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Winamp Media Player To Return as a Platform-Agnostic Audio Mobile App Next Year; Desktop Application Receives an Update (techcrunch.com)
The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic audio mobile app that brings together all your music, podcasts, and streaming services to a single location. From a report: It's an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it's still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community -- and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well. For those who don't remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say it's long in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So it's with pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way.
"There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience," said Alexandre Saboundjan, CEO of Radionomy, the company that bought Winamp (or what remained of it) in 2014. "You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built. People want one single experience," he concluded. "I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. And we want people to have it on every device."
"There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience," said Alexandre Saboundjan, CEO of Radionomy, the company that bought Winamp (or what remained of it) in 2014. "You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built. People want one single experience," he concluded. "I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. And we want people to have it on every device."
Anybody who wants a simple lightweight music player that just works and not a bloated "music library manager" one.
...it's going to be 2.1 gig d/l, require a credit card to sign in (we will never charge you, ever!), and gather every single personal data point resident on your system.
And still won't perform the basic function of playing mp3s as well as 2013 version.
-Styopa
But I have foobar2000.
Audacious, a descendant of XMMS (which was a clone of Winamp), works wonderfully. Its "Winamp Classic Interface" looks exactly like Winamp and even (iirc) supports Winamp skins.
That said, I do miss the old (original) Whitecap visualization (one of the very few in which you could really see the music in what was still a visually stunning display), which only works on Winamp on Windows. (...not that Winamp's return would allow me to run this again.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
"People want one single experience."
A lot of software has gone down to tubes because of this idea. People don't want one single experience. They want different experiences for different circumstances. They want software with features optimized for how they listen to music, how they listen to streaming radio and how they listen to podcasts. Combining them into one app is both unnecessary and creates undesirable side effects.
The same thing happened with social media apps tried to be the be-all and end-all of all media, when users want to keep things nice and compartmentalized.
Except, Winamp is ALREADY this. Winamp has an extensive plugin system. It can already play podcasts. It CREATED internet radio through Shoutcast. Other plugins are available for other data sources too... I know this, because I remember writing them and publishing them myself.
I'm still using Winamp 2.95 for music, and there's nothing that needs to be updated about it. It plays music, has a playlist, volume control. There's also a "browser" which thankfully can be turned off. I suspect this new version will have even more amazing shiny new features that need to be turned off, so basically, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Winamp never went anywhere. Unlike most modern software, it didn't require to check in over the Internet to work, so it still works just fine today. I've been happily using Winamp for a few decades, and hopefully, I'll continue to use it for the foreseeable future. The last version is version 5.666, and it was released as a final "thank you, goodbye" with *all* of the "pro" (formerly paid) features, and none of the crapware. I use it for playing all of my media, for ripping and burning CD's, and all sorts of neat stuff.
Sometimes, software works as intended, with no problems, and simply doesn't need to be "upgraded" any more. I think this is one of those cases.
I don't respond to AC's.
This is why myself and a ton of the other people from the plugin community jumped ship over to foobar2000. fb2k is developed by the guy who wrote the MP3 decoder for Winamp, but had issues with the audio processing pipeline of Winamp degrading audio quality. Disputes happened. He left. Built fb2k. And the rest is history! It is by far the cleanest, lightest music player available for desktop now. Multiple tabbed playlists are awesome. My largest playlist has ~16k tracks in it, and supports pretty much real-time text searching. And yup, it supports audio codec "components" as they call them to extend it with more file support or other functionality.