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.

Comments

Download it!

[little_fluffy_clouds]

It's 1.4MB in size, and is only available as an rpm.

http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/Winamp- 0.a1-1.i386.rpm

I downloaded it a couple of days ago ...

[trexl]

and alpha is a very good way to describe the results thus far. The player plays well, and will handle their streams, however there was no way to add anything but files. It seemed to me that it ran very slowly, and affected the performance of the other apps on the machine(a Dell laptop 850MHZ/256MBRAM) quite a bit. These are alpha kind of things, and by no means did I do a thorough evaluation. I am truly excited about this product coming to Linux as evidenced by my nearly immediate download, although it will be very difficult to get me away from all of my presets in xmms ... but I'll be playing with it.

Not entirely true...

[Jon Chatow]

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.

Won't even run for me..

[Eivind]

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 ?

Re:I thought Xmms == winamp

[Anonymous Coward]

XMMS is a whole different program than winamp. The only thing they have in common is that they can share the same UI with the same skins.

playlist controls

[seanw]

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

Re:playlist controls

[Pope]

Here's why: http://www.apple.com/itunes/organize.html

You import MP3s into iTunes' database, and you can sort and search by anything in the ID tags. Then you can save multiple playlists and just switch between them when you're bored.

There are a couple of Qucktime movies linked on that page that show it in action, but figured the screenshot would do for those w/o the plug-in.

Personally, I don't need much in the way of playlist controls because I don't have all my MP3s on local storage. If I did, I'd be using iTunes!

Name change!

[little_fluffy_clouds]

xmms was formerly known as x11amp. Here is the slashdot story from when this happened.

(Winamp3 == Soundjam)?

[Bonker]

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.

Help forums on winamp.com

[little_fluffy_clouds]

Winamp.com already have a couple of useful support forums for this beta:

General Discussion, and
Developer info.

Re:I don't like this trend...

[Goonie]

I don't think anybody has been asking for more Linux MP3 players.

The office apps to be finished, more work on personal and commercial finance apps, more games - sure. A media player that supports the Sorenson codec - definitely. But more MP3 players? I doubt it somehow.

Sure, if somebody releases another one all power to them, but when good free alternatives exist it's not something to get too excited about.

A Playlist patch for XMMS

[abelsson]

I wrote a patch to filter the playlist of XMMS a while back - it's pretty simple: You start typing in the playlist and it filters out all the songs that doesnt match the string you wrote. Backspace deletes the last string you typed.

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

its an alpha of winamp 3 (three)!

[porter235]

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.

Re:what about...

[Technician]

I guess it depends on what your browser reports. I got the following...

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).

The D/L file is an EXE not an RPM. I guess I'll have to boot back in the other OS to get the RPM. They choose the Win/Lin version depending on what browser you arrive with.

Re:what about...

[Yokaze]

Not really, you just have to click on "Grab the Winamp 3 Linux Alpha Preview" link.

(Writing this from a w2k machine, shame on me :) )

Nullsoft & Open Source

[antiher0]

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*

Entirely TOO alpha quality...

[David E. Smith]

Aside from the fact that Winamp/Linux is only made available as an RPM, it's so alpha, it barely even works!

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.

Re:I'll be using winamp on lunix

[Anonymous Coward]

File selection?
It uses the standard GTK file selection screen that xmms does!

Re:XMMS will continue

[Odds]

> 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?

*cough*. The Winamp (1.x/2.x) plugin API is absolutely terrible. Let me give you an example. If you want to retrieve the title of the track, what do you do? Well, you get the window handle for Winamp by calling a few Win32 API functions with "WINAMP.EXE" as the argument. Then, you call the Win32 GetWindowTitle function, then you take the resulting string and strip off the "Winamp - " from the front. No, there's no nice exported "GetSongTitle()" function.

It gets worse. What do you have to do to get id3 information from the playing mp3 file? Well, you get the HWND again using the old approach. Then you send a WM_USER message to get back the index into the playlist of the file being played. Then you send another WM_USER message to get the filename of the playlist. Then you ask Windows politely for Winamp's full path, and use that to build a full path to the playlist. Then you read the playlist file in, and find the ith entry. Then you use id3lib to retrieve the id3 info, after patching id3lib since Winamp generates non-conforming id3 tags.

Please, do not bring this Frankenstein to Linux. Won't someone think about the children?

- David

Winamp in linux ? Been there, done that ;^)

[dumol]

Mpg123, Xmms and the other linux players are all I could ever need to play mp3's in Linux, but just for fun, Wine was good enough to run Winamp in Linux years ago... Here is a screenshot to demonstrate it! Taken on Feb. 23, 2000.

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)

Winamp Mini-review

[Alan]

K, I'm in the middle of organizing a bunch of mp3s, so I downloaded and tried it, and figured I'd throw my observations up here.

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.

Be Very Careful What You're Downloading...

[ewhac]

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

Comment from developer

[Simm0]

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

I can't resist.

[trilucid]

New test MP3 file for the Linux version:

"Winamp... it really whips the Linus ass. baaaahhh."

C'mon, :).

Re:what about...

[Progoth]

I wouldn't be surprised if WinAMP itself is being ported with the aid of winelib.

I wouldn't be surprised either, the linux version of winamp3, especially the UI, reeks of wine (horrible pun intended). While moving the windows around, it has that really slow to update feel that apps running under wine or ported with winelib have.

I think the 2.4.9 kernel has issues with the sb live, (hmm, maybe time to try out .11 with the preemptible patch?), so I may be wrong about this, but winamp's sound quality seemed to be really bad when I was playing with it. I tried the windows version of winamp3 and it sounded ok, though.

iTunes, cymbaline

[oldays]

I made an media player that plays mp3s, mods and oggs using python. It follows different philosophy than other mp3 players I know - instead of selecting files for playlist by hand, you load up all files in a dir (recursing subdirs), save it into a playlist and then it monitors your listening habits and rates songs accordingly. Eventually you end up with a playlist where songs you like best have higher scores, and others have lower scores (from 0 to 100). At that point you can set a threshold that creates a playlist on the fly that only includes the songs you like most, above a specified score. I considered playing around with id3 fields, but I decided against it 'cause many mp3s don't have id3s and manually adding genre etc is boring with a large collection.. And the playlist in cymbaline is not the flat type that 'normal' players have, but is hierarchical - you have a list of albums, and in each album, you have a list of songs. Albums are determined not by id3s, for the reasons I mention above, but by directories. So, if you want to listen to a song in the same album, you simply go to the next or previous song.. if you want to listen to an album by the same band, you go the the next/previous album. I think it makes more sense to use directory structure for this sort of thing instead of id3s. For some strange reason most mp3 players ignore directory structure - is this because a lot of people dump all their files in one big dir? If that's the case, I think it's still easier to make a meaningful dir structure then insure that all files have good tags.

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.