Slashdot Mirror
Winamp Alpha for Linux
nerdguy0 writes "It appears that Winamp isn't just for Windows anymore. Nullsoft has a Linux alpha of Winamp3 out on their site. Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done." Does winamp have better playlist controls then xmms? I've taken to using freeamp just because it has decent playlist controls. I say decent, not good. I want something with a tivo type of intelligence, but everything that claims to do something like this, well, doesn't.
all those windows dynamic link library (.dll) plugins?
Runnin' On Empty
http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/Winamp- 0.a1-1.i386.rpm
What were the skies like when you were young?
In my option in developing such a system , it may be better to start from scratch instead of using legacy windows code. (except for some of decoding and stuff).
Using left over windows code , will cause bugs, crashes and slowness.
Cruise TT
Shouldn't it be called Linamp, then?
This space left intentionally blank.
i mean
winamp == closed source
winamp == dead
i can play audio mpegs with xmms
and now with xmms 1.2.5, i can play video mpegs.
so i ask again
who needs loseamp?
I have to agree with the poster on play lists. I'm trying to set up a laptop in my living room to play mp3's and while xmms is a great player, it's ui to load songs and file simply sucks. What I need is something that my wife can deal with.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done.
Who's to say the winamp people haven't done hard work either? Just because they have corporate sponsorship and their software is closed-source doesn't mean the software is 'bad'. Besides, if there are already good players available for linux, I doubt people would switch to a closed-source solution that does the exact same thing, unless it offered superior features of some kind. Anyway, this should be considered a good thing, as linux needs as much support as it can get when it comes to multimedia applications, and especially ones from big companies (in this case, AOL)
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I thought all that xmms was was a port of Winamp to Linux? And that they were based on the same source.
So, if winamp is getting ported now, can you use regular Winamp for windows plugins? That would be great
that will be the end. Just like every linux app it will be in constant beta state.
Winamp Mac edition has been in alpha-stage for quite some time (I've been using it for over 4 months, personally).
I like Winamp, but, no, the playlist randomisation is purely random - it doesn't randomise within a genre or the like, for example.
James F.
GQmpeg
GQmpeg Skins.
What were the skies like when you were young?
Assuming you can use WinAmp plugins, you would be able to listen to Windows Media files on Linux. Not only that, but WinAmp has dozens of plugins for video and other audio types. This could be the link that Linux needs to be a usable multimedia system.
The World is Yours.
Very Alpha I'd say. With my Mdk 8.1 system and Xfree 4.1.0 the player won't even start. They start it with a shellscript that redirects all error-reporting to /dev/null, After I uncomment that and run it again I see that it fails with:
libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 72 (X_PutImage)
Serial number of failed request: 5011
Current serial number in output stream: 5012
Ofcourse since it's closed-source I can't even begin to guess what's causing that. Anyone else have any luck running the player under mdk 8.1 ?
I could have sworn I was using Xamp on Linux two years ago. Or did I dream it?
this seems like good news in general, but I also get the feelin a lot of work will be duplicated by the Winamp and XMMS people.
on the top of the poster's list was playlist controls. I totally agree, and I am shouting at whoever is listening...LOOK at iTunes!! anyone who has ever had the good fortune to use iTunes knows what I'm talking about. it is hands down the most powerful, flexible (and beautiful) music interface I have ever used, and I would pay money for it, without hesitation, should someone port a similar scheme to linux.
regards,
sean
xmms was formerly known as x11amp. Here is the slashdot story from when this happened.
What were the skies like when you were young?
I had a buddy who went to work for C&G a little while back. After a few months, he left that job and then went to work for a Newspaper.
A little bit ago, I heard that Cassidy and Greene was discontinuing Soundjam, which was really quite an incredible (closed source, alas) audio player for Mac. They're now working on iTunes, or something similiar.
When I played with the Winamp 3 alpha, I couldn't help but think how closely it resembled Soundjam in terms of features and skinnability. About the only feature it was missing that Soundjam had was a built in CDRipper/Encoder. I dunno. Is that in the new beta? NS seems to have replaced that with it's rather overdone playlist database.
There's you Tivo-like Playlist, Taco.
At any rate, I found the Winamp Alphas to be quite processor intensive, even on a P3 500 and a Duron 800, especially with the more data-intensive features like the playlist database or the animated skins running.
An entire database in an audio player? Thanks, but I'm going to err on the side of sleekness. This may be a neat feature, but I never play my MP3's in any other way than drag and drop. I drag and drop a particular track I wanna hear, or drag a whole folder and then hit 'shuffle'. I'm certain others will find it useful, but for me, it's unecessary bloat.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Complaining on and on about how Company X won't provide Software X for Linux, followed (immediately upon release by Company X of Linux version) of complete deriding of that software (comparing its features to some previously created Linux software) is not good encouragement for other software companies looking into the possibility.
Not to say software shouldn't be allowed to compete against other similar software so that the best can win, but the immediate, relentless bias towards the earlier-compatible software serves no one.
I'll stick to Freeamp thanks. The Playlist manager ("My Music" as they call it) is the best I've seen for any player, and the iterface is nice & clean.
I started using Freeamp after Xmms started doing strange things when I tried to use it with the kernel OSS drivers, and I've never looked back. I can get the same player for Linux & home, and WinNT at work.
Remember kids, Freeamp!
Why would I so unique about Winamp that I would want to switch? Last time I used Windows, Winamp was a nice player that did it job without being annoying. (Quite an achievement for Windows software, BTW). But what does Winamp have that popular Linux players, such as XMMS and Freeamp lack?
What do you mean by that? How could a digital music player work like Tivo? Your ripped cds don't have commercials, and don't need to be saved so you can listen to them later. What feature of tivo could be applied to music player like winamp to make the controls better?
General Discussion, and
Developer info.
What were the skies like when you were young?
