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.

Comments

It's successor?

[romcabrera]

Which one do you think will likely be its successor?

Re:It's successor?

[Bricklets]

Which one do you think will likely be its successor?

Knowing what AOL did to their Netscape division, it'll probably be Windows Media Player.

Re:It's successor?

[mallumax]

Winamp 2.9 series has every feature an mp3 player should have and plethora of plugins available. So what more do u need ? Video ?? get 5 series.Use the classic skin for more performance. I can't think of any feature that is not available (a plugin exists for any feature i can think of ) I mean doesthis really matter as long as winamp work on all windows verions.

Re:It's successor?

[kalidasa]

Actually, I was just thinking that: as they once called the Ottoman Empire a prison of nations, they should call AOL a cemetary of independent software projects.

Re:It's successor?

[Number6.2]

Just remember: Corporate America isn't about *you*. It's about enhancing "value" to "shareholders".

This means that if they have to make 1000 employees miserable by laying them off for a quarter (or eight) so the financials look rosy for Wall Street, they'll do it.

And if they have to gobble up a superior technology as a bargaining chip, they'll do it.

Corporate America is the ultimate communal reptilian brain: cold, efficient, ruthless, amoral, it WILL achieve it's goals, no matter who it has to hurt. Things are very black and white in Corporate America: profit/good loss/bad.

Open Source, on the other hand, is very mamillian: there are others "like it", there's a *community*. Altruism actually has a place in this scheme.

And it drives the lizards crazy. If one lizard attacks another lizard, no other lizard intervenes. If a lizard attacks a mamal, all of the mamal's kin come down on that lizard like, well, a pack of wild animals.

Hence...the antipithy between Corporate America and Open Source.

This is a metaphore, to be sure: some businesses "get it". These are the businesses that can plan further than a quarter ahead at a time, or are big enough that they can say "screw the Street" and take a short term hit (IBM?)

Companies are like lizards, they are always prey to bigger lizards.

Open Source is like a herd of (your favorite heard animal here). They can only be taken down by a BIG lizard or another pack based life form.

enough

cheers
6.2

Re:It's successor?

[gordo3000]

decent try, but real bad example. In most pack animals, the smallest and weakest are left to die when then chase is put on by the predator(your lizard if you want). There are very few mamalian species that rush to the rescue and try to fend off the attack, but their are a few(so I guess it works sometimes).

a good example is an elephant herd, in which the elders will protect the children from attack and if a parent is killed, the young are still cared for by others. This is not the norm though.

on the other hand, isn't everything you described what a profit maximizing business is about. take something, give it value for long enough to profit, and always reevaluate the prodcut to see if its still worth it to you. It could very well be that those employees are now out of work, but if their work wasn't profitable, there is no valid reason to keep them. Obviously AOL does not feel the work of Nullsoft to be profitable.

Of course, you could not blame AOL for failed companies and blame the greed of the head's of those companies who sold out to AOL rather than keep doing a good thing. You know, even if bill gates walks up to me and offers me a billion dollars for something I have, there is no force on this planet that forces the sale.

Re:It's successor?

[jsebrech]

Really, did we ever see evidence that AOL had any intention of using Netscape or Winamp for anything, or was it just to kill the projects?

Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. I see no evidence AOL ever made any product that was truly good. Their corporate culture seems to discourage excellence. It's why nobody likes them, and why anything they try to "assimilate" ends up dead within a few years.

Re:It's successor?

[DrXym]

The problem was that Netscape was making Mozilla the open source world and not for their corporate masters at AOL. They five or six years dinking around writing UI toolkits and bugbases and pontificating on standards, and when they finally released something (NS 6), it was a pile of ass.

It wasn't 5 or 6 years. It was approximately 3 years to write a modern standards compliant brower from scratch to the point that AOL could have taken it up. Netscape 6 wasn't much to write home about, but even that was embeddable, as evidenced by the Compuserve 2000 client. The CS2000 client is basically an AOL client with some different DLLs, graphics and content. It was proof of concept that Gecko could run in the AOL client. By the time of Netscape 7, the performance was vastly improved and Gecko was miles better than IE - more stable, smaller footprint, better rendering. AOL could have used it and did use it in beta versions of the client. Betas running the Gecko engine actually crashed less than the IE version. The reason it never materialised in the final release was because marketing couldn't cope with the short term pain that might entail from the transition - sites running VBScript, ActiveX controls and so on. That's what it boiled down to.

They could have used XUL too, for example when AOL Communicator was being written, but they didn't. Netscape demonstrated a standalone AOL mail app written entirely in XUL. For reasons unfathomable, they chose to write an almost identical UI entirely in C++ instead. Gecko did make an appearance - providing HTML mail rendering support, but it's hardly an impressive use of the technology. Making apps like AOL Communicator is what XUL was designed for and it was ignored.

XUL could also have been used to replace the really ancient AOL format (whose name escapes me) used for the start page and elsewhere. Partners had been bitching about it forever. XUL would have been the perfect tool to replace it with.

In fact Netscape bent over backwards to get AOL to use Gecko in a lot of places, but there was a lot of infighting, inertia and conservatism that ultimately 'won'. I say 'won' because the result is that the AOL client is even more arcane looking than it was then. You can only polish a turd for so long. It's no wonder users are deserting in droves when their product is so ancient and monolithic.

As for WinAmp, basically AOL could have told the guys in Nullsoft to work up a music store and they would have done it. I'm sure they would have jumped at it. In fact I am certain that Nullsoft have pitched the idea of just such an idea on numerous occasions. Again, it would not surprise me if they were beaten down by the same conservatism and marketing stupidity that did in Netscape.

AOL Client is a revenue stream. Netscape and Winamp never got past being Internet Freebies.

Netscape was a revenue stream too. And clearly it still is since AOL recently paid Mozilla.org to produce Netscape 7.2.

And so were Winamp & Spinner. They all generated revenue. Of course if AOL were serious about generating revenue, they wouldn't have sidelined them the way they did.

Time to open it up!

[dogas]

Much like Netscape did when it was in its death throes, I think it would be great if they could open up the source and allow an online community to develop for it.

Just think, in a year or so it could be the next iTunes killer..

Re:Time to open it up!

[garcia]

Just think, in a year or so it could be the next iTunes killer..

Nah. Nullsoft/AOL would have had to have a music store from the getgo in order to compete with the vast library that iTMS has amassed. iTunes is now synonomous with cheap music with a decent interface.

Nullsoft/AOL would just not be able to compete at this late stage in the game. Others have tried but it seems that Apple is continuing to win that battle.

Is this good? Maybe not. We certainly don't want a single viable option for music playing/purchasing but I really don't think that an open source project from Nullsoft/AOL will be able to compete *now*.

Re:Time to open it up!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already a whole bunch of players out there. XMMS and especially Freeamp to name two. Why do you want to hack on Winamp especially?

Freeamp could have been the best MP3 player bar none had the current Zinf developers had the slighest ability and at least the slighest clue.

Re:Time to open it up!

[martingunnarsson]

First, there might be licensed stuff in the Winamp source, codecs for different fileformats or whatnot.
Second, iTunes is one if the good guys, we don't wanna kill that!

Re:Time to open it up!

[damiam]

iTunes the program != iTMS.

Re:Time to open it up!

[urmensch]

Oops, strike that last comment. Don't know where that came from... Maybe one too many Apple/Bonhead commercials have burned my brain.

Re:Time to open it up!

[njfuzzy]

"iTunes files"?

Do you mean MP3, MP4, or AAC? All of the many file formats supported by iTunes are playable on a variety of hardware and software.

Or are you confusing the player (which competes with WinAmp) with the iTunes store?

pours some beer on the ground..

[loconet]

Here is to the greatest mp3 player ...

Re:pours some beer on the ground..

[Oliver Defacszio]

What can you do with WA5 that you can't with iTunes?

I can't remember what song I wanted to hear by the time that iTunes finally loads.

tis a sad day

[kc0re]

This is a sad day in free software history. Screw you AOL. (I know this will be redundant)... Winamp is one of the better free programs out there, I guess the few remaining will have to migrate to xmms.

Might as well...

[nordicfrost]

Winamp was one of those Must Have Apps for Windows, and heralded much of the MP3 success. After that half-yearly re-install of Windows, WA was one of the first apps to go back in. So you could play MP3s while reinstalling Office etc.

But after it went to version2, things became less rosy. Version 1.x worked a charm on my old 266/512mb peecee, but the 2.x series was dog slow and ridden with feature creep. I wonder if all the dumbass features in 2.x was something AOL mandated in the app. Rest of story: I went Linux, the Mac and never looked back.

Kudos to the original Nullsoft team, you did a great job!

Re:Might as well...

[yic]

I agree that Winamp 5 is awesome ... I love it. Winamp 2 was great, but Winamp 5 is better, and I don't even use the skins. I like the library system, with their SQL-like language for you to specify things like "newly added items that haven't been played yet" etc. The UI is great for organizing media, and I need it cuz I have so much music. Since getting the version 5 I realise I don't need to categorize my music anymore ... just type "rock" and it gives you everything associated with rock, or type musician name, or whatever. And it's really nice the way the UI integrates the bookmarks, playlists, streaming TV and radio. The "rescan Watch folders" button is nice. The whole thing is a lot, lot better than Windows Media Player by far.

So I'm really sad there will be no more extensions :(

Don't really need more updates

[millwall]

I'm still using v.1 and it still "Kicks the Llama's Ass".

What am I going to tell people now?

[WWWWolf]

"What's this ogg thing?" "Open it in Winamp! You have the full version, right?" "Uh, what are these s3m/mod/it files?" "Just open them in Winamp."

Okay, so Winamp will still exist as a reanimated corpse, but the question remains - what am I going to tell people to use now to open these obscure geek music formats? It's not like iTunes would particularly help here, and Microsoft definitely won't care either...

Re:What am I going to tell people now?

[julesh]

Just tell 'em to use winamp. It's not like it'll need any new features to continue doing its job. And it has a well defined plugin interface, just in case any are required.

Re:Oh no!

[lumpenprole]

Foobar 2000.

Tried it once, never looked back. And I was a huge Winamp fan.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Re:sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's just you. What the hell does that even mean, it needs to move forward? It plays music files, it lets you choose them and fast forward them. What the hell else do you need? A built-in web browser and tax advisor?
Ridiculous. Or, in /. speak, rediculous.

Re:iTunes (for Windows)

[Anonymous Custard]

Looking back, I don't know how I got along with WinAmp's retarded playlist system. It was literally just a list of however many hundreds or thousands of MP3's you had. iTunes was much better in terms of organizing your music.

Never.

[Ride-My-Rocket]

So when are they releasing the source code?

The same time they release the source code to Netscape.

Re:Never.

[Dizzle]

Didn't they... do that already? ie (no, not IE), Mozilla?

Sad but good.

[Puchku]

For many of us, Winamp has always been THE music player. I remember using winamp years ago and being impressed with it. I have gone from a 486 DX at 90 Mhz to an Athlon at 2 Ghz, and Winamp is one of the very few programs that have stayed with me. And I don't mean the monstrosity that was ver 3 or the new bells and whistles ver 5. I still use 2.9 and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Winamp/Nullsoft has always been a product/company that has been different. Concentrating more on ease of use and quality, rather than marketing, the original winamp grew to such a size that Justin's dad left his job as a lawyer just to keep up with the success his son's program. Like many of you guys, I was saddened the day AOL bought Nullsoft/Winamp. Just like the purchase of Hotmail by Microsoft, it somehow semmed to become less acessible. Like the next door garage band becoming big stars, both winamp and hotmail started to lose their identity and be subsumed into the corporate identities of their respective parents. Winamp did manage to keep a separate identity to some extent ( unlike Hotmail..) but it was the beginning of the end. A few hiccups along the road, like Gnutella and WASTE, but it was clearly doomed. However, the flip side is that a lot of smart coders are free to code again, the way THEY want... Unfortunately, they aren't 16 anymore, and the world no longer seems like a place that can be conquered... I hope that some of them retain the enthusiasm and freshness of the early years of winamp.. so to end.. Alas, poor Winamp, I knew him well.. (Unlike Shakespear, whom I obvously don't know well!!)

