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Winamp Purchased By Radionomy
Major Blud writes "TechCrunch is reporting that Radionomy has purchased both Winamp and Shoutcast from AOL for $5-10 million and a 12% stake in the company. Radionomy CEO Alexandre Saboundjian said, 'We want to rebuild the story for Winamp. We think the future can be great because the strategy is not just desktop but mobile and cars and so much more.'"
Here's hoping they start by PROPERLY supporting FLAC, including 24/192 media.
The plugins currently available flat out do not work. And I hate using VLC for music.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Does the 12% include the Llama Ass?
Some OCD people will care since their music has to sound just right
99.9999% will just listen with their iPhone or galaxy phone
I hang out with the old nullsoft guys in IRC. General consensus for most of them is "We've moved on" The other concensus is, "There are so many good media players these days"
There was a time when Winamp mattered. There was no decent media players (in some regards, it was a new concept) Winamp brought skinning, plugins, visualizations and a whole slew of things that most folks never even knew they wanted or needed.
Funny that they mention Songbird today. One Nullsofter went there after the AOL buyout. He's now at google.
As far as Frankel, he started working on a DAW called Reaper. It's a swiss army knife for audio.
...but that's what you get in the windows world. Good thing they didn't port xmms to windows...
Anyone know anything about Radionomy? I still use win-amp at work, despite the bloat. I like the small 'strip' interface I can put up at the top of my window and I really haven't found a replacement, so I'd like to know if I can expect things to get better.. or worse.
It really whips the llama's ass.
Oh wait. Too late for this comment.
And too late to make any money off Winamp. Is Napster next? Let it die.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
"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."
After all, in 2014, there are no free music or video players that can be used on desktops, mobiles or in cars (have they also heard of tablets? Good market opportunity there as none of then play music files at the moment....)
Good luck anyway, I suppose the astronomical prices paid recently for nonsense like Snapchat and Instagram persuaded you that this was an absolte bargain, and issuing soundbites like "we want to rebuild the story" persuaded enough venture capital guys to splash the cash........
Goodbye Winamp, I fondly remember the days back in about 1999 when you were the only decent way to listen to MP3s on my PC at work, and nice move in getting a load of cash from clueless idiots who didn't realise you are now virtually worthless.
It's funny that you mention those. In a way, we've come full circle. I get the feeling that most people don't really care about whether or not they can skin their music player anymore (the more out of the way it is, the better.. it's something for the background, not to show off to friends), nevermind visualizations (I don't see much demand for visualizations for Pandora on any of the platforms that have a Pandora app). Maybe that still sees some use with some (self-proclaimed) DJs, but I can't say I've seen it used in a very long time. Plugins are similarly dying a slow death. Think of video players.. how many have plugins to support some manner of format? Most of them either read them out of the box (think VLC) or rely on a 'codec pack' (with FFDShow or LAV) being installed to read everything.. and let practically any other media player read them as well.
"There was a time when Winamp mattered. There was no decent media players (in some regards, it was a new concept) Winamp brought skinning, plugins, visualizations and a whole slew of things that most folks never even knew they wanted or needed."
That's not quite true. Amiga and Atari at least had media players that worked quite well, and supported plugins etc, before WinAMP even existed. What made WinAMP hit its stride was the fact that Win95 came out, sound cards had become standard on PC's, and MP3 hit the scene in the same timeframe. And for Windows, WinAMP was the first player that supported MP3 to gain attention.
In many ways, WinAMP took a lot of inspiration from the Amiga players, such as HippoPlayer.
As far as I'm concerned, Winamp is still the best music player on Windows. With the Moon Glade skin, mine lives as an always-on-top bar at the top-center of my screen and expands into a playlist when I hover over it. The plugin system decodes every music file I know of and - this is huge for me - it can apply VST filters to the audio output. This is important to me because I play my music through Bose 901 (v6) speakers, which are designed to require a custom Bose equalizer to sound decent. Because I'm running audio into my receiver digitally, I can't use this analog equalizer, so I rely on a chain of VST plugins to mimic (and actually improve on) its functionality. I don't know of another media player that can use VST plugins for sound shaping. Then again, I haven't been looking, because I'm pretty satisfied with Winamp. If anyone knows other media players with VST functionality I would appreciate the info.
Different users have different needs. If one person wants obscure format A, and another person wants obscure format B, and a third person wants obscure format C, then the most efficient way to handle the different needs is to make a player with an input plug-in architecture. Or are you claiming that "most people would have no need for a player supporting" any obscure format?