Requirements: This BETA version of Winamp3 requires a Pentium II or higher class processor, 64MB of RAM (128MB recommended), and Windows 98 and higher (Windows 2000/XP Recommended).
I hope the Linux version has lower requirements. I really don't believe this. Winamp 2 runs on a P166. Where is the time that good software fitted on one 720 disk? (and would run on a 286)
Privacy is terrorism.
Perhaps more importantly (for linux users, at least) is that the open source nature make developing plugins easier.
What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?
It's really convenient when you have a 2000 song playlist and just want to listen to a specific album.
However, it breaks the usual shortcuts (p for play, etc) in the playlist - you need to use the main window for that. There are lots of improvements that could be done - wildcard and substring matching are obvious ones. But it works well enough for me, and makes the XMMS playlist much more useful I like to have a large playlist and just filter out things i don't want to hear right now.
Anyway.. if anyone's interested it's available here (I'm not sure it still patches cleanly, haven't tried in a while.)
-henrik
I just know I'm going to get modded down for troll, but please READ this post ALL the way through before you do so. I am not a Win32 zealot, I love Linux and want only the best for it.
Anyway, this should be considered a good thing, as linux needs as much support as it can get when it comes to multimedia applications, and especially ones from big companies
There is already a Shoutcast for linux, why would you need client sortware on a server OS? Why do you want people to waste time on this, when developers could better be spending their time competeing with Unix in the enterprise market. That's esentially what this is... a waste of time and resources. The most precious resource the Linux community has is it's developers, shouldn't you be encouraging them to play to their strengths instead of "run multimedia apps and have office so Linux can be just like Windows". I don't want Linux to be just like Windows. If I want Windows I have windows. If I want an affordable server solution I have Linux... and that, in all honesty, is a solution that needs some more solving.
Please stop crying for Linux to be a desktop OS. Perhaps it will evolve into one after it has swallowed the server market, but now is not the time to spend valuable resources on it.
Lots of people have mentioned how strange they think it is to release Winamp on a platform with a perfectly good clone, but I think this is bizarre for another reason. Surely this is a *really* good example where simply branding an open source product would be perfectly adequate for creating a presence on a platform? Quite clearly if Winamp released a Winamp branded version of XMMS there are a large number of people who would download it simply due to name recognition, and they wouldn't have to worry about their development being open source, since they would have a pretty much guarenteed (unless they really screwed up) following, who would download WinampLinux rather than any other version of XMMS. Are they really so into their closed source scheme (for a free beer program!) that they can't bear to use what's already been developed, and simply improve it to achieve feature parity or whatever?
..seeking in a stream via HTTP "partial content" feature. And Advanced Visualizatoin Studio.
from the what-exactly-is-the-point dept.
I'm sure the Nullsoft guys did this for fun, but why did Slashdot post it if even CmdrTaco didn't think this was news?
I think that any post that begins or ends with "I know I'm gonna get modded down for this, but..." should be automatically prohibited from being modded up. the vast majority of times I see people saying this they do indeed get modded up, probably because moderators are like little kids and respond so easily to reverse pyschology
FUCK YOU manipulative people who do this
One of the biggest reasons I don't use linux all that much is the quality of programs for doing my everyday things. High on that list is listening to mp3s/oggs. I tried both freeamp and xmms, and while I thought they were decent, both seemed to be trying their damndest to copy winamp, and failing. Both had many quirks that annoy the hell out of me. For instance on XMMS you have to hold down the mouse button to navigate the right-click and options menus. The add-files in xmms is extremely clunky too. I can't even read half the names of my songs because of it.
WINAMP being ported to Linux is a GOOD THING. It is definetly the best media player. Even if it wasn't, with 99% of windows people using Winamp, seeing the software they use ported to linux is a great way to convince them to get off Windows.
If anyone wants to stick to XMMS or Freeamp because of their religious open source ideals, regardless of player quality, go right ahead. I'll be using winamp as soon as it's out of beta for linux.
Competition is always good. But the good people over at 4Front Technologies have supported Linux and *BSD for a long while. Nullsoft (AOL) could've been in this space a long time ago. They're only expanding their base now that its obvious that Microsoft's WMF will make every other media format a second class citizen on the windows platform. Show a little loyalty.
Embrace the wrevolution!
Apple took SoundJam's code, threw out the GUI, and built their own. and it's the best MP3 player interface out there.
shows that Apple still has the right stuff(TM)
Would be nice to have a all Linux streaming solution that works with Shoutcast. I have yet to see any stable streaming solutions that are full featured for Linux (anyone have any URLs for me?). I wonder if/how long until they port the Shoutcast DSP to the linux Winamp3 version. The Alpha doesn't startup on my system, Redhat 7.1.
try
$ cd
$ wine winamp.exe
yep, it works perfectly well here (kernel 2.4.12).
of course, i installed it in whine-blows first ( haven't tried installing in Linux using WINE ).
[...]
IDNOAT, but I hear Tivos have a "thumbs up" and a "thumbs down" function to allow you to give feedback to it about what you like.
The interesting part is that half of that user interface is already in an mp3 player, they just need to take advantage of it.
Consider...
I have about 4000 tracks in my mp3 library. I leave xmms on shuffle play. There are tracks that I almost always skip. Sometimes it is a weak track on an album, sometimes it has especially inflamatory lyrics and isn't appropriate for the office, sometimes it is an artist that has ticked me off (Randy Newman isn't getting played much lately).
The player should keep track of which tracks or artists I habitually skip reduce their probability in the play list. If I stop skipping them then it should start reducing their penalty. (Say Randy Newman drops his suit against mp3.com and apologizes, I might stop skipping his tracks.)
There, no complicated user interface required. Just a player that pays attention and learns a wee bit. For bonus points, add a "i like it" button to the user interface and allow tracks to acquire 'thumbs up' points as well.
a couple of things.