Re:sweet

[TravisWatkins]

Because then you might as well just use MPlayer?

Re:foobar

[Pleione]

There is a freeform skin plugin for foobar. I forget the name of it since I like my custom formatting strings. Check around on Hydrogen Audio.

Re:I guess...

[BiggyP]

you'd likely be much better off picking up something like BMP to use for the port since GTK2 is far better than 1.x on win32.

Re:Woah!

[WalksOnDirt]

You LIKED Winamp 3?

I and everyone else I've heard from thought Winamp 3 was much worse than Winamp 2. I tried 3 and quickly went back to 2.

Winamp 5 fixed most of the problems with Winamp 3. The stuff you have to pay for in Winamp 5 is strictly optional and for convenience, you could always use Lame and EAC to do at least as good a job with a little more work.

Cui bono?

[revscat]

Why would Google do any of those things? WA never made a dime for AOL, and in that respect was a poor investment. I'd say the same thing if Google were to do what you suggested. Unless they can make money off of it, it wouldn't be worth their time.

Open sourcing it would be much better.

Re:Cui bono?

[Anonymous Coward]

WA never made a dime for AOL, and in that respect was a poor investment.

Compeltely untrue. AOL gets a lot of mileage out of Shoutcast/NSV. Plus, the NS team developed their internal media player, Unagi. Shoutcast is enough reason to believe that AOL will never sell off Nullsoft or Winamp.

Re:Cui bono?

[jekewa]

I see your intent. Yes, same interface, same output.

Therefore, Linux with Gnome, KDE, or one of the other Windows-like interfaces is the same as Windows. And the Mac interface is like CDE, so Mac and Solaris are the same. Yeah, I see it now...

Or maybe it's just that Word and all of it's work-alikes are the same? OpenOffice/StarOffice, Corel's products, even KDE Write, or maybe even Windows Write (almost the same, right)?

Yes, there is an alternative in XMMS (heck, I prefer it), and even in Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer. But, no, they don't do the same thing.

Be sad in the loss of quality software, even when there are alternatives. At least for a moment.

Then, after the moment passes, start looking for the leaked source on the torrents...

Textbook Example of "What Not To Do(tm)"

[slcdb]

Pay a hundred-million bucks for a company with a killer app and a helluva group of innovative engineers. Now that you own the company, make sure all those engineers know you are in charge by stifling the creative process. Strangle that som'bitch til' it's dead; I mean, until there is virtually NO innovation left. Revoke all of the "Next Big Things" that the engineers create. Casually compel the founder and creative genius to leave the company while you're at it. Persevere until all development -- whether it's creative development, or even just suck-ass development -- has all but ceased.

Voila! You've just shown the world, in textbook fashion, how to flush $100m down the toilet. Not to mention the fumbling of a precious opportunity.

Re:Woah!

[LWATCDR]

Well if Google wants to stray from it's core business this could be a good idea. Buy nulsoft and turn winamp into an Itunes killer. Buy Rio and and intergrate there players into the whole Google Music Store. Or they could just keep doing what they do and making money.

A Winamp Tale

[poena.dare]

So I had heard about this kewl file format called MP3 and I needed a player. I looked around and found Winamp for $10...

From: Nullsoft [mailto:sales@winamp.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 1999 3:59 PM
To: M Smith
Subject: Winamp Registration Code

*** Thank you for registering Winamp ***
(etc, etc)
Since Winamp is uncrippled nag-free shareware, this key doesn't do anything in Winamp. You can, however, for fun, enter the key into the 'shareware' tab of Winamp's about box.
(etc etc) Now here's the important part:
This registration is valid for ALL versions of Winamp, past, present and future.
(etc, etc)
---
Justin Frankel
Nullsoft, Inc.
---

...and it did kick the Llama's ass. I've got bad eyes and it let me make the control panel DOUBLE SIZE, which was a godsend.

