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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.
With all the sucess of Winamp 5, I am very supprised at this sudden closure. Tis a sad day indeed. DAMN YOU AOL!!!!
I guess they really are Nullsoft now.
So when are they releasing the source code?
Which one do you think will likely be its successor?
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..
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Now that these guys are done with AOL maybe they can get on with their careers. For future reference: have an exit event next time guys so you don't get tied up with AOL or whoever buys it out from under you. Then we all profit because we get cool new toys and you get a pile of dough, AND no responsibility for 9-5 crap.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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!
Justin Frankel made one of the best little out of the way bits of software ever. :)
;)
Still use it, never had a problem with it, it just works.
Exactly how software should be.
Now, onto the serious stuff:
The dupe google story - its gone, whats happened to any moderation - do ppl get their points back, does karma get restored etc. I ask because my comment history still shows comments with scores, but no comment linked in background.
I think we need to know
liqbase
Here is to the greatest mp3 player ...
[alk]
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.
Count me among the people who did not know they were owned by AOL. I guess this is the usual fate of buyouts.
A blog like any other.
I like xmms and all, but it's exactly the same as Winamp 2.. My point being that Winamp 5 is even better than that, so I don't see how Winamp sucks.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
cat employees.txt >/dev/nullsoft
I like winamp since it doesn't suck up many more processor cycles or bytes of memory than necessary to play MP3s, at least relative to the other bloatware out there. It also doesn't have a million features I don't need, just a few that I never use. RIP
Now that Winamp 5 will only have minor updates, what other MP3 players out there have the same functionality as winamp, and perhaps some new functions?
So, are there any badnesses associated with WinAmp that people might want to know about?
I currently use it as my main player on my work machine.
Any reasons I should be planning on ditching it?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Being primarily a Mac user my experience with Winamp was brief, but I had many friends who swore by it. So, what was the cause of Winamp's demise? Is it that Windows Media Player got better? Is it that people just don't care much what play's their MP3's? Did it lose its cool factor or geek appeal?
http://www.foobar2000.org/ ;)
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
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!
Argh... now I'll have to rely on Windows Media Player to develop a plugin for Shoutcast so I can listen to those net radio stations.
;)
Oh, wait... there's still XMMS in Linux...
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
I'm still using v.1 and it still "Kicks the Llama's Ass".
Are there any open source replacements for this for Windows? iTunes, while closed source, is a possible replacement, if a bit bloated.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Ha-ha!
I don't think AOL is much to blame for this; they can't be faulted for the fact that Microsoft provides a powerful media player (also free) and that Media Player is quite hard to keep up with. So blame Microsoft - isn't that easier anyway?
Love, Stu
Is today April 1st (please please). Winamp is my favorite player.
Can anybody recommend a good alternative? I am a Windows user (I can't get my nVidia chipset ethernet to work under Linux). The replacement should be capable, and free (no "register for only $39 for bonus features").
And before anybody mentions it, Real Player and Windows Media Plaer are NOT viable alternatives for me (but I think that Real's "Annabelle the sheep" is hilarious -- sheep are funny, just watch "A Close Shave").
I don't suppose that XMMS is available for Windows, is it?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I wonder what this means for people who paid for it?
In the beginning winamp was free, but you could pay for extras or support. Then it went completely freely distributable.
Now I notice that there is the Winamp 5 Pro which again becomes a paid piece of software.
I've not bought it, but I wonder what people paid for. More features? Upgrades? Support?
I'm still using Winamp 2.x which works well on my work desktop - at home I'm xmms all the way - even if there are a few irritations.
No, it wasn't AOL, or commercial business.
It was because the Llama really whipped Winamp's ass a couple of weeks ago.
I'm sure it surprised everyone when it happened.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"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...
I never really liked WinAmp myself and always preferred Sonique and now Sonique 2. It's always unfortunate to see a company close up when so many people obviously enjoyed their product, even if I'm not one of them.
Will more people be using foobar2000 now?
I LIKE WinAMP... it beats the pants off of MusicMatch's Jukebox and Windows Media Player. I'll have to make sure I burn my 5.0 install to a CD and put it in a safe, secure location.
-jls
Techno-pagan
I remember when Nullsoft got picked up by AOL: a mix of happiness in the community that they would finally be paid, and fear of what AOL would do to screw things up. This is worse than I think most had suspected.
:(
Although, on the bright side, winamp has reached near perfection. Either 2.9x for the minimal side of things, or 5.x for the complete package. The sad thing is, every time we'd think that winamp had reached the status of the perfect audio player, Nullsoft would release an update and make perfection even better.
I guess we can be sure that team Nullsoft won't have any access to the Winamp codebase now, and if they do try to go about making the perfect audio player, they'll have to start from scratch
XMMS suffers from identity crisis, just like all other WinAMP 2.x clones. It gets boring, quickly. Free form skinning was WinAMP's attempt to curve this in 3.x and 5.x, but so far XMMS really, really lacks here.
...or is it just me?
The point being, so matter how you skin it up, it looks the same. It's a great little music player, and like WinAMP, needs to move forward, instead of just remaining a silly looking box forever.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
for a petition to open up the source that way it can continue w/o the assistance of anyone else. if it is going the way of the dodo, then lets try to get something out of it
I know several people who are happy converts from WinAmp to iTunes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple makes some really good software -- even for Windows.
-Mark
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!
lol google dupe story did wtc lol google dupe story
Meanwhile, AOL continues its plan to weed out all the good software under its corporate roof, and employ more people to "optimize" (9.0) America Online software. Maybe AOL's feeling a little bloated , and it's time for them to unbutton the proverbial pants (whatever that means).
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
It's sad to see such senseless conflict. Here's to hoping the Nullsoft team gets to work on a new project soon enough now that they've mostly ditched AOL.
Winamp was the first media player I ever downloaded, and it was the beginning of my introduction to digital media. It really did whip the laama's ass! But now, an era has come to an end, and I for one am a little sad to see it go. Where it goes from here, I don't know, but it will never be the same. I take my hat off for the Nullsoft programmers for an excellent program and a job well done. Thanks for the memories.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
In 1997-1998(?) I remember quite vividly a friend of mine in computer class in high school playing a song on the computer. He explained that it was an mp3, and that it was playing on winamp.
