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Winamp Down for the Count
Artifex writes "BetaNews is reporting that the doors at Nullsoft have been closed: 'The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.'" The Register also has a story.
http://www.foobar2000.org/ ;)
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
Well, there is XMMS... Zinf... to name a couple... Zinf has a windows version...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I know several people who are happy converts from WinAmp to iTunes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple makes some really good software -- even for Windows.
-Mark
I strongly suggest trying FooBar2000 http://foobar2000.com/
I have loaded up the playlist with 15,000 songs, and it only used 2MB of RAM!!!
There are extensive plugin's available, it is compatable with shoutcast.
FooBar takes a very minimalistic approach to it's UI. You can add bell's & whistle's & visualizations if you want.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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The BetaNews article is a bit off, as is the story it spawned over at The Register (whose headline for the piece was just ridiculous.).
As usual, Winamp Unlimited sets it straight with not only details on an upcoming 5.06 version of Winamp, but details on what the former Nullsoft-ees are doing now and a naked picture of their ex-Product Manager.
"Winamp Unlimited is your #1 source for Winamp news, rumors,forum highlights, and general propoganda. Awesome!"
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Well, they have already released most of the Winamp 3 sourcecode (without any of the DRM stuff) under the Wasabi project.
Furthermore, the Nullsoft-guys already brought us the open Gnutella protocol.
All of this would indicate that the good people at Nullsoft are pretty cool with open source. So if the Winamp 5 source code is not going to be released, then I think we should blame AOL for that, not Nullsoft.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
I've tried lots, but none have been as satisfying as winamp. I wouldn't pretend to be an audiophile, but from a purely user perspective the best (windows) alternatives I found were
iTunes - great, I love the library/sorting features. It just works and works well. Uses a lot of memory though and not the most responsive app in the world. Ogg support through an experimental quiktime codec extension (I think).
Foobar2000 seemed very powerful and very customiseable, but I didn't really have the time to invest to get it set up like I wanted. The interface style sheets were very powerful, but it lacked volume control at the time - which was just a pain. Seemed to support every codec I've ever heard of (and lots I haven't).
everything else seemed to be a wmp/realplayer/jukebox ripoff.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
wxMusik. (musik.berlios.de)
Like itunes, but open source and really really slim on resource usage. Really, I've never been so excited with a player since I've found wxMusik. It has a media library, dinamic queries,it's interface is slim, just give it a try!
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Here's an odd thought... why bother? Quite a few Winamp clones exist because the WinAMP design is not hard to replicate. It's really not much more than a way of loading, inspecting, and playing audio files from disk, http, or streaming servers. Here's a few example clones:
jlGUI
JAMP
JahSing
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...off of the winamp forums:
To all of my friends and loyal users of Winamp,
I regret to inform you all that I have quit Nullsoft. To many of you, this news may come as quite a surprise, while those who know me best, it's no surprise at all.
It's hard to describe the experiences of the last year. Nearly a year ago, we released Winamp 5.0 and finally reclaimed our user's hearts. It was a very proud moment for our entire team.
Since then, for varying circumstances, much of the team has left the company. It's been tremendously difficult to recover from the losses of such core team members and close friends.
Those of us left behind have tried our best to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward. Unfortunately, given our current environment, continuing to move forward has become tremendously difficult and frustrating, to say the least.
That said; I was recently presented a wonderful opportunity to work at Apple with the iTunes team. I hope to bring much of my experience from Nullsoft to Apple with the hopes of making a tremendous difference there.
The fact is; there's never a good time to leave something that you love so much. Given the state of things today it was appropriate for me start planning a life after Nullsoft.
I want to thank you for how much you've all contributed to making Winamp such a huge success. I'd like to appreciate the efforts of all the volunteers who've poured their heart and soul into this place, all the skinners and developers who helped the rest of us customize Winamp to our hearts content, and all my friends at Nullsoft who made working here more than a job, but a family.
I ask that all of you who work so hard, please, keep working hard. There are still a few of us left at Nullsoft and they're doing their best to keep this ship afloat. You're the only thing that can help them do it.
For those of you who would like to keep in touch with me, feel free to reach me at 'steve at gedikian dot com'. You can also keep tabs on what I'm up to by going to my homepage at http://www.gedikian.com.
I love you all and I can't thank you enough for making this chapter of my life so wonderful.
Peace.
-s
I would say the emotional overtone of his post is well understandable, Winamp certainly did build itself up an immense fanbase with it's great (and free) software, it's climb to the top of the proverbial heap of MP3 players showing dedication of the programmers that built and maintained it.
Farewell, last of the true Nullsoft team, and good luck in future ventures!
I recently did an Ask Slashdot on this same question.
Had really good luck with jOrbis from www.jcraft.com. I just added the applet to my Shame of the 80's site. It seems to work everywhere, unlike most java applets... could be that it does exactly one thing: plays ogg streams. :-)
Hmm... how about Winamp? You can continue to download Winamp 5.05 from their website, and the announcement said they will continue to release minor updates, such as security patches and plugin support. Unless you change to a brand-new streaming format that only a new player supports, why should people switch away from Winamp? Just because AOL is letting the rest of the Nullsoft team go, it doesn't mean that you have to stop using a program that really whips the llama's ass.
I think you mean version 3 was the dog ugly, slow and bloat version?
Versions 2 and 5 are the best versions ever released.
Version 2 if you have an old computer or just want pure music playing.
Version 5 if you want the Winamp library and new skin support.
I've found that the best way to make iTunes organize your music the way you want is to trust iTunes. It took a giant leap of faith for me (having always been a launch-winamp-from-windows-explorer kind of guy). But if you let iTunes handle the music organization, you'll find that it gives you the flexibility to do more than any other method out there.
I've now stopped organizing my music by hand (creating a folder for each artists, and album, and blah blah blah) and just let iTunes keep everything organized. It works much better since it synchronizes folder and file names with changes you make in the ID3 tags (and whatever the tags for AAC files are called). I also (usually) no longer browse my music collection from Windows Explorer, but just browse with iTunes. Even without playlists you'll find it's just as efficient (if not more so) than browsing files directly.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Some places are cheaper still
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm