Slashdot Mirror
What Happened To Winamp? (arstechnica.com)
Winamp was released more than 20 years ago, and last week marked the 15th anniversary of the release of Winamp3. An anonymous Slashdot reader tries to explain what finally happened to Winamp:
AOL planned to discontinue Winamp in November of 2013, but instead sold it to the Belgian online radio service Radionomy. The last update on Winamp's Twitter account was September of 2015, though it announced that they were looking for a new senior C++ developer. Then in December of 2015 Vivendi Group became that company's majority shareholder, stirring hopes that the company might one day launch a revamped version of the classic mp3 player from 1997.
So did they? Radionomy's Winamp page is still showing download links -- though they now lead instead to a forum post which says "code licensed to the previous owner" is being removed or replaced. But that post has been updated five times -- as recently as last October -- with "info about the next Winamp release," each linking to a thread on Winamp's forums which offer tantalizing glimpses into a still-ongoing development process. And last October a Winamp dev posted on Twitter that "a Winamp 5.8 public beta release could be imminent," while the web page at Winamp.com still says "There's more coming soon," with a background image of a llama.
"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition," their first general manager told Ars Technica in 2012. (Winamp's developers had been earning $100,000 a month just from $10 shareware checks before AOL acquired the company in 1999 for $100 million.) In May TechRadar wrote that Winamp "is still a great media player...but it now relies on third-party extensions to add features found as standard in more modern players."
I still remember all the visualizations and custom skins -- but does this bring back any memories for anyone else? Leave your thoughts in the comments. And what mp3-playing software are you using today?
So did they? Radionomy's Winamp page is still showing download links -- though they now lead instead to a forum post which says "code licensed to the previous owner" is being removed or replaced. But that post has been updated five times -- as recently as last October -- with "info about the next Winamp release," each linking to a thread on Winamp's forums which offer tantalizing glimpses into a still-ongoing development process. And last October a Winamp dev posted on Twitter that "a Winamp 5.8 public beta release could be imminent," while the web page at Winamp.com still says "There's more coming soon," with a background image of a llama.
"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition," their first general manager told Ars Technica in 2012. (Winamp's developers had been earning $100,000 a month just from $10 shareware checks before AOL acquired the company in 1999 for $100 million.) In May TechRadar wrote that Winamp "is still a great media player...but it now relies on third-party extensions to add features found as standard in more modern players."
I still remember all the visualizations and custom skins -- but does this bring back any memories for anyone else? Leave your thoughts in the comments. And what mp3-playing software are you using today?
The SUPER stupid part is AOL did this a lot. They bought up a lot of innovative companies and squeezed the life and individuality out of them and stifled their potential. Want to know how dumb it got? AOL forced all their subsidiaries to migrate their email systems to use the AOL client because of course they did.
Ah, a proud user of Windows*. Probably still using XP even, because "it still works" and "I don't need to keep my machine up to date because only stupid people get hacked". Or something.
Seriously, VLC kicks winamp's ass so hard it isn't even funny.
It is a veritable army knife of media palyback. It is vastly more efficient, it has support for every codec known to mankind, it has support for multiple platforms - all flavours of desktop AND mobile, x86, ARM (so you can run it on a Raspberry Pi) and more - and, crucially, it is open source so your software can't be held hostage by someone else.
Heck, you can even run it headless and control it remotely.
Winamp is a relic of times gone by. It was ok then, in the dark ages, when IE6 was the pinnacle of browsing and 128MB or RAM was a luxury. But now it is just an obsolete piece of turd, irrevocably held down by the whims of whoever "owns" it.
I'd give you a nickel to get yourself a better media player, but I don't even have to. VLC is free as in beer and speech, so get some already.
And in case you are terrified of all the features VLC packs, you don't have to use them if don't want to. They stay out of the way, so you can use it as just another dumb old media player. I probably even still supports XP, so you are fine.
* Assuming, since Winamp support for other platforms is utter crap. It has an Android version, but that doesn't even exist in the Android Play store any more, and the Mac OS version is a stripped down, crash prone turd.
Winamp was required to play mp3 files on Windows in the late 90s because Windows Media player did not support the codec. This allowed Winamp to grow as a successful product, up until Microsoft started bundling Windows Media Player 7 with Windows. Since WMP7 had support for mp3, most people just used that, simply because that's what mp3 files opened in when they double clicked on them. This lead to a rapid decline in Winamp users, and thus through the illegal practice of bundling Microsoft was able to abuse its Windows monopoly to kill off another competitor.
Bundling is an illegal practice for trust companies, and it always amazes me that they were able to get away with this with no investigation at all. It's not the only time Microsoft has used its bundling of Windows Media Player to its advantage. With WMP9 Microsoft added the VC-1 codec as a competitor to h.264. VC-1 was supposed to offer lower royalty payments to h.264, while offering similar performance, but once all patents were assessed the royalty payments turned out to be the same as h.264, so VC-1 offered no advantage at all to the incumbent codec. However, Microsoft used its Windows monopoly and bundled WMP application to push VC-1, and they were so successful they managed to get VC-1 included in with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards. Some early Blu-rays from Warner used VC-1, but the quality was noticeably inferior to h.264, and thus it is rarely, if ever, used for Blu-rays now. However, thanks to its monopoly abuse anyone who buys a Blu-ray player is paying money to Microsoft because all Blu-ray players have to support VC-1.
And mplayer/ffmpeg shits on VLC. So what? Some people like Winamp. I like Winamp. I like VLC, too. I also like mplayer and ffmpeg - and they're free, too. I use the tool/s that best suit my needs at the time.
BTW, VLC fails badly when asked to convert formats, it can't cope with damaged AVI indexes, and it's not very efficient at real-time playback of MKV files, so don't go crowing too loudly there.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom