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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.
http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/Winamp- 0.a1-1.i386.rpm
What were the skies like when you were young?
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.
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 ?
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!
General Discussion, and
Developer info.
What were the skies like when you were young?
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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
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.
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.
The truth shall set you free!
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*
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.
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
New test MP3 file for the Linux version:
"Winamp... it really whips the Linus ass. baaaahhh."
C'mon,