1) it's an alpha of winamp 3, containing a different feature set than the winamp most of you know (and that xmms borrowed the look of)One thing is an extreamly flexible skinning script language, allowing for a custom shaped, custom programmed interface (for the most part, from what I understand).
2) it's an alpha! bitchin'bout it ain't makin' it better! if you want to use winamp in the future, than write the team with constructive notes. yes it's not open source, but it is free. negative shit like some of these postings is not a good way to encourage people to develop for linux.
The only thing that could make me switch at this point is if all the winamp DLL plugins somehow work in the linux version. Winamp has a lot of nice plugins you won't find for xmms. Somehow I doubt it, but have they even addressed the plugin issue at all?
winamp 3 is new, and has been developed with portability in mind, the linux port was planed from the begging.
Photos.
In all of this I'm starting to wonder where AOL comes in. I don't see Linux or Mac as big markets that they'll make any money in, but perhaps this is another stepping stone to get an AOL package that works for other OS's. If you look at what Netscape Communicator (4x) came with you see:
Netscape - became Mozilla, is cross platform
Winamp - being ported to Mac and Linux
Realplayer - Mac and Win32 versions
With these 3 components (and Macromedia flash) you could participate in just about everything the web has to offer. I could see these comming together in some sort of cross platform package in the future (with some sort of chat client).
The whole player thing is getting a bit weird. Xmms started off as X11 amp, which was basically a copy of Winamp, but later grew into a player with it's own flavor. Winamp then gets ported to Linux, which sort of makes for a weird situation. Mac amp was the Macintosh version of Winamp and used to be owned by Nullsoft, before the guys sold off the division to some other company. Now Winamp is available for the Mac again, but now under it's own name. And yes, Mac amp is now also available for windows. (So we have Winamp for Macs, and Macamp for Windows)...
I read on the winamp forums that it won't work when the display depth is 16 bpp
So, in other words, this alpha version does not work at all on two-year-old laptop computers that lack megs and megs of video RAM. Not everybody's computer has enough video RAM to hold a 24-bit frame buffer at the LCD's native resolution (i.e. 1024x768).
Will I retire or break 10K?
I say who cares. We have XMMS, FreeAmp, and a whole host of other players. If your gratitude is based on the fact that WinAmp has better playlist controls, then do us all a favor and write a patch for one of the existing open source players. I'll admit that I haven't actually checked out the link, but are they making the source available? I doubt it, and so I say again, who cares.
-B
It locks the device up and won't release it.
The "My Music" function also chokes on my 10 GB mp3 directory, but I guess that's almost expected.
xmms plays mp3's winamp and even mpg123 barf on
go figure
i heard it has something to do with xmms having code to parse out bad mpeg headers, but i'm not a programmer, so what do i know
just my 2 pesos worth
Where is the time that good software fitted on one 720 disk?
When its users accepted four-color CGA chrome. From another post in this thread, I inferred that Winamp3's theme engine uses true-color PNG images (which are smaller than Winamp2's uncompressed BMPs but still big). Good luck fitting even the default theme on a floppy.
(and would run on a 286)
MPEG audio layer 3 requires too many floating-point operations to be practical on an Intel 80286 or comparable microprocessor.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's pretty stupid to sort the music files based on the artist and song name stored in the .mp3 file itself.
It's far too much work to input all that information in when you're ripping CDs. Stay with the filenames, please.
Dude, by legacy windows code he meant code that uses the Win32 API, not code "written and compiled on a windoze machine". Win32 API is not good stuff, and emulated like in WineLib, it is prolly worse (or not, considering the quality of M$ code...). And yeah, writing code on windoze leads to less good and less tainted code. For example, check examples on how to fork processes on both APIs (Win32 CreateProcess() and UNIX fork()), you'll see what I mean.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
So will people use Winamp, or use XMMS out of principle? I like Winamp, but given the choice between an open-source and closed-source program, why should I use the closed-source version?
I decided to give it another try and "My Music" music search locked up the computer -- hard. Fortunately it didn't trash my ext2 partitions. Had to wait for ages for the fsck to finish, though.
What a piece of crap.
Winamp sucks. I like the Microsoft Media Player. It looks like a very large head. Large heads are good.
Does winamp have better playlist controls then xmms?
They both have the jump command ('J' key), what more is needed? That in my opinion is the best part of the playlist.
Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done. Come on, XMMS is not very good (at best). I have stability problems using it (Mandrake 8.0) and the look and feel is a complete ripoff of WinAmp. If it is as stable on Linux as it is on the Windows platform, this will be a winner.
You have something above your lip.
I tried Winamp. Its not beta, its alpha.
I got it playing an mp3, but many features
do not work/work well.
However, when it played, it played my mp3 much
better than xmms. For some reason, my mp3
has a sort of "skip" sound at some point.
Under Xmms, it plays loud. Under Winamp and
mpg123, the "skip" is muted. You can hear
it, but its much less intrusive.
BTW, what can cause these "skips" to occur?
Bad riping?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Tivos have a "thumbs up" and a "thumbs down" function to allow you to give feedback to it about what you like.
check out Mserv.
It's a client/server app designed for an office setting where many people can hear the music playing from the mp3 music server -- like overhead speakers or with shoutcast. The client runs in Windows and puts a treble clef in the taskbar tray. Users sign into the app and rate songs as needed while they're playing from "hate it" to "love it". Admins can stop/start the player and skip tracks.
As you could guess, the server keeps track of who's logged in and modifies the playlist on-the-fly so as to avoid playing songs signed-in listeners have said they don't like and focus on songs the signed-in listeners are either neutral about or have said they liked. It's actually a very cool app.
I was foolish enough to buy the X10 wireless audio extender, and used this app to adjust playlists for when either I, my wife, or both of us are home. If I can figure out how to "sign in" users without having them actually start windows anywhere, I would be able to make Misterhouse take voice commands like, "Alfred, please play some music for Steve", or "Jess", or "a party", or "dinner".