I went through, hrm, 8 or 10 OS upgrades. I almost never downloaded a new version. It did only a few things and it did it well.

My happy world came to an end when I moved to Windows XP and Winamp stopped working. So I got the latest version and found that after 5 years my registration code didn't work anymore. So I wrote NullSoft:

From: M Smith
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 3:24 PM
To: 'support@winamp.com'
Subject: Ode to a support person

In a desperate attempt to contact someone at NullSoft, I send this letter to you.

Dear Human Being, presumably one employed by NullSoft:

Back in 1997 I paid 10 hard earned dollars for Winamp. I just downloaded the 5 Pro version and discovered that my registration key doesn't work! Could this please be remedied? Here's the text of the email you sent me ages ago: (etc, etc)

To which I got back this message:

From: support@winamp.com
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 12:46 AM
To: M Smith
Subject: Re: Ode to a support person

Dear M Smith,

Thank you for writing WinAmp, My name is Larry, I will be assisting you today.

You can find your Registration Key in your confirmation e-mail. If you do not have your confirmation e-mail, you can also retrieve your Registration Key by viewing the details of your purchase using the lookup at the address listed below: (etc, etc)

Hrm. Larry appears to not have read my email, for, Lo! I did have a conformation email, in fact, I sent him a copy of it.

NOW, I remembered the whole "AOL buys NullSoft" thing and it occurs to me that I'm in the hands of an organization with infinite cruelty and infinite patience. I tried to break through again:

From: M Smith
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 7:28 AM
To: 'support@winamp.com'
Subject: FW: Ode to a support person

Larry,

You obviously are not a human being, because a real human being would notice:

1) I DO have my confirmation email - it was pasted at the end of my email.

2) My registration key (NNNNNNNN) is obviously not the format that Winamp uses today.

3) Since I paid for the product BEFORE Nullsoft ever used Digitalriver for order fulfillment, looking up my order would be fruitless.

Either the human Larry was incensed at my sarcasm or the Perl Script Larry couldn't handle the language for I haven't heard back from NullSoft/AOL/Time/Warner yet.

So I bumble along with the latest freebie version of Winamp feeling generally dispossessed - I have a lifetime agreement with NullSoft and the parent company won't take my phone calls, so to speak. I tried sending email to Justin Frankel and it bounced - now I know why.

Anyone know know a lawyer who will take on a class-action lawsuit for 1/3rd of $10?

Re: Foobar - foo_looks

[Mr Fodder]

You're thinking of foo_looks 2.0. I've been using this plugin for a couple of months, it's rock-solid and has some great looking skins out. You can read up on it at the foo_looks 2.0 Guide.

Re:iTunes (for Windows)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple makes some really good software -- even for Windows."

yea? can you name an example?? & dont say itunes, thats not an mp3 player, its a browser that happens to have mp3 capabilities (& rather poor ones at that)

quicktime player is a classic example of how not to build a GUI, and MacOS would be great if itd stop trying to wow me & just get the hell out of the way.

ive never installed any apple software that didnt get uninstalled the same day.

Re:I disagree

[Mr. Cancelled]

Sorry, but you and I strongly disagree on this! Winamp 5 is the best Winamp I've used. I really wish there was an OSX version of it, as a matter of fact!

iTunes is nice, and since getting an ipod, it's more or less a requirement, but it still lacks features that Winamp 5 brings to the table.

You mention that Winamp5 is unstable and slow, and that may be on your hardware, but on mine it flies (On both a 3Ghz P4, and a AMD1600 system), and it resolved all instability that Winamp3 brought to the table. In contrast, itunes is a f'in power hungry beast! On Windows it slows the whole system down at times, something Winamp5 has never done, and even on my dual 2ghz. Mac, it can freeze the whole system at times. Not too cool... If Winamp5 were out for the Mac, and gave me ipod features simuilar to itunes, itunes would never be used again on my systems.

