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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.
So when are they releasing the source code?
This has been the expected outcome of Nullsoft's assimilation into the corporate giant that is AOL.
Read more here: http://p2pnet.net/story/2965
Finally they got something right and theyre cut down in their prime :(
:)
Hopefully the programmers will leave and start some free Winamp like project in the Firefox vein..
Open Amp, here we come
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Windows?
If anyone wanted to listen to my Icecast streams, or the ogg recordings I made, I always pointed them at Winamp, as it worked, and was free. And I couldn't be bothered answering lots of questions about codecs, and stuff.
What's the best thing now?
Get your own free personal location tracker
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?
Anybody out there in Slashdot land think we might be able to put together an initiative, gather donations for funds, and buy the source from AOL?
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
A couple years ago I was tired of Winamp seeming to eat a crapload of system resources and switched to Foobar 2000 and never looked back.
But Winamp was the first free gui audio player that I ever really enjoyed. I remember sending playlists to friends as a way to encourage them to download it. Thanks for helping to make computers cool, Nullsoft. You were great.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
I don't think skinning and eye-candy is that important. Winamp2 interface is good enough. There are other more important fields to advance. I would like to have a MPlayer backend to play all the media files in XMMS. (There is also a plugin for video files, but why not a plugin to play *every* file through MPlayer?)
I think that this is an opportunity for Google. They could buy up companies like this, combine them with various other companies or open source software and come up with a Google OS or a "fascia" for Windows.
- Google Winamp
- Google OpenOffice
- Google Firefox/Phoenix (complete with gmail integration)
- Google Linux (BSD?)
Now that they've sold their souls to the devil (i.e. - gone public), they've certainly got the resources to put it together with the much needed polish that the mainstream is looking for.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The real killing of things started when control switched hands from AOL to Time Warner. Once that happened, the Microsoft settlement and killing of Netscape happened, now this.
AOL seemed to have a clue, but didn't really know how to act on it. Time Warner simply sees no value in a product when there is a working Microsoft version of the same thing.
Time to start begging the folks over at xmms.org to make a windows port. :(
- Jimbob
Please explain to me why iTunes is one of the good guys? Is it because it's difficult to play iTunes files with other players and platforms?
Why is this a big deal? Don't get me wrong, I've been a WinAmp user for years, and I love the program for playing my MP3s. But just because it's not going to get any more updates, why is that a big deal?
I mean, we're talking about a program designed for little more than playing audio (and later video) files. Once that is accomplished, and once the bugs have been relatively shaken out, anything else is just the beginnings of bloatware.
WinAmp has seemed to be relatively bug free to me, and works for what it was designed (audio/video) files. Why do we *NEED* more updates (other than if more bugs are found, of course)?
AOL actually didn't really care too much about the program or how good it was. At the time Netscape was the start page of a majority of the internet. They bought Netscape for their page views, they sold all of the programs (except for the browser) off to Sun. They kept the browser so they could keep the clicks, unrealizing that MS would end up flipping their position and that in short while adveritsement dollars wouldn't be quite the same.
At one time, Netscape, Nullsoft, Spinner etc. were considered to be 'divlets', all with their own identity, all churning out cool stuff that could be reused etc. You think about what these groups produced:
So what does AOL do? Drive them all into the ground and suck Microsoft's cock. Oh I think some of these things are offhandedly in the AOL client (e.g. radio) but innovation? What's that?
The reason for all this is that AOL has a corporate culture of infighting and conservatism. If two groups compete for some work, it is the one that doesn't rock the boat, that promises the fastest results and with a vision compatible with marketing drones that wins. The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead. It doesn't matter that an inferior product will go in or that it will become a millstone in a year or two.
Meanwhile the innovative product withers on the vine and the group responsible is shitcanned. Why? I don't know but I reckon IE & WMP are like comfort blankets to AOL marketing. If you start going all scary on them by showing them something without 'Microsoft' in the title, they get nervous. I bet even the Mac group in AOL feels like an unwanted child.
Consider what could have been. Winamp 5.0 has streaming music, videos, a library, a CD burner, ripping, an integrated browser. With a little push it could have been iTMS. Time Warner has tens of thousands of tracks and movies to sell and AOL is (or was) the perfect outlet to sell them. The much vaunted 'synergy' they kept talking about was right under their noses. But apparantly that's not much use to a massive multi media conglomerate. Oh no, "let's sack them all".
Or consider Gecko. It was cross-platform, standards compliant and modular. AOL could free themselves from Microsoft forever. They could develop a cross-platform and modern client. They wouldn't have to wait for MS to fix bugs, or workaround some broken implementation - they could do whatever they liked with it. So what does AOL do? It stumps for the bitrotten piece of crap from their mortal enemy. And I'm sure Microsoft is ecstatic about that, since it basically ties AOL's hands.
It really does boil down to incompetance. Sheer bloody incompetance.
... looks like Steve Gedikian finally shut off the lights:
I Haven't Forgotten, And We Will Never Forget.
An insider's view of the end of Nullsoft...
-ch
If AOL is halting its development of WinAmp, it could score lots of credit with the open source crowd by publishing the WinAmp source code under GPL. They'd be done with it just the same, but they'd continue to stymie their competitors with the player that wouldn't die, at no cost to them. Including the low management wind-up cost of releasing under the GPL, rather than some other license (especially one they roll themselves). OTOH, if they have more unholy alliances with "competitors" like Microsoft (like their IE AOL browser), they might strangle this beast just to hear it scream.
--
make install -not war
Well kinda.....
Back in 1997 I wrote an mp3 streaming server that was originally intended as the audio equivalent of a webcam I could chat and play music.... obviously this quickly turned into the webs first live mp3 radio station. Problem was that there were no mp3 players that could stream content, I had to give my friends a perl script wrapped around mpg123. (as it happened this script also turned the client into a relay server, creating the earliest p2p streaming distribution system).
So it laboured in obscurity for a while until Winamp added HTTP streaming support and suddenly I could tell all those windows users to download winamp and point it at port 3223 on the server cluster. The code was released under the GPL, and I had a few downloads, but it required some real hackish thinking to get it to work for most people. That's when I started getting job offers in California (I was working as an astronomer in Northern Ireland).
Of course then Shoutcast got released and it pretty much did what mp3serv did, mp3serv promptly became even less interesting. But that didn't matter, because mp3serv was so obscure that nobody ever found it, it was only once there was a proprietory solution that people started to look for an open source solution. Icecast came along, it was much cleaner and smarter than mp3serv, so I took all the good bits from mp3serv and integrated them into Icecast and LiveIce.
That was 1999, by that point I was ready to quit my PhD and take a real job......