WinAmp does.
If you're not looking at getting the entire OpenOffice.org suite, you can get just AbiWord, which is a great word-processing program. OpenOffice.org, however, is really full-featured and I would say almost a must.
People have already mentioned the free anti-virus software from AVG, but it doesn't hurt to have backups, such as the free online scan from Trend Micro.
As someone else also mentioned, ZoneAlarm is also a great thing to have.
Trillian and/or GAIM are great instant-messaging.

Taking a look through SourceForge and Pricelessware are great places to go and explore on your own as well.

He doesn't mention other, very nice multimedia players like Rhythmbox, JuK, or Zinf. For anyone like me who became frustrated with XMMS' slow development and lack of features these are the things you should check out.

I like Zinf. Good points about it: it's open source, and it's cross-platform.

Zinf

Zinf is a recursive algorith for the project that was formerly called FreeAmp. What does Zinf mean? Zinf is not FreeA*p

Come to think of it, it seems to me there was another recursive algorithm like that... but I can't seem to remember what it is... (Sorry RMS, I'm just being cute...)

Well, *inf could be *inf is not freecr*ft

etree.org for a directory huge lossless (true CD quality) legal audio files from FTP sites. Mostly live shows. HUGE files will fill up your space fast.

mp3.com for downloads-a-plenty. All put up there by the musicians, who want you to download them!

Emusic gets my best vote here, because their CDs have a one-click to download all songs on a CD. You can go add say 50 albums to your queue with 50 clicks each night before bed, and fill up your collection pretty fast. (non-windows people use zinf for this one-click capability.)

Why not use a service that offers something you actually want? Like www.emusic.com. I'm starting to feel like a whore promoting them, but they seem to be consistantly overlooked and they offer exactly what most of the slashdot comments seem to want (except maybe ogg).

1) inexpensive downloads: $9.99 per month for unlimited downloads!
2) Linux/Windows support: works with Zinf (was Freeamp)
3) Works with all standards compliant browsers (well, I haven't tried IE..;)
4) Downloads are not copy protected (you want to support something I think this is the one!).
5) Non proprietary: just good old fashioned mp3's

Now remind me why should we be getting excited about the new UMG service? Sounds like extra work at a higher price to me, but its your nickle... ;-)

I've been quite happy using Zinf as my Windows-based MP3 player. It's functional enough (i.e., it plays MP3s, but doesn't have all the extra stuff that WinAmp has, like a built-in web browser) and is GPLed.

well since i was looking for freeamp the other day and i noticed it wasn't around any more, i found another free as in both speech and beer open source mp3 player. it's called zinf

freeamp is good just wish the website was still around. zinf seems to be the exact same thing tho just with a name change.

Check zinf out, (formaly known as freeamp). Its has plenty of good features (inc skins which u dont like) but it very small (compared to wmp), it also has a playlist editor similar to wmp media library (which i like)

You Want Zinf

Who this kills is the free (as in speech) players - Zinf, XMMS, etc. They can't afford $50k OR $0.75/copy. They can either hope Fraunhofer doesn't notice them, or try to relocate to a place with either no software patents or no Fraunhofer patent, or they can leave MP3. In fact, Linux users in general may be left out in the cold, because I'm not aware of any commercial MP3 decoders for Linux, at all.

Unfortunately, this probably won't be enough to move the world from MP3s. WinAmp will still be downloadable for free, which is all 98% of users care about.

I remember when I was at EMusic, I met with the Thompson guys, who were trying to figure out how to make money on this (circa 1999). I explained to them that nobody was going to pay for a decoder, and that their choice was either to give the decoder away or have people switch to something else. I also suggested the encoder should be free for non-commercial use, in order to cement their current dominance against (then soon-to-be-released) Windows Media.

One of them replied (imagine a German accent), "I see! Vee give avay evrysing for free, and you make more money selling music!"

So, you could say we had a meeting of the minds. :)

Do you think Winamp might go the way of Freeamp which has to be renamed to Zinf (zinf is not freeamp) so as not to infringe on trademarks?

Zinf is based on the FreeAmp® source code. However, AMP® is a trademark of PlayMedia Systems, Inc., and therefore the original name of the project cannot be used anylonger. On this website the old project will be referred to as FreeA*p.