* Bonus points on why I would call my home automation system "Alfred"
Intelligent Life on Earth
This is like porting Photoshop to linux, who would care? The software already has a fully functional _OpenSource_ alternative already developed! I am happy NullSoft is releasing for linux, not like it matters since:
A) I don't do closed source if there is an open source version available, and if there isn't an open source version available I will only use the closed source version until there is a better product developed openly.
B) It is for X86, please tell me why I would want software limited to an architecture I detest?
I still like it more than Sonique for example, tgough: Sonique looks better, has a better shuffle function, but is not stable.
Does anybody know if this is solved in the upcoming 3.xx Winamp versions?
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
This is excellent. XMMS has always had a pretty poor decoder (the same as in mpg123), which does not handle VBR mp3's very good (lots of artifacts in the sound). FreeAmp has a better decoder (as does mpg321), but is overall quite buggy. I'm looking forward to this.
-larsch
Nice of the lads to port WinAmp, and actually use :P
;)
proper GUI tools - as far as I could tell, it used Gtk+.
But as far as I could tell, there was also a timer to make
sure we couldn't see much of it before it crashed
Anyway, I would stick to XMMS as I'm actually happy
with it - it plays sound, music, movies, and whatever
else these crazy plugins do. I think I'll make a picture
viewer for it (with slideshow options) just to not have
to mess with even more programs
True, nobody is saying i have to upgrade. and since i have an 166 i probably won't upgrade.
The thing that got me puzzled is this:
15 years ago - 286 - 256Kb of memory.
Word perfect 5.1.
now - Pentuim 500+ - 128Mb of memory.
MS-Word.
graphical options are improved, the userinterface is improved and the os has several advantages comparesd to DOS (where you had to install a printerdriver for each different program).
but gradually the os but also the programs have become less and less efficient. It's a way of thinking like "because it's possible" which makes programs less efficient, I guess. Where people used to think about efficienty, nowadays resources are freely available and you can do whatever you want.
Hmm. This is gettin offtopic.. Sorry.
Privacy is terrorism.
Winamp Is Not A Monopoly's Property?
It seemed to want to save user data in the isntallation direction (/usr/local/WinAmp on my system, Debian using Alien). Also I found no way of loading whole directories of music at once. Under XMMS I can multiselect in the file dialog, or select a directory and have a recursive find.
I'll have to look at Freeamp!
I use real jukebox, although I can't explain how it got onto the computer *probably bundled with something else*, it plays and encodes all my music at the quality taco mentions.
Its cool too, unless i am missing something, it goes to CDDB and gets the track detail, even on obscure things like 'beta band' old EP's.
On a diff note i would recommend the beta band to all you yanks!
Is this available for linux? Any 1 have any reasons why I shouldnt use REAL jukebox?
On a diff note, why wasn't winamp made for linux first? The reasons why would tell you linux/unix devotees why you never get 'cool' software first!
Cheers,
Sy
Sounds really nice... I wish I could try it, sad that they don't have a FreeBSD version, I'll need to try to run it with binary emulation latter...
I wish that they make it Open Source some day, AOL already supports Mozilla, so why not also opensource WinAMP?
That would allow more ports to other Free and non Free *NIXs, and I'm sure it would create a great development community.
BTW: Other great player is s.q.u.e.l.c.h(http://www.geoid.clara.net/rik/sque
Best regards
Uriel
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
RPM ONLY?. Good lord.
not that i dont like xmms, but winamp has been around for a long time and they have kept their software pretty legit. Their decoders are probably a lot better than xmms's too, just because they have been so perfected over the years.
as for playlist control, i dont how well winamp3 will be with that. if you go to fileplanet.com you can actually download the winamp3 alpha (for windows), it is NOTHING like the current versions of winamp, they changed everything.
There seems to be a bit of annoyance in the community pertaining to the closed-source nature of Winamp. I'm not Nullsoft, but I'd wager that if they weren't part of a larger corporation, they would have probably open-sourced Winamp by now. Nullsoft isn't against open-source. Check out [nullsoft.com] to see (the most notable contribution here is their open-source installer software... no more InstallShield!). Don't forget that Gnutella started out as a Nullsoft project. Besides, the past has shown that competition breeds innovation. Has anyone looked at the new media database thingy? It's pretty sharp. Of course, when it all comes down to it, it's Just Another MP3 Player.... *shrug*
This thing is hideously power hungry. Running winamp under WINE offers far better performance... how'd they manage to skrew this up so horribly? there's been a beta mac version for a while now that hasn't really seemed to be in development lately (it crashes when you try to access the menu).
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
fsck it! it should be .deb!
At least on my system (K6-3/333MHz, 192M RAM), XMMS plays everything I throw at it flawlessly, whereas this alpha of Winamp was slow and choppy under the same conditions. Slow and choppy to the point of being utterly unusable. And ugly, but that's something I could forgive from an alpha, if it actually worked.
Wow, winamp doesn't clip at 100% like it does in XMMS. Their is also a marked difference in the sound quality.
Once they get this running faster, I'll definatly make the switch. (Native ALSA drivers would be a plus!)
Huh? Why is it stupid to rely on the files ID3 information, thats exactly what it was designed for!
If you use a sensible ripper that does CDDB lookups when you rip, it will get & set the correct ID3 data for you. The only problems I've ever seen is when some fool uses RealJukebox to do their nasty 'ol 96kbps rips with no CDDB data, but so what?
Oh great. There goes about 80% of the distros that aren't Redhat baised. I'd rather use rpm2tgz instead of trying to force it with plain-old rpm itself.
But then, XMMS works well anyway.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Maybe I'm just getting old and less reactionary, but for what it's worth, here's my series of knee-jerk responses to the Winamp Alpha for Linux:
... uh ... I'm...such a spaz.
Oh well look at that! Nullsoft decided to jump the Linux bandwagon. Well, tough titties, Winamp boys. We're all using XMMS and it's open sourced.