He then said the file size for the song was three megs. Jesus God, I thought. NOBODY's gonna download that much for one damn song.
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)
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? /. speak, rediculous.
Ridiculous. Or, in
It's a shame most users only listen to the lame "music" the recording industry puts out, encoded in compressed but still large formats like MP3 or WMAudio. Lots of great music was created that run on chips, the so called chiptunes, ranging from the simple MIDI formats, going to MODs, videogame sound chips and other synthethizers.
And that was the real force behind Winamp and its very huge list of emulated sound chips in the form of plugins: relive the astounding Amiga games music, MOD tracks, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, PSX game music, it's all there, you name it. Windows Media Player has got none of that and never likely will since the plugins development was driven by an enthusiastic crowd of developers and WMP doesn't exactly inspire that.
I don't feel like it...
The rest of us just kept using version 2.
.wav file" option).
(I uninstalled v3 because it didn't have an "output to
Foobar 2K
Winamp is the one app that has always stayed with me through-out the years, a very good app.
Damn it, this sucks.
Will Justin be able to retain the rights to Winamp? Will the source be possibly relesaed? Crappin' AOl is going to bury it? It's like my dog just died or something...
Josh
Because of Winamp 3, I thought the same thing and stuck with 2.91 for about two years before finally checking out 5. It turns out the basic version has a memory footprint very close to 2.91 (6-7 MB with few extra plugins) as well as all the options the old one had. I was kinda pissed that you couldn't tweak the classic visualization settings like the refresh rate of the spectrum analyzer (I prefer 70 fps) until I realized they're all consilidated under the Classic Skins page.
Oh yeah, and I don't recall any spyware in this release. Maybe I have a subconcious urge to uncheck boxes on installers, but I haven't seen anything and the Nullsoft web page listed pretty explicitly what comes in each package.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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 paid money for WinAmp 5!
Just kidding. I still like WinAmp. It really kicks the llama's ass.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
QCD is what I use.
Nullsoft was an awesome company. I use the word "WAS" because it "WAS" a company known for innovation. That is, until AOL bought them out. More significantly, until TIME WARNER / AOL bought them out.
Do you all remember GNUTELLA? Released online for 2 days before TIME WARNER shut them down (through AOL). I think that was a firm message to the NULLSOFT team that their heyday as innovators was over.
"WORK ON WINAMP" was the message they got, and we havent seen anything ground breaking from them since.
Im glad the front-line team has left the company. It means some very smart guys/girls are going to be out there, away from the umbrella of a major music label; hopefully free to "create" again.
GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE.
Harder.. Better.. Faster.. Stronger
Anyone?
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?)
.
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!"
.
I figure their open source programs like NSIS will stay open, but what about programs like shoutcast?
And please tell me that someone will be maintaining BEEP
It would be interesting to name a few alternatives that are out there. Personaly, I've been using the basic version of winamp since ... wow... forever it seems. And eventhough the fact that there will not be more updates does not really bothers me, I think it's a good occasion to review other similar (better?) programs and maybe switch for something else.
So, what else have you been using?
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Winamp is the best media player on Windows, bar none*. :'(
* IMHO
Well, it's unfortunate to hear this. Winamp was hands-down my favorite audio player; clean, simple interface, good quality (in terms of the EQ), and the Media Library was nice in the newer versions.
In truth, I started writing this post to say WMP wasn't all that bad, but the more I think about it, the more I remember why I never use it except for video playback: increasingly bloated (built-in "Shop Online" stuff that you can't disable), all the "Album Info" stuff assumes you don't already legitimately own the music ("Buy NOW!" all over the place), the Equalizer is subpar, and most annoyingly, the playlist control SUCKS! Loading up about 2000 tracks and setting it to random play seems to make WMP's head asplode; if you manually move forward a track or two, it either picks a completely new order for the songs, or will repeat a portion of the playlist that it's already played.
I guess I'm glad the Nullsoft team left us with a solid release before they left (actually, Winamp craps out on me on occasion, but not too often), and I wish them the best in their future ventures.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
Is there any way it can be open-sourced? Or is AOL holding on to their source code, even though nullsoft is dead?
I mourn the original couple of versions of Winamp. Back when it was simple, sleek, and had low-overhead. It did one thing, and it did it exceptionally well.
That was before the dark times. Before AOL. Now, it's just like every other feautre-bloated media app. Which is unfortunate.
First of all im quite shocked. Winamp is one of the best players out there. Ok I admit that 3rd version was crap (@ performance and stability) but new 5.0x is an excellent product. It beats iTunes by many factors, especially performance and usability. Media library is very well organized, video support is good, internet tv / radio is also usefull (even for those who want to watch free pr0n). All this comes for free. And if you pay couple of euros you can even rip cds and burn mp3 just as Nero does, but all this in one program.
Anyway... i'm very disaponited, especially with AOL. God damn hippies.
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
Not that it will matter or be noticed, I sent this to AOL corp.
---
What will become of Winamp now? Please release it to the community or give it's rights back to Justin Frankel.
AOL does not have the passion or the correct mind-set to continue it's development. The application, is the Mercedes of music players out there, and also is held very close to a lot of peoples hearts. It is not an app that will grow well in a corporate environment.
Joshua
---
This really bothers me. AOL will butcher it. And I want the source before they do.
Josh
Winamp brought us the shittiest interface a media player ever had. Tiny unreadable fonts, with no way to resize any part of it (don't tell me about that double size crap). No decent menu, no decent playlist, no nothing. Too bad so many FOSS programs are still trying to imitate it.
What does this mean as far as ownership of Winamp? Does AOL get to keep it to ruin it for certain or do the rights go to the original authors?
That being said, I hope this at least lives on in open source so it can stay in active development. We could even see better plugins hypothetically since the authors will have more to look at than the SDK.