Isn't that like a 12% stake in a dead horse? Was it just thrown in there in hopes someone on the team had the other 15 shares to take control of the company and finally finish the job?
Pointcast instead!
Plugins are similarly dying a slow death. Think of video players.. how many have plugins to support some manner of format? Most of them either read them out of the box (think VLC) or rely on a 'codec pack' (with FFDShow or LAV) being installed
What do you think the "codec pack" is? As I understand it, a codec pack is just a curated set of input plug-ins.
There was a time when Winamp mattered. There was no decent media players
And now there are dozens, with some that focus on audio, some that focus on video, some that handle both: Foobar2000, Songbird, VLC, Media Player Classic, XBMC, Windows Media Center, etc... You even have image viewers like XnView turning into video players. The lines have completely blurred as viewers and players have turned into multimedia centers.
The question is, which niche would Winamp try to fill? How could they differentiate themselves? The interface? Cataloging? Container support? Codec support? Streaming support? Subtitle support? Time shifting? Post processing? Song recognition? Speed? Size? Cross-platform support?
Audio player software included on mobile devices requires audio to first be transcoded to MP3, MP4, or (in the case of Android) Vorbis. That sort of hurts if you have a big collection of files in sequenced formats, such as NSF, MIDI, or MOD. Transcode an NSF to MP3, for instance, and you've ballooned the file size by a factor of 100. Winamp solved this problem through an input plug-in architecture, but mobile device manufacturers seem to require the transcoding in order to get users to buy devices with larger flash memories at inflated prices.
Why does no-one ever remember Sonique? How I loved that player that I could never close because it always crashed when I did...
I do hope that Radionomy don't murder Winamp but keep the winamp dream alive. Nonetheless, the old files will always remain somewhere
Winamp + Pacemaker = 3 cups of coffee if you set the tempo to +25. changing pitch, not so much, but setting the temp to -20 allows you to learn the hard portions of songs to sing/play along with. Would love if I found any other player that had the same functionality. Can even do that to online streams, if they prebuffer correctly.
I too use VLC to watch video, but I use Winamp when playing or converting obscure audio formats. Until this purchase, it appeared that the capability to do the latter was about to disappear. So as of the article, I admit that my complaint is no longer quite as much of a complaint.
Anyway, if someone is about to lock himself into a particular tool, then he should choose a tool with room to grow. For example, if someone wants to play one obscure codec, he's likely to want to play other obscure codecs, which means a player with a means to add input plug-ins. Likewise, in computing, choosing an iPad or Surface tablet as your only computing device locks you into the applications that the tablet's maker approves of, making it more expensive once your needs grow to encompass something for which there is no iPad or Windows RT app.
http://mp3blaster.sourceforge.net/
I don't understand all of this talk about the Winamp developers stating that there are plenty of good audio players out there now... There really isn't! There's iTunes and a majority of people use that because they don't realise that their computers can have non Apple software installed on them too :O.
I've recently been trying out many of the top rated audio players, e.g. foobar2000, MusicBee, iTunes.. none of them come even close to being as good as Winamp.
Some of Winamp's features that I'm yet to see in other players are,
- Excellent Media Library, with the ability to play straight from the library...
- Toast Notifications of playing tracks
- Great plugin integration
- Modular and modern design
If anyone knows of any players that can really compare, please let me know. I'd love to see them.
The question is, which niche would Winamp try to fill? How could they differentiate themselves? The interface? Cataloging? Container support? Codec support? Streaming support? Subtitle support? Time shifting? Post processing? Song recognition? Speed? Size? Cross-platform support?
Even more lamely ad-ridden with ride-along crapware in the installer than it was when AOL owned it?
Just guessing.
It supports real world formats!
Yet Google sold a lot of chromebooks 2013 Holiday Season!
I was a winamp user for many years then it got to the point where every release was more ad-infested bloat
AiMP 3 (AiMP.ru) is a suitable clone of winamp based on LibBASS (http://www.un4seen.com/ ) it supports most winamp DSP plugins and a few of the general plugins
Actually there were several MP3 players for windows prior to winamp, but most of them used a LOT of CPU cycles. Winamp was like 5-10% on my pentium 100 and it supported mmx & amd's extension (i forget now.. on the k6-2 anyway) that brought CPU usage down to practically 0 on a 300Mhz processor. I ran it because it had little impact.