Wait...wait. Hold on there, self. You haven't even tried the software and you're bashing it. Give it a try, then form an opinion.
Oh fuck me running! They only distribute in RPM! Fucking bastards probably don't even know what RPM is an acronymn for! Fuck this.
Wait a minute, self. You have rpm2tgz. Just give it a go. God, I swear you're
I shouldn't have to do this.
You're always bitching about the only reason linux isn't where it needs to be is because corporate money drives the 'accepted standard'. Hired programmers are PAID to do the hard stuff and polishing even if they don't want to do it -- to make a product palettable to the everyday user. Open Source programmers work on what they want to, when they want to. Generally they are just a loose-knit community really only working on what floats their boat. Maybe this is a little inconvenient now, but this could be a step towards Linux gaining mainstream acceptance.
It doesn't fucking work. It doesn't even error out. It just dies and brings me back to a prompt.
Hey come on, guy it's alpha. This is the risk you run
So I could be using XMMS, a matured mp3 player with near-winamp capabilities, but instead I've wasted my time, chasing after a carot tied to a corporate stick.
Yeah that's true
AND we know how well Linux beta's are maintained. Look at the half-assed, bare-bone, or WINE-backend capabilities of RealPlayer, MusicMatch, Acrobat 4, and AIM. These aren't even updated or maintained half the time. Hell, GAIM is even infinitely better and more capable than AIM.
Yeah that' also true
And the reason for that is because they're disinterested and they know they can get away with it. If the software was just open-sourced, even with a restricted license, they wouldn't even have to maintain the code and let all the happy hackers fix their shitty software for them.
Wait...why aren't we using XMMS again?
Looks like another binary compiled for one specific version of RedHat.
.can't do much with it in gdb.
I use: XFree86-4.1.0-17mdk
And get the error:
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 72 (X_PutImage)
Serial number of failed request: 4985
Current serial number in output stream: 4986
Symbols are stripped. .
Well, there seems to be a limit on how long titles can be... ;-)
I like Winamp, but, no, the playlist randomisation is purely random - it doesn't randomise within a genre or the like, for example
In the Windows version, if you go to Preferences -> Shuffle, there is something called "Shuffle Morph Rate." It's a horizontal bar, with "Slow" on the left and "Fast" on the right. The text says the following:
But, as you said, there's no way to randomize within genres, outside of creating your own custom-playlists. And that probably won't be too random...at least the second time...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
That's a good strategy there, post flames and shit so moderators waste their points modding you down. Because we sure as fuck can't trust them to pick out the GOOD posts. :)
Who would of thought WinAmp for Linux would cause a political controversy.
'Language du beau pays du Quebec..' In the locales menu.
I get the joke, the french being a slang french and all
BUT
Anyone from Canada should be totaly offended by this, like wtf, there must be some seperatist coder working for Winamp who decided to call Quebec a country. Like rename it to 'Quebecois'
(btw I like this winamp for linux, much better decoder than xmms, (and that should be the bottom line), once the speed and resources considerations get out of the way, it'll be much better, lets just hope they do a good job)
I have a definite bias towards free software, software for which I have the right to view and modify the code. I see no reason to encourage people to produce closed source software for Linux if there is a viable open source alternative, as is the case with Winamp.
If, however, there is a task for which open source software is not available then closed source software is fine, but if closed source software has trouble competing with Open Source then that is a good thing.
However note that if you had issues with Winamp (such as the fact that it seems to crash once every 30 seconds on my machine) you need to rely on Nullsoft to address any problems you are having. Or what if Nullsoft decided to place spyware in their software? What could you do? Not much because you may not even know it is there. And what if Nullsoft decided to stop development of Winamp, or (more likely) decided that Linux development wasn't worth their time. What could you do about it? Absolutely nothing.
You may see these as irrational "religious" reasons to favor Open Source, however to me they seem very rational indeed.
* Bonus points on why I would call my home automation system "Alfred"
:)
I hope that this is a reference to Bruce Wayne's (Batman's) butler, and not to Alfred E. Neumann of MAD Magazine
deus does not exist but if he does
I have that feeling that Winamp is going to stay in alpha for at least at year.
The thing I don't like about those none-open-source-windows-ports is that most of the time they come out for Redhat only.
Being on a Slackware box that is very unpleasant. That is the reason why I stick with Open Source stuff.
Compile the hole thing and it works just fine!
I think that the XMMS people are doing a very good job and the program will always be better on the Unix platform than Winamp.
42 + 1 = 42
There was nothing wrong with what he said; what you think he was "implying" is typically true. From your post many can assume you have no idea what you're talking about. There are many problems with using Win32 legacy code. Taking code from Win32 and porting it to Linux results in poor, unclean code (most of the time). Nobody is trying to scream Linux's "power"- it's the simple truth.
By the way, to all those who are concerned, WinAmp3 is a complete rewrite of WinAmp so there's nothing to worry about.
I don't understand why it is that there was an early Winamp lookalike that never made it past version 1, and was made by an individual and not the Winamp people.
On the early days of MP3 sharing on our mac network, all we had was winamp mp3 compatibility problems, inability to use pluggins and no skins. That started changing but I still need to use Virtual PC if I want to get any SPC pluggin-- emulation of esoteric formats for the mac is only starting, and it is coming from individuals, again. The problem is the lack of free programming resources and general information, like there is for Windows all over the web.
I hope this Alpha winamp does it right for you guys, because the MacOS was forgotten --rare thing when it came to Office, browsers (cough, IE, cough) and other things.
"Wireless : LAN
Uh...if there are tracks you ALWAYS skip, why don't you delete them? Or at least remove them from the playlist...
I was really starting to worry about WinAmp. Windows Media has gone from a complete pile of junk to a usable pile of junk and WinAmp really hasn't changed, but version 3 is a complete rewrite with everything I wanted and it's still the exact same size with probably 3X more features. Those guys really know how to program. It's just a great app.