For the longest time, I stuck with Winamp 2.91 because I thought they went south with the program beyond that (which was true for v3). I was kind of conflicted about using a piece of software that was out of development for so long. Then I got version 5 and was relieved to find out the lite version had changed very little, memory footprint at all. The only thing I saw changed was that the menu widgets were updated to the 2000/XP type. (Much nicer looking). Now I'm faced with using software that could once again potentially see no new development for a while. (A dilemma I face with other software such as emulators often)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Time to start begging the folks over at xmms.org to make a windows port. :(
- Jimbob
I blogged this last week.
R.I.P. You will be missed. Nobody ever expects things like this to happen, when they do, they're a surprise to everyone... me at least.
So when are they releasing the source code?
The same time they release the source code to Netscape.
Foobar....
I have been using it for a very long time.
15000+ songs in the playlist, and it only used 2MB of ram.
I stopped using WinAmp at v1.8
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
This isn't a big deal, the versions of Winamp over the last few years have sucked anyway. Most people I know stuck with older versions, and have no need for 5.xx
I've been using 2.91 since it was released, and never upgraded since then. 3 was a joke, and 5 is a bloated mess.
I wish they just left it an mp3 player, it was perfect as a plain mp3 player, instead of some media-player alternative.
If MP3 jukeboxes are a dime a dozen, then MP3 servers are probably a quarter a dozen. However, in my own humble little quest to set up an Intranet radio station for my fellow workers, I found Nullsoft's Shoutcast to be MUCH better than the alternatives I tried.
.conf file similar to Apache for all of the options. Compared to Windows Media Services for example, which has to sit on top of IIS (gack!) and is not very straightfoward (IMHO) to configure, Shoutcast was a dream.
I especially like the fact that it has a
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
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!!)
I use the latest version (5.03a) and I find it to be flawless. It's one of those apps that shows rare attention to detail - for example, it has 'smart dragging' - when you drag it closer to the window border, it "sticks" to it. Why don't more window-mode applications have that?
Just because it's been declared dead doesn't mean I'll stop using it... not until it won't be able to play some format I'm very insterested in. Here's to hoping it'll go open source!
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/n ews/local/10134626.htm
Never confuse volume with power.
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?"
foobar2000 maybe?
Quote from their site:
Features:
* Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC
* Audio formats supported through official addons: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
* Full Unicode support on Windows NT
* ReplayGain support
* Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
* Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
* Highly customizable playlist display
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)
Entertainment for Nerds. Stuff that matters,
nuff said
Go Gusties
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)
I'm still going to continue using winamp even if there will be no more innovation... to be honest, what else do I need in a media player other than what winamp already offers me?
Today is a sad day. I knew this was coming when Winamp 3.0 came out and was just completely bloated with ugliness and features I didn't use. What I loved about Winamp was it was small, quick and effective. If you ever needed anything to work right everytime, you went with Winamp. No need to take 10 minutes to load up your playlists, libraries and sailor moon skins. It worked like a standalone cd player, you press play, it worked. Sad day indeed :(
Because then you might as well just use MPlayer?
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
Hmmm. If you put it in a certain light, this is the massive AOL Time Warner corporation killing off one of the few major media players that doesn't support DRM particularly well, and does support mp3 and Ogg. Co-incidence, or well-planned strategy from a corporation with links to the MPAA?
What alternatives are there to Winamp? I mean good alternatives and not just any old crap.
The best one I've seen for Windows is QCD
--
AOL bought Netscape and we got Mozilla.
AOL bought Nullsoft and we got Gnutella.
AOL Shuts down Nullsoft.....will we get another nice present? Will WinAmp become Winampella (or something with a better name)?
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Damn... damn them to AOL. With Shoutcast I got rid of my radio (literaly) and my TV time has been cut waaay back in favor of NSV (Nullsoft Video, think shoutcast for video) and sold the TV in my computer room in favor of NSV.
I'm thinking its a good time to build an OSS replacement for ShoutCast/NSV. Based on Matroska mabey.
Open Source, being necessary to security and innovation of a free system, the right of the people to alter and copy shall not be infringed.
Or Shoutcast.com for that matter...
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
It finally was pretty cool, fast, and had the features I wanted, now it's going byby!
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!
It deeply saddens me to learn of WinAmp's demise, having been an avid fan of the software for several years, I've used it since I was first introduced to Mp3's and digital audio (and filesharing). When version three first came out I was turned off by its annoying tendency to crash and thus have stayed behind at version 2.80 (oddly the most stable for my computer.) which conveniently interfaces with StarBar, Another piece of free software I have grown fondly attached to when in a windows envitonment. I hope somebody has the sense to open the source so winamp may continue to thrive in a bazzaar instead of dying in the dungeons of the dark cathedral known as AOL.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
So if winamp will no longer be devloped, what is the next choice for windows users that dont want to deal with WMP?
Sure i can google, but that doesnt give a good account of what is preferred..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm taking bets that the next program killed by AOL is ICQ.
They've did kill Netcape and almost killed Mozilla. Now we're seeing that WinAmp/Nullsoft *MAY* be dead. It's only logical that ICQ is killed next. Or worse, merged with AIM (which would be a death blow as well).
It was fixed in version 5. A nice thing about v5 is the way you can make it look exactly like v2! :D
As one of the guys who helped foster WinAmp's growth, I feel the loss more than most. Gone are the nights fighting off the script kiddies, rebooting servers, watching Tom fsck around... The web site moved from a Lotus Notes box to Apple network server 500s and finally to FreeBSD as it grew. AOL threw it up on Sun hardware when they bought it in '99. What a great deal: $100M for the property then kill it 5 years later. AOL, release the source. Release your head from your *.
I guess the Llama got sick of getting it's ass whipped.
honnold.org - sometimes-rock band, all the time awesome forum
Great work AOL on ruining a fine product. I hope you don't consider running Winamp out of town as one of the ways your "fixing" the internet.
Hats off to the original NullSoft team. I'll miss the pre-installed audio of "Winamp, it really whips the lama's ass". Winamp was/is one the first downloads after rebuilding any machine.
