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?
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
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.
The real trick is to click on the icon representing your playlist. Now, holding the button down DRAG it overtop of the XMMS controls.
Now, once the arrow is overtop of XMMS, release the mouse button.
NOTE: For those with unsteady hands, you may require both. One to click and hold the first mouse button down (most left) and the other hand to move the mouse.
If you don't like the UI, then don't use the UI. A good portion of the players out there use the same playlist format (straight text by the way) and your filemanager works perfectly fine to search through those lists...
Otherwise, make an HTML page of your playlists and let the browser fire up the player. Lots of ways to approach this.
Rod Taylor
GQmpeg
GQmpeg Skins.
What were the skies like when you were young?
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.
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?
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?
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.
No, it should be GNU/Linamp
-RMS
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?
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)...
Ah, TummyX strikes again. Perhaps you should also mention how Microsoft stole many many many ideas from Mac, Unix, VMS, etc.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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 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
Winamp Is Not A Monopoly's Property?
The latest release (2.77) has a randomness factor option added. Quite how random it is, though, I'm not sure; basically, I agree :-).
James F.
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*
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.
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";
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.
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.
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
The name has to be changed to Linamp.
No sig for you.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
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,
Bump up your colordepth to 24 or 32... Stupid, but it makes it work, at least as close to "working" as this program gets... A Real resource hog...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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
Actually, what it demonstrates is that Winamp is not ready for the Linux desktop. Big surprise there, since it is, afterall, labelled an _ALPHA_ release.
Winamp is a proprietary mp3-player made by Nullsoft. What this has to do with Linux I don't know. Would you instantly claim Win32 is not ready for the desktop if some company released a buggy alpha-version of an mp3-player for Windows ?