Look at it this way: You could say "Oh, you're from Manitoba. That's some beautiful country out there." Well, Manitoba isn't a country. But the landscape, the terrain, the plains, the wheat, all that shit is part of the generic term 'country'.
It's not French slang, btw. It's a language unto itself. If you study the history of it, Quebecois is very closely related to the french of the 1700s. It didn't mature in the same fasion as the France French. There's a lot of English influence in it, but it's not slang.
Slang is like "Hey, can I slip my tube steak into your sister? She ain't half bad lookin." That's slang.
And so what if a seperatist thinks Quebec should be its own country? Does that mean there's a fundamental flaw in the program?
No sig is worth reading.
OK, well, I'm a fan of XMMS, but WinAmp is cool in Windows... So, is this going to mess up XMMS forever? Probably not. XMMS is already distrobuted with most distros of Linux... Plus, this is a alpha and may result in being pretty buggy, who knows...
WOW this is great. I am a big Winamp fan and a regular shoutcast listener. This player has the shoutcast servers listed within the program so there is no loading Konqueror just to hear stations. Very cool. I've noticed some breakup during the first few seconds when playing a stream but after those first few seconds everything sounds fantastic. 192kbps streaming ohh yeah!!!
There's an XMMS plugin that tracks when you skip over a file, and then when you shuffle a playlist will put those skipped files further down on the playlist.
There's a program which does exactly that. It's called Cymbaline. I'm too lazy to find the link, but you can find it on Google.
It's console-based. It keeps a playlist with a score for every song (which starts out at 35). It adds points to a song's score if you listen to it all the way through, and subtracts them if you skip it. There's also a key which sends the score up to 75.
I haven't touched XMMS since I downloaded it.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
... but suspicious, no. I'm not sure which, but it's either Gælic or Welsh (or possibly Irish).
It looks like spam, too, though I can't imagine why someone cultured enough to speak any of those languages would be spamming...
It is designed for an office environment, and, by rating tracks, the random play will tend towards tracks liked by people logged in.
I've been using WinAmp 2.666 very happily with Wine...it seems to use an equal amount of CPU as XMMS does on my machine. Unfortunately there's a few kinks lost in the translation, but I find that I use it more than XMMS.
The name has to be changed to Linamp.
No sig for you.
there was a MacAmp for a time but it sucked. Sound Jam was a commercial product that worked very well, but once apple released iTunes, Sound Jam was no longer needed.
It is nice to see that more Windows apps are going to be ported to Linux. There is a market for Linux, and these software companies need to start realizing this.
Since Red Hat (according both Netcraft and the usual market research firms) is more than fifty percent of all installed Linux systems, with SuSE, Turbolinux, and Caldera (which all use RPM) being the other major players, I'd say your 80% figure is a flaming load of poo.
Sorry not to burst your bubble. There's a standard and more people would like proprietary vendors to package their apps than otherwise.
Deal with it.
Subject says it all really. Do you want to learn more?
Being a FreeBSD/Win32 whore, I find it very, very amusing to see a major software release such as this fail miserably on so many Linux systems.
It illustrates perfectly why LINUX IS NOT READY FOR THE DESKTOP.
Yeah, it's a shameless plug, but there are some people interested in using Winamp's plugins in Linux. Well, that's the way to do it... Using Wine in Linux, Winamp uses even less cpu time than in Win 9x... Some of the plugins run just fine (see the screenshot for an example)
I started with nothing and still have most of it left.
I noticed the year is missing from dates on Slashdot. This is annoying when you read articles from a few years ago and don't know when they were posted...
Anyone know why this is the case? Oversight?
Winamp 3 ALPHA... Hmm, 2 years in the making, just went beta in the windows side of things. Not to be confused with Winamp 2.xx or XMMS, a whole new design, a whole new way of thinking. The wonderful thing about software... you dont have to use it if you don't want to. You make it sound like someone is shoving Winamp 3 down your throat. Half of you speculating "AOL"'s motives, the other half arguing a moot issue of open-source vs non. If open-source is so cool, how come everyone uses shoutcast server vs icecast? :)
In *my* opinion, open-source is code written by people who give up to soon, and want others to fix their mistakes. It's great when people are all behind an open-source project, in the beginning, then a few months roll by, and your core developers are back to where they started...alone, but now they're open-source, so to make any significant impact on the code base, they get to run the devils-guantlet of opinionated jerks who's expansive knownledge of programming is breaking open someone elses PHP script to add a Smiley to a submission forum. Real inviting. So my word of advice, back off, it's alpha, it's free, and I gaurantee if the "response" from the Lin-world continues to be this negative, I doubt they'll bother finishing. I would assume people would like stable, new software for Linux, I could be wrong. It's amusing to note, that the poster of this article fails to mention the open-source sdk for winamp 3, ah well, censorship works both ways I guess.
ps: Whats the latest exploit in sendmail this week?
No, but good guess. It's actually a reference to the "home automation system gone bad" in a very early Dean Koontz novel, "Demon Seed". The HA system in that house was the bomb (if people are still saying that :). Cameras with machine vision everywhere. Complete voice control for appliances, temperature, blinds, door locks, the works. The house owner's ex-husband works nearby at a research place with the "world's most powerful computer", which ends up invading the innocent HA system and does some very bad things with his new "senses".
:)
It became a movie in 1974, and Dean rewrote it in 99 or 2000 to bring all the tech stuff up to date. Great book. Awesome HA manual
Intelligent Life on Earth
First of all, only an RPM. Sure, alien converted it to .deb easy enough, but still, the option of .deb, .tgz and .rpm would have been nice.
Adding files is a PITA. You can't select multiple files in the playlist editor, and it doesn't take filenames on the command line like xmms does. There is a neat split in the playlist editor, and that might have let you add directories, but I didn't play with it.