You also bitch (sorry... When you call things a "steaming turd", you're bitching, rather than making a point) about how Winamp 5 was moving away from being free, but only the pro version was. The regular version has more than enough capabilities for 99% of the users out there, and for those who wanted more, they could pay a small fee to upgrade it to the pro version. Not a bad deal IMHO, and it's a helluva lot better than a time-limited trial.

Not to mention the streaming media capabilities that Winamp5 offers: The .nv video format provides freekin' great quality, considering it's rather meager bandwidth requirements. It allows you to do much more than itunes does in this respect, and again... All for free.

As for your comments about people reverting to winamp3... I haven't met anyone who feels that way. In fact the opposite's true, from what I've seen. I know several people who had wrote Winamp off after v3, but came back loving it after v5 hit the streets.

Finally, I have to point out that their library is the best I've seen. It automatically updated and removed dead tracks as they were shuffled around, which is something itunes still doesn't pull off that well, and the way it imports both video and audio files has allowed me to do some very granular sorting by putting the files into named folders.

As an example, I can search for, and find items with such wide-ranging search terms as "Rated-G animation", "Industrial music", "Sheep on Drugs", "The Simpsons", "Rock Music", "Rated-R movies", and "Kids Television", and get very specific, meaningful results. This allows anyone in my house to quickly pull up media without having to know how I've sorted my collection. itunes doesn't even come close to this level of organization.

Summary: I hope this isn't the end of Winamp. They lost me w/Winamp3, but really made up for it with v5. I hope someone either buys the source, or it's open-sourced. This would be a very sad ending for such a great piece of software!

J River Media Center - It's iTunes For Grown Ups

[meehawl]

The best media jukebox software on Windows is probably Media Center. It's what iTunes would like to be when it grows up a bit. Unfortunately for Apple, it's a moving target. The motto is "All Media, One Interface".

Re:foobar

[DavidTC]

I was actually about to suggest foobar2000 myself. I use it all the time, I love it.

Why? Because it doesn't use a stupid ass interface. I hate winamp's interface. Yeah, let's waste space mimicing a fricking physical player. And while we're at it, why don't we draw a big pencil around the screen to write?

foobar2000 sits in the taskbar, and has global hotkeys to flip around with. If I want to do something the hotkeys can't handle, I can bring it up...it's just one window, a tabbed playlist window, where adding and deleting files is very intuitive. It actually maximizes logically, so I can see everything. I can have dozens of playlists on the top, all nice in a row. All the buttons on Winamp's main window take up a good 15x300 block in the menubar.

Winamp, in contrast, wants you to bring up extra windows to manage your song list, when that is, in fact, the only reason you need a media player in the first place. And, of course, the list is this tiny thing...hey, windows already has a perfectly good list control, with columns and everything.

I don't give a rat's ass about how pretty it looks, because 99.9999% of the time, I can't see the damn thing anyway. Do people really sit around and have winamp cover up a third of their screen while using their computer? Somehow I doubt it.

The only thing foobar2000 is lacking is easy access to the EQ. I'm sure there's a plugin somewhere for that.

That said, foobar2000 does apparently have some skins plugin you can use.

Well ..

[ciupman]

I just stopped using winamp when it got to the 3.0 version. By then that thing had load times bigger then MSWORD, just to listen to music ... i thought they would improve in 5.0 but no, the same thing happened. I Got a little prog, very small and very fast loading (eats very little memory), has skinning capabilities, and supports winamp input plugins .. it's called XMPLAY .. and i forgot .. it's one of the best modules players around.. so one advice to developers all around, use the GOOGLE paradigm, that is, small, fast and very functional. So in this case the function is to play music, SO WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT GRAPHICAL BLOAT FOR???

Re:iTunes (for Windows)

[toddestan]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple makes some really good software -- even for Windows.

You mean like Quicktime for Windows?

My experience with Apple software for Windows is that it's slow, bloated, and lacks features. Why anyone would choose iTunes over Winamp (or even Windows Media player) is beyond me.

Re:Winamp 5

[Anonymous Coward]

try zinf