I'll be using Winamp for a long long time. What can be added? Digital Rights Restrictions? No Thanks. I'll be listening to your shoutcast on Winamp whenever I'm running windows.
I mean, if you're giving it away for free, and you don't feel like working on it anymore, why not just open the source and allow it to continue to grow?
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)?
Ok .. I lied...Not a couple reasons to switch FROM winamp..Just one thing..
.. oh wait..
WowThing from SRSLabs (Yes, you can still find it out there).
It takes the llama, turns him sideways and shoves him straight up
It IS cool though..
= Grow a brain...
I think you are confusing Shoutcast with something else.
Shoutcast is just an MP3 server. You can play whatever you want on it. I use it to stream my personal collection of MP3s. So I play EXACTLY what I want to play, 100% of the time.
Clearchannel (which is of course evil as you have noted) has nothing to do with how you use the software.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
Justin Frankel sold out to evil AOL. I was thoroughly disappointed after having giving a $10 shareware donation and submitting bug reports.
...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!
"Here you are sushi... and wasabi..."
"Hehe, 'wasabi'"
"Yea, wasabi"
"Wassssaaaabi!!"
http://trevc.net/whassup/cparodies/wasabi.mov
JetAudio: http://www.jetaudio.com . Has a free version, with support for MP3, WMA and free formats like Ogg, FLAC and several others. And it can play Real and Quicktime too if you install the codecs.
So what do you guys think the best version of Winamp is and why? Version 1? 2? 3? 5?
Bullshit. I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms so.
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. :-)
This is very sad news, but then again...
They did sell out to AOL, and then made life hell for them (Gnutella anyone?). By they, I'm refering to their founder (can't remember his name right now)
I'm disheartened, but at least they're going out at the top of their game. Winamp 5 is a very nice piece of software, and I don't know what else they could add to it.
Insert Sig Here
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.
Eh. What I meant was the *default UI* isn't minimalist, regardless of the minimalist *usage of resources*. I guess I didn't say that right before.
:p
I would call Winamp with the default skin (2.x, or 5's classic skin) minimalist, because it doesn't take up much real estate at all, even with the playlist editor, and I can collapse it and still keep it on the screen. If foobar does that (apart from the systray icon) they hide the option spectacularly well.
That's why I asked if anyone knew of a UI plugin to foobar.
For a near complete replacement of an WinAmp replacement, I recommend Quintessential. It's got everything WinAmp did except video channels, and it does OGG.
http://www.quinware.com
Open sourcing it would be much better.
iTunes for Windows would be my next choice after Winamp only if it had "Play in Winamp" and "Enqueue in Winamp" like options in Windows Explorer context menu (right mouse button on a folder). Any idea if this is possible somehow? I don't like nor need playlists, I just want to play an album the files of which are in this folder, please.
Now that is a silly question. Windows Media Player - secure, not bloated, of famous Microsoft quality. :-P
[sorry, couldn't resist]
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.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
... 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
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?
Why an alternative?
The best player under Windows is still Winamp. It will be downloadable from winamp.com for a good time yet and probably from other sources until there is a good reason why it wont work anymore.
There is no reason to change unless something is wrong with it!
Um,...how about WinAMP? Just because they stopped developing it doesn't mean that the current version will stop working.
Winamp was done years ago. What else could they possibly do to it!? I have no plans to stop using it.
(All legal, since they were all copied from borrowed CDs). Dude.... I hope you have a good lawyer!!!
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
Besides, until there's a version of Ryan Geiss' kick ass winamp plugins, for another player (let's not pretend that iTunes visualizations are even in the same league) I'll stay with the old stuff, thank you. How up to date do you have to be with MP3 software anyway?
Streaming is one thing that I've found WinAmp is excellent for. I'm not bothered that the development of the software will stop, as the version I have works for listening, and works for streaming. But out of curiosity, what else is out there that supports live streaming of whatever's on your playlist out to the internet world. For WinAmp the choice is obviously ShoutCast, which works wonderfully, and is also one of the main reasons I stay with WinAmp. Does iTunes have something that allows internet streaming? What about any other player out there? Just something I've wondered for a little while now.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
QCD has been my default music player for years now. Far far far better than WinAmp ever was.
It's a shame about sonique though. That was the first mp3 player to beat WinAmp at their own game.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Winamp. Just because it won't be updated, doesn't mean it's not any good.
I moved on a long time ago.
I need a basic mp3 player and WinAmp bloated; it long ago stopped being an appropriate solution merely for mp3 playback.
--
Toby
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
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Well, call me stupid, but why did you stop using it just because you didn't like the latest version? Did somebody put a gun to your head and force you to stop using the older versions?
I don't respond to AC's.
had a good run. hopefully the end of an era would spur some worthy successor, no longer confined to the shadows. and i didnt mean WMP10.
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.
about the lack of updates thanks to WinAmps demise are usually the same people complaining about the bloat that comes out with the new versions. WinAmp 2.x works fine, doesnt have blaot and didnt self destruct when new versions of WinAmp were released
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I've been using WinAmp since the beginning, before AOL, and I still have a copy of 3.0 somewhere because it was the last version that didn't suck, sure.
But there's one thing I've never understood.
What's with the Llama-whipping?
There's got to be some story there, right?
I don' use Winamp as I'm a mac user but i don't understand the mad rush to look for a replacement. Is the current version you are using stable? Does it still work? Then what is the problem?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
1) a fine-grained (sub second) seek-to feature. At least, for the media types that support it.
2) A better way to handle the sourcing and sinking of data. Right now, you've got command line options and a config file. It needs to support call-backs that the xmms plug-in provides instead of internal routines.
I think a better way would be to perhaps roll a libmplayer and have an instance configuration API... maybe to use
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
In addition to being a media player, the draw toward winamp was it skinnability and the availability of plugins for it. People liked seeing all the silly bouncing flying thumping swirly off-the-wall crazy retro tripply twirly blip-bang around-and-around epilepsy-inducing orgasmic smooth gel-glide itchy nifty cool visualizations that the winamp plugin interface gave them. And they loved the EQ and the numerous effects plugins. If people just wanted basic functionality, then WinPlay32 would have been just fine. If people just wanted skins then Sonique would have been more popular. And if they really wanted the fastest most lightweight player out there, they would have used NAD. But the cool thing about winamp is that it did all of these things, and it did them well.