When you do get files in their playlist, the player takes about 70% of the CPU. Xmms has usage way below that. (my cpu is at 16% now, and I have a lot more than xmms going :)
Sloooooooooooooooooooow. Moving windows around, opening windows, was slow and laggy. Probably having to do with the cpu usage.
Fonts are pretty gross. Quite possibly my X setup though. Anyone else have everything come up in a large courier font?
The automatic music stream retriever was pretty cool
None of the windows 'docked' togeather like xmms or winamp under windows.
Stability... while moving windows around and opening and closing the little 'helper' windows it crashed on me.
All in all pretty dissapointing. Now I am very pleased that they are doing this! I hope their product gets better, addressing the above points, and that xmms has to get their asses moving to make thier product better (competition is good right?) But for me right now winamp doesn't cut it. Totall time of playing with it was a couple of minutes (less than it took for a song to play)before it crashed.
This is a pretty poor review as I didn't have much clue as to what I was doing, and didn't spend that long on it, but for what I am looking for, no thanks.
Notice how Nullsoft has it called Winamp, not Linamp. They will have to change the name to show that they now have developed for majority of the experienced users of the world. That is beside the point that most devleoping countries are using Linux or some other open source Unix based OS due to the price compared of using some other OS.
Just my 2 cents.
Deep breath.
This is not a release. It's an alpha version, fergawdsakes. You don't release precompiled binaries of alpha versions.
And yes, it's bleeding-edge: of course. The fact that it was compiled with bleeding-edge libraries is probably a reflection of the libraries Nullsoft have on their Linux boxen.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
"It appears that Winamp isn't just for Windows anymore."
:P
I guess the rock CmdrTaco lives under didn't let the news that there's been a version of Winamp for the Mac for months slip by.
Runs like a dog.
... it's consuming about 40% cpu just sitting there.
a rameters(LPVOID foo, BLAHCHAR unknown, VPPOIDPTRTODATAMEMBER bong, EXTRASPECIALDBLBYTECHAR goodVariableName, WIN32DOUBLE(TM) wang)
Oh I see
I would have thought it would run a lot faster, after being unencumbered by all those calls to Win32RatherLongFunctionsThatTakeAboutFourMillionP
I announce a completely off topic contest: the longest Win32 function name. Let the idiocy begin!
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-MS-ishi amal fauthut burgulli.
Yes, it's true, SoundJam was discontinued because of iTunes. However, I believe the developers left C&G to go work for Apple, with the blessing of C&G being given due to a cheque from Apple. It is still possible to find SoundJam in odd places (I have a limited version of it on my machine that came with my Rio; I bought my Rio just before iTunes was released & consequently never upgraded; "RioPort SoundJam MP" still comes in handy sometimes, although it's somewhat crippled).
Although I love iTunes and use it frequently, ironically, my favourite MP3 player is MacAST, due to its superior AppleScript support. while it doesn't do everything I want it to, it does allow me to press the play button in a script. iTunes, weirdly enough, has no AppleScript support at all. also, the one feature that SoundJam had that iTunes doesn't is a large base of available visualization plugins. the default Apple visualization is kinda cool, but I've yet to see anything as neat as G-Force, or in fact any non-Apple visualization plugins at all. this is weird. there is an SDK for iTunes plugins, does anybody use it?
Anyway, back to the topic. :) SoundJam was - as far as I know - based entirely on original code. MacAST (formerly known as MacAmp) was originally a port of WinAmp. (Amp changes to AST for broadcasting, i.e. shoutcast playback support.) It was done by a company called @soft though, but they did have Access To The Source.
the post-iTunes postscript: @soft's site is still up. However, they haven't released much; they just put out an encoder a few weeks ago, but most of the site is still living in March 2000. most of the other Apple MP3 players have basically stopped. the only reason people use them now is because they have Old Macs and can't run iTunes, or because they're cranky like me. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Winamp is incredibly lame, especially on Windows. XMMS slaughters it IMO, and, isn't some untrusted bullshit binary that does weird shit. I know the windows ver has a constant thread running on all windows systems it's installed on. I think this's just the latest version though (3).
Blah.
:wq
At the risk of appearing like a paranoid Montana militiaman, I would point out that AOL announced over a year ago they were going to incorporate copy protection measures into WinAmp. I don't know if AOL (Nullsoft's parent company) intends to cripple the Linux version with the same garbage, but I would advise you be vigilant when downloading any version of WinAmp for any platform. You do not want to help proliferate such stuff, even unwittingly.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Open source/closed source....
Well I know where the safest option lies, I'd much rather compile and use the source than use a pre-compiled binary, who knows what sort of virii or backdoors are in those damn binary files. When there is very little difference in functionality, there is very little room for the closed source to move.
www.linuxfromscratch.org
Does it go on forever?
"Does winamp have better playlist controls then xmms?"
I have noticed that XMMS seems to pre-build a list of "from this song I'll go to this one" type thing for random play every time you start it. If you keep playing the same song, the next "random" song will always be the same until you restart XMMS. I haven't noticed this in Winamp. Just my two cents.
void women (int money, time_t time);
Plan:
/.
14-Oct-2001
Dear
We ported it to Linux because we *like* Linux. Calm down.
Sincerely,
Brennan
... tee hee, and in other news, Microsoft releases their bug free, previously Microsoft internal only version of Office for Linux and Slashdot patrons cream their pants in a beautifully shared geek moment...
ahh.. *passing the cig around* was it good for you too?
Sonique is another great windows mp3 player that will be making it's way to linux. Looks like there's going to be plenty of competition- I'll just sit back and see who ends up on top.
well, how many times have you downloaded mp3's, and then when you go to play them they are inventively named "untitled" by the worlds most prolific artist, "unknown artist".... id3 tags aren't always accurate. Hmmmm... that leads me to wonder... Is it possible to edit id3 tags down the track? or only when originally ripped?
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
IMHO.
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
It became a movie in 1974, and Dean rewrote it in 99 or 2000 to bring all the tech stuff up to date.
