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WinAmp's Death Greatly Exaggerated
robyannetta writes "In a previous story, we heard that WinAmp was
down for the count. Apparently, this is not the case.
Here is a note by Eric Caoili that says "No we weren't axed. We haven't even seen anyone with an axe. There was this one guy who came up to us to axe us a question, but that's about it.""
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Eric's site, Winamp Unlimited, expands a little on the Winamp situation, and also has comments on most of the news articles that've been published regarding the topic.
If you missed it in the last discussion, he also has written a past article on what some of the ex-Nullsoft kids have been up to.
It's weird talking about myself in the third person.
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You are correct that it's a media player, and that there are lots of media players out there. But IMO, WinAMP is the ideal choice for music. WMP doesn't have the functionality and extendability that WinAMP has, and many other free media players are clogged up with overly fancy interfaces and/or just don't perform as well.
WinAMP always was free. There's a "pro" version with extended capabilities, but at no point was there NOT a free version that did everything any other media player did (and often more).
And I do not recall WinAMP ever being open source. There is an extensive SDK available, but the program itself is not available in source form... at least not through any legit channels that I could find.
=Smidge=
Perhaps you didn't notice because 3 scared you away, but 5 is far more closely related to 2 than 3. They realized how bad 3 sucked, and then skipped a whole digit just to tell you how cool 5 was. And it really is pretty nice. Better than what else is out there, anyway.
:)
All of the major security holes for Winamp that I recall had to do with the fact that it has a component that embeds Internet Explorer. And I've never seen a case of winamp-related "spyware" that doesn't involve either use of IE or other blatant stupidity.
So back off
Winamp still has one advantage--the huge collection of plugins. I'm a video game music junkie, and the only reason I still run winamp is to play SPCs, NSFs, PSFs--the dumps from the audio processing of emulated games. If iTunes could use winamp input plugins, I'd use it all the time.
I've tried several versions of iTunes now, and I just don't like it. Where are the customization options? I'm not just talking about skins and interface and such... everything just seems very inflexible. If you use iTunes and only iTunes for all of your ripping/downloads, then I'm sure its great. But if you're using other programs to aquire and manage music, it sucks.
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders. You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them. (You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.) Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Also, after using iTunes to edit some ID3 tags, my database ended up corrupted and I had to delete it. Fortunately I had only been using iTunes for a few hours, or I would have lost all of my song play counts, playlists, etc. Go to Apple's support forums and you'll see database corruption is a frequently occurring and very annoying issue.
I can understand the iPod not being able to play WMA/OGG/FLAC/etc. for now due to limited CPU power (even though lots of other MP3 players can do it just fine), but I don't see any reason why iTunes shouldn't be able to play them.
For me, Winamp 5 is the only tool that gets the job done, and I'm relieved to see it will be sticking around!