Writing an mp3 player that looks similar to winamp probably isn't that hard. Writing an winamp clone is impossibly difficult, though; to create a player with the same appeal as winamp is a daunting task (remember that much of what made winamp great was its developer community and its ubiquity).
As other have said above, so what? I use 2.91, I have the installation file in my backup directory and I see no reason to change, ever. I tried the later versions (3.x or 4.x or whatever it is) and decided right away that I do *not* need another bloated do-it-all-multimedia thing. I want an MP3/OGG player, 2.91 is great for that.
It's too bad that I had to discover Winamp as a result of this post on /. I hang my head in geek shame.
Nullsoft is definitly big into open source. Just check out their website. Most of the tools they've developed are open source. Get em' before they're gone!
Bye bye Winamp
Bye bye happiness, hello crapiness
I think I'm gonna cry
Bye bye Winamp, bye bye sweet codec's hello "unable to play"
I feel like I could die
Bye bye my Winamp goodbye
There go the last developers, to someone new
they sure look unhappy, we sure are too
It was their baby till AOL stepped in
Goodbye to future perfectness that might have been
Bye bye Winamp
Bye bye happiness, hello crapiness
I think I'm gonna cry
Bye bye Winamp, bye bye sweet codec's hello "unable to play"
I feel like I could die
Bye bye my Winamp goodbye
I'm through with big corps, I'm through with closed source
I'm through with counting the bugs add up
This is a perfect reason, Open Source is free!
My Winamp playlists, export for me.
Bye bye Winamp
Bye bye happiness, hello crapiness
I think I'm gonna cry
Bye bye Winamp, bye bye sweet codec's hello "unable to play "
I feel like I could die
Bye bye my Winamp goodbye
Bye bye my Winamp goodbye
Bye bye my Winamp goodbye
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Of course it wont self-destruct, im not stupid..
.. Rather not wait until the 'last moment'...
My reason for asking is due to future changes in windows, and audio/video codecs. At some point it will quit working
---- Booth was a patriot ----
winamp was finally getting good. A few small glitches to iron out and that would have been it...
ah, well.
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!
.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.
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
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!
Their ex-Product Manager is a man, baby!
The talent in the original Nullsoft team would be worth their weight in gold. Those are all top notch developers and I can think of 3 apps that either Justin or the team released that changed the world:
Winamp, a very popular mp3 player
Gnutella, the benchmark for anon p2p
Waste, which has morphed into various darknets
A good team of programmers. It's too bad that AOL didn't recognize their worth and cater to their needs. I'm sure google would love to get these guys in house, I know I would.
this is a sad day, the end of an era. I am sad to see them go, they made some great stuff. via con dios winamp team!!!
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
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......
I've been using foobar2000 for the last 3 or 4 months extensively (I had used it before, but it always had a little niggle that forced me back to winamp).
Now it's my number 1 music player, loads of customisations, I love the way you can make the tray icon pop up a balloon with the artist and song name. It's much less obtrusive in this sense than winamp where you always need the window in view. Also has great sound.
Better app than clunky old winamp imo.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
ok, I am biased.
For the last little while, winamp has just been a load of AOL out of date crap, used only by the masses because of the market share it got when it was a leader, and kept up only by the fact that it's not quite as bad as Microsoft or Real Player. Winamp hasn't done anything new in more than a year; this is nothing new. Foobar is clearly in the lead, and I for one will be glad to see winamp go. One less AOL icon installing peace of crapware on the internet!!!
What currently used file formats can winamp play with out plugins? Ogg and mp3 last I checked. Everything else requires you to hunt through masses of (mostly crappy) plugins to find what you want. Foobar also uses plugins, but they come built in, and all of the popular file formats are supported. The only place that foobar falls short on is midi files; in everything else, it's a winner (dsp, general, lossless formats, etc).
tired of online ads?
Maybe I'll check it out again. Usually I have fb minimized or running MilkDrop fullscreen, so skinning kind of gets forgotten.
Those are some pretty cool looking skins though.
+1 for fb2k. I use it with foo_ui_columns, and it looks and feels a hell of a lot nicer than WinAmp ever did (that is; like a real application, and not an ugly picture with buttons (although you can make it look like that too)). Don't let its rather, uh, conservative default look put you off.
It's just you. mpg321 manages quite happily without skinnability. MP3s are for listening to, not looking at.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
AOL paid $400,000,000 to aquire Nullsoft in the first place.
You think Winamp could be worth only $10,000 of that?
it really whips the llamas ass
BAAAHHH!
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com
The best media jukebox software on Windows is probably Media Center.
Da Blog
Someome with some disk space needs to mirror the skins archive. There are some real gems in there. I think the variety of skins, and the subjects covered by the skin authors is a strange little snapshot of our time.
Get a free ipod.
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".
Da Blog
I got a reply from justin. He said that AOL had put a hiring freeze on. They wren't allowed to hire anyone else, and if someone left they wouldn't be replaced. It was pretty clear that he was really frustrated with the situation. So this doesn't come as such a big suprise.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
While the loss of Winamp is sad. Now, how can we go about losing RealPlayer and its disgustingly insidious spyware (which pisses everybody off and only works on the most clueless of users anyway)? Success would probably spawn parties all over the web. Too bad there's no AOL to ditch RealPlayer...
Can we vote them off the island soon?
Snazzier than a Three-Piece Suit: http://kf.rainydaycommunications.net/
One of my favorite WinAMP Plugins is The Brain, which monitors your listening habits and begins automatically creating its own playlist for you. Just choose music for a week or so and then let The Brain take over... Kind of like having your own radio station. The plugin hasn't been updated in a while, though. Are there any other audio players with built-in or plugin capability to do the same?
Though as long as I'm here, who remembers that one of the first things they did after getting bought out by AOL was create an advertising remover for the AOL IM client? That let us know the llama was still going to cause trouble!
