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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.
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
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.
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?
Recently there have been a few projects using a subset of wine to support some subset of Win32 for some specific purpose (codecs, games etc). This looks like a possible application for this technology. I wouldn't be surprised if WinAMP itself is being ported with the aid of winelib.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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.
What if the developers' strengths are in developing multimedia applications? Or GUIs? Do you want them to develop MySQL until *you're* ready to use Linux as a desktop? Not me. What about the StarOffice, AbiWord and Ximian developers? Do you want them to abandon their projects so they can work on something you approve of?
I for one use Linux as my desktop for 70 hours a week rebooting to Windows only when I need to check my email in Lotus Notes (and that's only because I haven't loaded the RPM yet).
Its not up to you to decide how the rest of us use Linux. It already is a desktop-suitable OS.
Intelligent Life on Earth
It does have basic features only (Forget about plug-ins except what it comes with; you're not going to be able to change a lot of options 2.x would give you etc) but it truly shows which direction they're heading in. This player seems to be written with the ideas of making the thing as portable as possible and making the new generation of plug-ins ("scripts") go right to the new platforms with the player. The performance is perfectly acceptable on my K6-2 450 w/128mb of ram and win98 (A rather conservative setup in this day), and it sounds like the speed is only going to get better as they approach final with this one.
I think NullSoft/AOL has a winner here.
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?
Willing to bet you're in 16 bit color, winamp 3 alpha 1 needs 24 or 32 bpp. This is stated in the README.
--dave
The name has to be changed to Linamp.
No sig for you.
Not just that, but it requires a very bleeding edge Linux system (Glibc 2.2, libfreetype, libstdc++-libc6.2)
Personally, I feel they should release this as a completely static binary, this way it can be run on any Linux system. Linking to such bleeding edge libraries (We are a Redhat 6.2 shop) is unwise since few people will go through the trouble of upgrading glibc just to try this.
I'll just stick with xmms.
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
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