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

what about...

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

all those windows dynamic link library (.dll) plugins?

Re:what about...

[XNormal]

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.

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.

Winamp authors

[GoatPigSheep]

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)

I don't like this trend...

[GeekLife.com]

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.

XMMS will continue

[larien]

XMMS isn't just a linux MP3 player; there are now plugins for Solaris, AIX, IRIX and other Unixes.

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?

all very strange...

[archen]

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)...

Re:You need multimedia apps in Linux?

[LinuxHam]

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.

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