Get off my launchpad!
Any good alternatives to Shoutcast for Windoze-powered servers (that isn't a Windows Media service)?
Good luck to all those NullSoft developers and staff.
Pretty Pictures!
I don't know what everyone else has tried, but I find TCMP (http://www.corecoded.com/) to be a worthy successor to Winamp.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I like iTunes a lot for maintaining and playing audio files on a local drive but I have problems with how it handles streaming audio.
Every time you play a new stream, iTunes permanently adds it to its library. While it's nice to keep streams you listen to regularly in the library, it's annoying to have to clean up the ones you don't want to listen to again or that broke.
This is particularly annoying when you're using a some kind of online jukebox, like Namp! With an online jukebox, iTunes will add a library entry for *each* track.
their programmers had some real talent. I'll be interested in seeing what they go onto next.
- Joe
This is basically the truth.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
ITUNES is MUCH better than WINAMP....... MuUUUAHHHAHHhHHhHAHHAhah
-- "Life's not fair, but the root password helps."
What'd be nice is if (we, someone) could use the "remote control" mode of mplayer along with a local website that let you queue songs/query a database and control it from wherever.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Wouldn't it be easy, given Nullsoft's history, to claim that they were hacked in order to get the source code out there? If i were in the position they're in, I'd blame it on a bug or something in AOL. 2 birds, one stone!
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
Now Nullsoft bails out because AOL is, well, AOL.
Given that both of these programs were (at least originally) indedpendantly developed, are we starting to see a trend toward the innovation being sucked right out of the industry?
Chris Knight is my hero.
Once Winamp tanks completely, Zinf can use the Freeamp name again; you have to use a trademark to keep it alive.
Please moderate parent up.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I wonder what will become of http://www.shoutcast.com/? Any other good internet radio directories out there?
And it's completely customizable, so if you do have a laptop with said messages, you cna make it match them, style-wise.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I registered Winamp when it was shareware circa 1999. Can I use my old serial number to unlock Winamp Pro?
No, Winamp 5 Pro requires you to re-register in order to unlock the latest features.
Winamp Pro is a different product from Winamp, which your key is still valid for.
xmms is closing.?!?.
oh wait.. heh.. was just one of the winamp skins I had on xmms, which supports everything winamp did as well..
They did have one truly cool product and that was called AO or something, and you could rearrange the interface while playing music.. it was very cool, buggy, but cool..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Free? I paid $15 for the shareware in 1997.
Still I feel it was a good deal.
It's unfortunate that there is going to be no further development of my favorite software product, but my real concern is what's going to happen to the Shoutcast website. The website is little more than a tracker for Shoutcast audio streams, but it's a very nice resource and I have found plenty of wonderful webcasts using it. The consolidation of hundreds of streams onto one site, plus searching features, made it invaluable. Without the site, finding a stream is going to be very difficult unless you know exactly what you are looking for. Has there been any word on this, or are we just going to have to hope for someone else to take over stream tracking?
"Nullsoft/AOL would just not be able to compete at this late stage in the game."
I disagree. AOL would have an advantage over Apple, because they *own* the music they would sell. They could price very competitively.
What Apple or AOL does with the user interface is really secondary, although of course if they really screw it up, that won't go too well.
There's plenty of opportunity still left in the downloadable music market. Apple may have a huge lead, but they still have barely scratched the entire potential of the market.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Winamp can now take its place in software history, next to Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Mosaic, and all the other innovative and important "killer apps" of years past that have been reduced to only niche usage today.
We've moved on to other things, now. But we appreciate what you made for us.
Finally a GUI that's small and somewhat works. Thanks for being the only person to actually help me rather than tell me about features that don't exist in the default install. :)
I still had to search on Google for 5-10 minutes hopping over busted links and broken websites to find it.
Every copy of foo_looks I found was incompatible with v0.8.3 except for the 2.1 beta, and the only working link I found for it was on a German forum.
I guess that must be why so many l33t d00ds love foobar so much. I mean, why go with something that works out of the box when you can go traipsing through half the Internet to find plugins?
This guy's article says it all.
There really is no reason for AOL to develop Winamp anymore. Every Wintel PC out there comes with Windows media player, which isn't perfect, but many people seem to prefer it to Winamp. Now that iTunes is picking up steam on PCs, and with AOL using iTunes for its own online music sales, Winamp is just a competing project that isn't really competing. Delayed releases, poor performance, and a bad randomization algorithm that doesn't cut it for today's trend of listening to music with shuffle on aren't pushing the envelope.
I remember when Winamp was cool, interesting, and mattered, but those days ended after AOL picked up Nullsoft. It's about time for AOL to just euthanize the poor thing and move on.
I really like the Media Library too.
:)
I can't remember exactly in which revision it first appeared, but the Media Library *IS/WAS* available in a 2.9x version.
It can probably still be found on oldversion.com
Yes! I want it to be just like emacs, but for Windows.
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.
I am really disappointed in this development, though I did see the writing on the wall for WA. My main question is, what alternatives are there to WA that have a small footprint, and are able to play OGG VORBIS files. I have a lot of friends who use Real's player, or Windows Media, but I haven't been able to find OGG support for these players. I saw the link to the three sort of alternative players, but they don't look quite polished enough for my liking. If anyone has any suggestions for a Windows based player that would suite my needs, please let me know. Or perhaps this is the time for me to completely ditch Windows for Linux.
No improvements are needed therefore no programmers are needed. we have all the playback capabilities we need. How many different ways can you play mp3's and ogg vorbis files anyway?
We'll probably be SOL since IP and copyrighted materials are such a nice thing to have in today's sueciety.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
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???
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Oh wait I just got an mp3 player, I guess this isn't so sad then.
"They all have bugs, none of them are perfect, and arguing about that stuff is as stupid as Window$ users.."
Ow! The irony is making my stomach hurt!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I have a 100" projection screen and I use Winamp for its Visualization Plugins. There are some plugins that only are made for winamp. Therefore, despite the fact that I can play the files on any itunes,vlc, windows media,etc., Winamp still rocks for visualizations. The big ones like G-Force work in iTunes as well, but for sheer variety and number of plugins Winamp is still the king. I dare you to find a program that tops Winamp in this area. Actually I'd look forward to finding anything that could.
