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 ?

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

Name change!

[little_fluffy_clouds]

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

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.

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.

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*

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