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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?
I couldn't stand itunes's bloat and insistence on taking control of my media files/directories.
Winamp forever, itunes never.
This basically took over Winamp's userbase.
"I still remember all the visualizations and custom skins -- but does this bring back any memories for anyone else?"
Memories? I still use it.
I don't know what these supposed "Features" it doesn't have that are in modern players are but I don't want them. What I want is something that sits in one line at the top of my screen and plays music. It's still Winamp for that and has been since 1997.
Still use it. I could go on, but it feels like this Winamp story shows up a couple times a year.
It uses a tiny amount of RAM, a tiny amount of CPU, supports tons of plugins, global hotkeys, and more. I would "upgrade" but I've never actually seen a player that's an improvement. Why would I use a "newer" tool if the newer tool isn't functionally better than the old one? Playing an MP3 shouldn't take more than 16 MB of RAM or >0.0% CPU. End of story.
Thank God ONE software package hasn't become a bloated piece of crap that requires 15 seconds to load and 1 GB of RAM to load a freakin' word document.
Is what happened to WinAmp. The truth is that the vast majority of people now use their mobile phone to listen to music and not their laptop or desktop. The trend started with the iPod and was accelerated by the phone. As flash capacity increased it has been ever pushed further down the line. As such the market for audio players on your computer has larg
You can get 400 albums on a 64GB microSD using 256kbps MP3 and still have plenty of room to spare for photos. It's not like 128 and 200GB+ microSD are extortionate either.
That said the Linux clone xmms suffered the same issue, a massive "redesign" that destroyed it and even qmmp seems to be dead. For me neither are any use now I have a HiDPI display which is a shame.
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.
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.
What else would I be using?
I tend to rant.
MP3 players should play MP3s. Not download or play alternatives.
Post-processing is nice, though. More mp3 players should have more robust post-processing.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I ditched it around the time they decided it needed to play video, burn CDs and have a fucking integrated browser.
>"And what mp3-playing software are you using today?"
Audacious [under Linux], of course. And guess what skin? Refugee Winamp 2! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think your "professional" meter needs calibration... Itunes webpage looks like it was designed by an interior decorator. The winamp homepage looks like it was designed by a domain squatter. The XMMS homepage looks like it was designed by an engineer.
Your question seems to legitimize .MP3, it implies that it's the only format that people would ever use to play music. While you may well be right that it's what a majority of people use, you just made me very sad realizing how hopeless it is to try and get people to care about listening to music that has decent sound quality in lossless formats when most of us never have issues like running out of storage space anymore.
This is not to say that mp3 isn't a perfectly appropriate choice on personal portable audio devices that we use with earbuds while 'on the go', because it's totally suited for that.
But in the case of WinAmp and since this was a desktop app, there is a good number of us who actually have high-end audio interfaces with audiophile-grade D/A converters connected to large speaker systems, in which case such a choice of audio format arguably can and does make a difference.
To answer the question, foobar2000 is so superior to anything else out there, it seems like the natural inheritor of all of the endlessly customizable features that made Winamp such a cool program to use back in the day. foobar2000 is capable of playing back any format known to man, including, FLAC, APE, ISO images of DVD-A, SACD and many other exotic formats, yet isn't encumbered by all of the bloat that has turned iTunes into such a dog for anything serious like dealing with very large music libraries.
Even if Winamp was to be released today, it would have a very hard time catching up to the amount of extensibility and customization that plugins currently offer to foobar2000 and given its recent history would likely come as a freebie bundled with all sorts of toolbar installers and other sponsored crapware.
Incidentally, and for anyone running OS-X, WineBottler allows for foobar2000 to run very smoothly, and I assume it's the same for Linux. Which means that using such a solution would probably would also work for Winamp under OS-X...
The Llama, which had been ignoring it for years, suddenly turned around and whipped *its* ass. Winamp hasn't been seen or heard from since.
Clementine works for me - even has some visualisations, and plays FLAC files.
"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.
You mean it could be a fat, bloated piece of shit with a miserable, fucked-up design and a craptastic UI?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
In Linux I use:
- Clementine
- Sayonara Player
- mp3blaster
- plain old mplayer
In Windows:
- Clementine
- Foobar2000
In Android:
- Foobar2000
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."