Uhh... how bout Winamp? There likely won't be further development, but that doesn't mean you can't use it any more. As of now Winamp is still available from both winamp.com and download.com, and probably other sources as well.
How much can we buy the source code for from AOL?
Are there any decent alternatives that share all these features with winamp? Gapless play Volume ramping when pausing/stopping Crossfading when seeking Supported within logitech iTouch Media library I'm sure there must be but i've never found one. I can't do without any of them features either, otherwise i would be driven insane. It also has to look ok. Not necassarily eye candy but not depressing either.
What a wonderful iTunes rip-off. Hah.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Why anyone would choose iTunes over Winamp (or even Windows Media player) is beyond me.
Other than that M4Ps bought on iTMS work only in iTunes?
Does it Rip CDs? I'm looking all over for a BSD/GPL/true freeware/ID3 lookup/win32 all in one digital music solution and I'm pulling my hair out.
At this point i'd even go for a good freeware/bsd/gpl CD ripper with a reliable id3 lookup capacity. Its getting the lookups so I can automate moving over my CD collection that is the pain right now.
There is an mplayer backend for xmms, and can be found at TheGraveyard.org
What a wonderful iTunes rip-off. Hah.
You're just showing your ignorance. Have you used both softwares for any appreciable amount of time? I have. When and if your media collections grows beyond the larval stage then you will probably realise the limitations of most jukebox software out there.
Considering that Media Center was first released several years before iTunes, that it is now at version 11, that it pioneered programmable smartlists and user-defined dynamic tags, client-server streaming, programmable visualisations, programmable and scriptable playback screens, and that it supports over 30 audio and video formats, multi-Zone playback, 32-bit internal processing, 3d digital playback upsampling, scheduled recording and broadcasting, on-the-fly downsampling and transcoding, as well as managing photo collections and Tivos, which would you call a "rip off"?
Furthermore, iTunes chokes on anything over 40000 files. I know, I tried it on my 100K multimedia collection. It just whimpered and died, much like the MS player and the Real Player. However, Media Center just kept on chugging, read in all tags correctly, and even successfully spent around 400 hours of CPU time analyzing the entire collection, writing BMP and auto dB levelling info into the ID3 tags. Given that this entailed processing around 800GB of data assorted into over a dozen different formats, and that Media Center completed this mammoth job without a single crash or complaint, I was impressed.
I'd just add that thing about MC that I like most is that its client-server streaming mode is not lamely limited to LANs like iTunes. I can stream from my home server to anywhere over the internet, and I do. It's quite a kick to be visit someone, or work abroad, and simply hit "Play" to instantly hear what I want to hear.
Da Blog
How many times are you going to say the same thing?
Once again AOL kills a Microsoft competitor, by purchasing it, and then killing the project, despite it's popularity. Netscape all over again.
I bet Microsft will send an extra big Christmas card to AOL this year.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
This is simply not true. If you take a look at Kaillera it is in a questionable battle with MAME developers. MAME (open source - but no GPL) requires that derivative works open their source as well. But the Kaillera (two of the main Nullsoft guys) developers have not only refused to comply with MAME's license they've also perma-banned the MAME developers from Kaillera's forums.
This is not a group of people that like open source. Sure they liked fighting AOL, but they also like fighting open source.
Joseph Elwell.
Wow! That's just completely wrong. Not even close on that one!
The Gnutella binary/program leaked, but NOT THE SOURCE CODE. The protocol was reverse engineered, and that spec is where we got new Gnutella programs. No original source code at all. Perhaps they are confusing Gnutella with "Waste"?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How [slashdot.org] many [slashdot.org] times [slashdot.org] are you going to say [slashdot.org] the [slashdot.org] same [slashdot.org] thing [slashdot.org]?
Until they wrench the keyboard from my cold dead fingers. If something is worth saying then it's worth repeating.
Da Blog
I tried CoolPlayer for a while. It was small, sleek, did the job (usually), and had some decent minimalist skins. But it was also buggy beyond belief. Might end up back with that one or not.
Foobar2000 - I might go back to them. Very powerful but really lacking in polish.
Pity, because WinAmp5 was actually rather decent (compared to the garbage that was v3, which caused me to go looking for other solutions).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Well technically 2, 3, and 5 were all prime and people used to say 1 was prime, but it's not considered to be prime anymore.
This is a little OT, but does anyone know of any media player for Linux that matches Winamp's Media Library. I've tried several (Rhythmbox, Yammi, Madman, Juk), and they don't even come close to Winamp, or, hell, even MusicMatch.
where the comment ends and sig begins
All I really want is one player that plays all the audio formats. *Sigh* I currently have WMP, Winamp 5, Foobar2000 and iTunes all fighting over extensions...
You probably should try Media Center - it plays everything, audio and video. The developers' slogan is "All Media, One Interface". It supports over 80 formats, does ASIO playback, and has a scripting engine that can drive any unsupported formats using their player's API. It can also transcode between formats on-the-fly while serving clients, as well as doing bitrate downsampling and soundstage upsampling. More info. Windows only though, I am afraid, although it has been embedded in several home theatre and media playback set top boxes.
Da Blog
has anyone gotten any luck running winamp 5 under wine?
"no further improvements to Winamp are expected"
I can't remember the last time I've upgraded Winamp due to the new version having some killer new feature I couldn't live without. Winamp has been satisfactory since it's mid 2.0's and will remain so for a very long time to come. Winamp is a nearly completely open box, operating mostly under the control of it's plugin modules; I see no reason for a lack of official updates to slow Winamp down.
For the record, though, I no longer use Winamp, anyway. Foobar2000 better supports my workflow. Now, if only it supported Milkdrop et al.
I had issues with 3, but loved the library, so didn't want to go back to 2, then 5 came out, it really was the best bits of 2 and 3, so it is now my standard music player, and I love it to bits...
