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Winamp Shutting Down On December 20

Posted by Soulskill on from the llama-finally-whipped-back dept.

New submitter Cid Highwind writes "If you want to download the latest version of Winamp, you'd better do it soon. According to a new banner on the download page, AOL will be pulling the plug on the iconic llama-whipping music player in a month. 'Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.' Ars Technica ran an article last year detailing how the music player lost its dominance."

6 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. WinAMP still rocks by CanEHdian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In "classic" skin you have the good old nice and small interface, and it has excellent 24bit support... Fraunhofer Institute codecs... all sorts of goodies. I wonder what will happen to people who (recently) bought the Pro upgrade...

    --
    When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
  2. Oh Man- My Lightshow by gnarfel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My very first light shows we're done using AVS Studio plugin. It was sick. You could render text, create complicated intricate patterns, specify coloring directly (not just a pass filter over an existing image) and even adjust all of it in real time on a second monitor. Modern VJ apps like arkaos and resolume don't even dent the surface of the on-the-fly stuff you could do in AVS, even if they do have more features overall.

    --
    Local music(to upstate NY). http://gnarfel.com/ radio.
  3. Here's to hoping... by Forbo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that someone who had been working on it "accidentally" leaks the source.

    1. Re:Here's to hoping... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ...that someone who had been working on it "accidentally" leaks the source.

      That might actually be a worse result. Unless there are Winamp-specific features/interfaces that are either difficult to clone or near-impossible to get full compatibility with, without the source, leaked-but-unlicensed source would just cast suspicion on any winamp-like projects, and fall into a difficult-to-develop for legal grey area (since the source leak itself would be hot, patchsets would presumably be legal; but actual compilation would require hanging out in warez circles and leave the resulting build illegal to distribute.)

      Kind of like the issues XBMC had, back when they actually supported Xboxes. Their codebase was fine; but the SDK components required to actually do a build, and possibly the builds themselves, depending on exactly how hungry MS legal was feeling, were always illicit and kind of a pain to deal with.

  4. Re:FB2K FTW by EvanED · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A society that only satisfies the lowest common denominator is no society I'd want to live in. foobar is targeted at digital audio fans ...and of course every digital audio fan worth their salt has at least 100,000 files. </sarcasm>

    I'm not saying that software should satisfy only the lowest common denominator, just that I suspect 150K files is a pretty severe abnormality even among music fans who love piracy. Personally, I very briefly tried foobar2k, and didn't feel like putting in the effort to figure out how to make it do what I want, so I just use other programs. And on normal-sized collections, they work plenty fine.

  5. Re:FB2K FTW by jimshatt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Winamp had plugins for formats not anticipated by the operating system. I once (LONG ago) wrote a simple plugin that executed .bat files, so I could queue OS commands in my playlist (shutdown at the end of the list, etc.). Pretty cool (if I might say so myself :) ).