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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.
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.
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!
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?
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
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
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.
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)...
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
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...
Winamp Is Not A Monopoly's Property?
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*
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.
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
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,