This is very sad that Winamp has died, but it was becoming apparent that it was in a downward spiral, the number of people who were amazed I was still using it was staggering. "You're still using that old thing?"
It might be worthy of note that XMMS does support Winamp skins (the 2.x variety at least, not sure about the newer ones). And in addition to it's former name of LinAmp I'm guessing it was in many ways made to be a semi-clone of Winamp.
Of course, with many of its own plugins and featurse etc it's advanced beyond WinAmp now, with Winamp having advanced in different directions as well in Winamp5... but many of the simulatities do remain.
Sometimes I wish they were more cross-compatible though, as there are some nice winamp vis plugins that I would love to have in XMMS...
Sorry, but on loading it up, I am presented with a large, empty white box and the controls at top. On loading up my MP3 directory I'm presented with one long list of tracks.
That is butt ugly and painful to look at. No replacement there.
Version 2.91 has the media library.
I just recently checked out Media Center after using Winamp for years, and while I have to say it's media library support/functionality is the BEST I've ever used I'm still at a loss for GLOBAL HOTKEY SUPPORT. Is it possible, you being a more experienced user, to get some light shed on the status of Media Center and hotkeys? Any plugins or anything? Hotkeys are the only thing keeping me on Winamp now; Winamp isn't bad necessarily, but I have a huge music collection and as of late Winamp's library management has felt inadequate.
...I don't mean to turn this into a support forum thread or anything, but I did feel like milking this opportunity to pose my question...
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
This also spells the end of Milkdrop, which is still by far the best visualization for any media player. It's too bad it's DirectX based or I'd have hopes of it going open source one day and showing up in iTunes.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Hate to break it to y'all, but it sure as heck looks as if Mr. Softie has claimed a victory in this particular multimedia software battle. Windows Media Player has and always will kick some major butt (llama's butt in this case LOL).
So...
Did I miss something? Is Winamp going to suddenly disappear from computers around the world?
Host a copy yourself if you're really worried, but I doubt it will be hard to find for a long, long time.
I think a lot of people forget that Winamp was one of the first programs to popularize the use of 'skins'. The /. crowd may not care much for eye candy but it has certainly been very influential and was quite a leap forward.
Come on guys, be serious. Did anyone seriously expect corporate behemoth like AOL to keep a team of creative programmers unharmed forever? This is corporation, everything that sticks out of the line would be squished, it's just a matter of time. Corporations are a great place for those with mediocre talents or bad luck that need a paycheck at the end of the month in return for some spiritless effort. Anyone creative will suffocate there in the long run.
But, as someone pointed out, they asked for it. After all AOL bought Nullsoft with real money. So, basically, it's their now and they can do whatever they want. And I bet Justin Frankel doesn't regret selling Nullsoft when he looks at his bank account. So it is all OK in the end - entrepreneurs got their money, AOL got the product and employees got their paychecks.
Are you ok? You seem quite upset.
Nullsoft was sold to AOL in 1999, you were probably still running Win95 at the time. AOL bought Nullsoft for $100,000,000, eight zeros, not bad for a kid barely out of high-school. It is a shame that things have transpired this way, but I don't think you can really blame them for the sale.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
I just installed 5.05 lite. It looks and behaves just like V2 - did not even need to change skins. Performance is just as snappy as well. Great stuff!
Freedom of speech doesn't come with bandwidth.
I like the way you can leave winamp set to "shuffle" but still enqueue songs. When your selections are finished playing, it goes back to randomly playing your playlist. This is especially neat for parties, when you can cue the right song for the moment, then go and enjoy the moment without having to go and hit the shuffle button again before winamp plays the rest of the album your selected tune comes from...
sustainable living
Yes, the lack of built-in global hotkeys has been mentioned many times by users as sorely lacking for novice users. For further info, just type "hotkeys" in here.
/Command Pause
/PLAY TREEPATH=Playlists\Top Hits
There are a few solutions that probably illustrate why the developers have not bothered to date implementing a global hotkey support for menu items. The first is that MC users tend to be a crafty lot and many have already linked MC with girder and their existing universal home theatre remotes or AirPanels. The other is that MC can be driven using the command line, so many people map their function and macro keys to some of MC's command line parameters, along the lines of
C:\WINNT\system32\mjextman.exe
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\mjextman.exe
etc etc.
You can even get one of those blank UI templates with lots of buttons and make yourself your own on-screen widget to control the program this way. Some people use their PDAs, or Bluetooth phones for this.
Da Blog
1) MAME developers, including the ones I've linked to in my original message, will disagree with that Kaillera FAQ item.
.67 (2003-04-06). The not-open-source server has many known remotely exploitable holes that prevent users from setting up full time open servers without actively banning ip ranges in a pathetic attempt at security.
It's easy, almost required, for the Kaillera developers to "claim" that they're compliant with the MAME license. But if they're compliant why are the MAME developers up in arms against them, asking them to open their sources?
2) The Kaillera server is not open source.
It should also be noted that Kaillera is practically abandonware at this point. Development has stopped since MAME
Joseph Elwell.
Come on, you could practically overlay Media Center's interface over iTunes, and probably 80% of it would line up. That's a rip-off. I don't care if it was around several years before iTunes, but it obviously wasn't using iTune's interface before iTunes came up with it..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
I don't care if it was around several years before iTunes, but it obviously wasn't using iTune's interface before iTunes came up with it
So let's see, you admit you are completely ignorant concerning the history and evolution of a piece of software you nonetheless deign to comment upon. Interesting.
Why not take a look at Media Jukebox versions 1-5, released many years before iTunes. Then take a look at the literally hundreds of Mini and Maxi mode skins for Media Center. I also think you're ignoring the fact that MC works in multiple interface modalities: maxi, mini, theatre. Many of the skins do implement a classic three-pane action-modal maxi interface, which is also the design that iTunes has tended to use in its various incarnations and which was common by 1999. But some of the skins are insanely non-Euclidean weirdnesses,
I think what you're seeing instead is a case of parallel evolution. Take a look at an ichthyosaur sometime, then compare it to a dolphin, and tell me who "copied" whom.
Da Blog