The early MP3 players would consume all CPU on a 486 33Mhz and that wasn't even at full quality (stereo, 44000, 128Kbps)
winamp was also one of the first 32bit mp3 players.
StreamRipper of course...... Silly Wabbit...
well I would want to 'move on' too if I had done what these guys did back when they did it...same goes for the guy who made napster Shawn Fanning.
remember when releasing software like this could get you sued for millions?
Thank you Dave Raggett
I love WinAmp, and it's a Windows application. I hate seeing the world "mobile" and "much more" in the buyers sentence. Sound like they will turn this of adware or bloated service application.
That's the mindset of the majority, not "OMG, they're so used to sucking the cock of zombie Jobs."
iTunes shows my music library as a fucking song list, I click what I want and poof, it plays.
iTunes lets me setup custom playlists.
iTunes will come up with playlists for me.
For the vast majority out there, this is all we really want. I used to be glued to Winamp as well, from I think about '98 up until around '07. Since then, meh. I never used any of the plugins. Personal computers now are so insanely powerful compared to what they were at Winamp's start that even on the cheapest bargain basement laptop the inefficiencies of applications like iTunes generally aren't noticeable at all.
Aside from it being resource friendly I only liked Winamp because I could have it sit on top of everything as a tiny bar and its implementation of playlists wasn't as space consuming as, and more accessible than, VLC's. Thing is, iTunes can sit on top of everything as well as a tiny bar.
So meh I say, meh.
I have not used AMP for a while. Is it too late to send songs in for the Antic Song challenge?
Dunno about any alternatives, but Winamp does what I need it to - mainly having a comprehensive media library, that I can keep open along side the playlist so I can select/drag and drop between them extremely quickly and easily, based on artist/album or individual tracks etc..
Incredibly huge playlist support.
My current "everything" Winamp playlist is 2000 hours long and covers about 20000 tracks. The process consumes a mere 38MB of RAM and is as responsive as it is with 10 songs.
Scrolling is a little odd - a single-pixel on the scrollbar, on a 1080-pixel-high playlist, translates into about half a screen's worth of movement.
Okay, then. Winamp needs one UI change: if focus is on the playlist window, pressing keystrokes should highlight the track. (e.g. "M" - goes to ten remixes of "M - Pop Muzik", "e" if pressed within a few milliseconds should take me to "Meat Beat Manifesto", and "t" if pressed within a few more milliseconds should take me to several pages of "Metallica", just to piss off Lars.) Because a binary search through "M" with a scrollbar can get awkward :)
Seriously, Winamp, if that's the worst criticism I can come up with, thank you for 15+ years of awesome, and for knowing when your product was complete, and for not fucking up the UX in the way that everybody else has over the past few years. Your UI (not UX!) is clean, functional, and scales to hardware that didn't even exist when you designed it. Others would do well to follow your lead.
fascinating news... I had no idea AOL was still in business. I worked at spinner.com (which streamed music and was not a blog) when AOL bought us and Winamp... I left almost immediately, somewhat as a result.
-pyrrho
That works exactly because they have an army of properly paid engineers developing Chrome OS.
I bet people at radionomy dont know why people use winamp and will ruin it.
If you read carefully, what I wrote was not that WinAMP was the first. But the first to catch attention.
I use winamp for two things, mod music and shoutcast
mod music cause open MPT is a decent editor, but I sometimes just want a player, shoutcast cause their web player is junk and crashes all the time
both cause I like the graphic EQ
anyone who cared about the winamp name no longer does. recognition is not going to set them apart from all the other media players anymore.
For desktop platforms, I think minimalist, quick-loading, massive format support is what I want. I don't need skins. I'd rather have a very streamlined interface like Vox on Macintosh. I want to be able to make it the default player for a variety of sound files. On mobile platforms, I'm not sure what WinAmp can do differently. On iOS I could use a lossless player that can pull content from the cloud: dropbox or skydive. Something that could read from iOS' music storage would be helpful, otherwise I'd need drag and drop storage of music files, which means the possibility of maintaing now two silos of music (iTunes/Google Play + local in-app). One thing I don't need is yet another ad-supported streaming service that promises to be better if I pay a subscription. I also need a really good software equalizer on iOS because the built-in one is horrible.
who the hell uses this malware laden crap anymore?
foobar2000 took the throne 10 years ago
The other concensus is, "There are so many good media players these days"
Does someone actually know what these good media (music) players are for Windows?