:) (Koontz is entertaining in a trashy sort of way, but he's not the sort of author I'd pay good money for...) I remember some gratuitous mentions of the Internet grafted in there...
I think I may have read the rewrite -- given to me as a freebie when I bought a much better book
I did wonder why they were giving it away, though. Trying to boost sales figures?
deus does not exist but if he does
Winamp developers response to slashdot:
/home/brennan Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
/.
[simm0@mercury ~]$ finger brennan@nullsoft.com
[nullsoft.com]
Login: brennan Name: Brennan Underwood
Directory:
On since Sun Oct 14 18:17 (PDT) on ttyp0, idle 1:05, from 64.105.36.233
New mail received Sun Oct 14 19:20 2001 (PDT)
Unread since Sun Oct 14 19:05 2001 (PDT)
Project:
Why, none other than architect and head such-and-such for Winamp 3.0.
Codename Wasabi. Why this fails to get me all the chicks I'll never know.
Plan:
14-Oct-2001
Dear
We ported it to Linux because we *like* Linux. Calm down.
Sincerely,
Brennan
Q: Can we have a Linux specific bug page/Linux specific winamp page so we can help fix and find these issues as they appear. There are quite a lot of loyal Linux fans who are very technically competent who can help out a lot here and will willingly do so.
A: There will be, I think. But, bear in mind that the Linux version is ported from a fairly old snapshot of the win32 code. So a LOT of the bugs you'll find are already fixed in the main code base. Over the next month or two we're going to try to fold the Linux code back into the main tree.
--Brennan
New test MP3 file for the Linux version:
"Winamp... it really whips the Linus ass. baaaahhh."
C'mon,
I agree - I like GQmpeg's interface. Very nice on a 1600x1200 screen, whereas xmms is tiny. It still has the same 'winamp'ish look for the main window, but having the playlist as a regular gtk+ window is nice.
Thing is, on my system (K6-II 500) it skips when I change desktops, move files around on IDE drives, scroll in netscape (sometimes), etc. xmms doesn't.
What would be great (and for all I know, it may be out there - I haven't looked) was for there to be a gui plugin or somesuch that used gtk+ (and qt for the kde guys). I've never been a fan of the winamp-style look-like-a-car-radio interface. For one, a lot of my mp3's have long titles - mix that with long author names, and you can't tell what songs you're listing in the playlist.
Like I said, I haven't looked, so it may be out there... perhaps I'll do some checking around.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I haven't tried it, but I don't see why it wouldn't work - mplayer supports .wmv files, so perhaps someone could modify it to play .wma (the version I got won't play mp3, but I imagine it's probably just because it wasn't designed to play audio only - it plays mpeg just fine).
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
There's a utility called id3 that does this. On my system (debian) I've got three packages - id3, id3v2, and libid3 installed, so it's bound to come from one of those (prolly id3). Check your distro for binaries.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
From what I have seen, iTunes is by far the most superior audio program. The playlists are not only easy to use, but keeps track of your music more efficiently and you can query easily too. I would like to see THAT ported to linux and windows...but it wont happen, so I use sonique...(deprecated, but whatever it works)
I don't maintain a play list, I just let it do my whole mp3 directory tree. I don't delete the songs because I like to keep the albums intact for research purposes. Say I'm studying a particular bass player. I will then want to listen to all of his tracks, even though I don't listen to them recreationally.
To quote: Having read yet more comments, I think you guys are totally missing something:
/.
Our open-fucking-source SDK. It's 1.5 megabytes of C++ code, zlib-type
licensed, mostly debugged, pretty portable, and happens to comprise about 90%
of the *exact same code* we use to build Winamp3 itself.
Do you see the point now?
Do I have to fucking spell it out for you?
14-Oct-2001
Dear
We ported it to Linux because we *like* Linux. Calm down.
Sincerely,
Brennan
Read it here yourself
hopefully with the advent of kylix by borland, a lot of shareware and freeware developers for windows will choose to produce linux equivalents, it's very easy unless you are using complex visual controls, then you have to write more code.
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
/ducks for cover :)
The poster didn't look at the page.
You can download a RPM
Cymbaline has many other neat things, mainly features that rely on these two unique things - album-centered and weighted playlists. It's a console player that only works on unix currently, using mpg123 etc as backends. The URL is in the sig.
I can rip CDs based on my playlist. I can randomize by just about anything. I can get faded and watch stupid visuals. I can listen to streaming MP3 audio.
I love Mac OS X(.1).
hmmm, xmms looks like winamp with a skin (can't remember the name but it looks exactly the same as xmms), the basic functionality is the same, and - at least on my laptop - xmms works better than winamp. even more - xmms was developed for linux and isn't just a half hearted port.
so - why switch?
".Sig Stealer" was here
oh come on... 'alien' is a package you can use to convert for example rpms to debian .debs or vice versa and even to other packaging standards. How is this offtopic? Are moderators on crack?
This was posted in the winamp.con forums by Brennan (the lead developer for Winamp 3):
"...bear in mind that the Linux version is ported from a fairly old snapshot of the win32 code. So a LOT of the bugs you'll find are already fixed in the main code base. Over the next month or two we're going to try to fold the Linux code back into the main tree."
Just thought this would add some insight to the matter from the developer himself...
- Jarsonic
...This is what Brennan (again, the lead developer of Winamp 3 for Nullsoft) said on the winamp forums concerning Linux users' complaints about the name being "Winamp" and not something like "Linamp:"
"The name Winamp, at this point, has 0% ZERO ZEEERO NONE NO NOTHING NOHOW NOT ANY thing to do with Windows. If we called the Linux version Linamp, we would be implying that it did. At this point it's just a name, a very famous one, and a pretty good one. So it's Winamp, not WinAmp, not WinAMP, just Winamp, no matter the platform.
--Brennan"
There we go. - Jarsonic