And by good I mean something similar to Rhythmbox (Gtk isn't the best thing on Windows). The UI should be clean, simple, and to the point. It should support music streaming, and a library function. And it shouldn't require me to spend two days trying to figure out how to configure the UI.
Winamp brought skinning, plugins, visualizations and a whole slew of things that most folks never even knew they wanted or needed.
Well exactly. They didn't want them and they didn't need them.
Skinning is a novelty of zero use. No, I do not need to rearrange the UI of my application every month so I can't find anything. No, having my music application look like a tie-in with the latest Batman movie is not a plus.
Plugins are of more use. But really, just provide me with the stuff I need in the application and I won't need these and won't have to spend ages getting them to work together.
Visualisations are fun at first, but I am not a club DJ or a stoner. They are therefore just CPU hogs.
Winamp had it all in its day and I'll remember it fondly. But over time it just became a confused mess.
Speak for yourself, skinning was actually very popular with WinAmp users. I still use the old DOS-AMP skin for it's retro flavour.
VLC > winamp...has been for years.
Having been very close to WinAmp and the AmpDev team in general in its infancy (circa 1996-1999) it's good to see that someone else is taking an interest. When AOL/Time Warner bought it for $100 Million in 1999 we all knew the direction it was going: large, corporate, and stupid. Let's face it, AOL bought WinAmp for the community that came with it. It should be no surprise that they did nothing memorable with it. And I can't fault Justin for taking the money and running.
I remember well the Stupid Factor being turned up to 11 when AOL ditched FreeBSD for SunOS/Solaris when they moved the hardware off of its "home" network. They practically ended up doubling the hardware to accommodate a (much) less functional OS. I could see the downward spiral start months before that happened. So they bought it for $100 Million and they're selling it for $5-10 Million. Good job, guys. Way to build shareholder value. Go, Team! ...Still, you beat Microsoft to the punch.
The TAP/WinAmp Memorial Hot Tub still lives and I use it every day. And I still use WinAmp every day, just not a CURRENT version. ( I still keep the pre-brain-damaged versions around despite some known security issues.)
That little pieces of it survive here and there is a nice reminder of what was, and what could have been, and what still might be. We'll see what Radionomy does with it. I, for one, will be happy to give them a chance to become relevant again.
Good luck, guys! Whip that llama's ass!
Storage is cheap
Only if your listening device has a USB mass storage port or microSD card slot. Many don't. Instead, several manufacturers of mobile listening devices, such as dedicated digital audio players and smartphones, sell one model with tiny storage at cost and put an excessive mark-up on the models with more storage.
I've been using REAPER for about 5 years now, professionally. It's cheap, works great, and there's no DRM beyond a registration code. I'd argue it's much more than a Swiss Army Knife, it's easily about 85% of ProTools is for my uses, and I can fake the other 15% without a sweat.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
if someone is using a certain video player for their videos and it also plays their sound files - why not use that?
Because audio and video use cases have different playlist expectations.
Video is more often a foreground application, requiring the viewer's primary attention, compared to audio that's more often used as background noise. And audio and video typically have different durations. In my experience, audio is more often stored with one file per track, while video is more often stored with one file per "album", with cue marks between scenes. People are more likely to put a collection of songs from several albums in a playlist and shuffle it than single scenes from motion pictures. And video is far more likely to be unavailable from the publisher in a DRM-free format than audio.
Theres something to be said for only learning to use one program to do different several things - assuming it does it well.
I guess the thinking is that audio libraries and video libraries are so different in metadata structure that it's difficult to make one application that plays both well.
I use reaper, tis excellent.
The difference is that it's 'plugins' that anything can use, rather than your specific choice of media player.
True, Video for Windows codecs and DirectShow codecs work in a wider variety of media players and editors. But I know VFW applications such as VirtualDub can't use DirectShow codecs. And I'm told VFW itself has limits that make it less than ideal for certain codecs and containers, which is why you don't see a lot of, say, MOD players using the VFW architecture. I guess Nullsoft might have developed its own input plug-in architecture to work around VFW's limits, and I have since learned about other players that can also use Winamp input plug-ins for just this reason.
As far as Frankel, he started working on a DAW called Reaper. It's a swiss army knife for audio.
I use Reaper and I love it. Inexpensive and extremely flexible. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
the death of winamp