Back in the day I used WinAMP (and X11amp) as a simple front end to my web-based Linux jukebox server that I had ripped all of my CDs on to. Those were the days of AudioGalaxy and Red Hat 6 and WindowMaker. It was a marvelous time, for a couple of years anyway.
Then WinAMP 3.0 happened, and it was buggy garbage.
Then I discovered what iTunes could do for me as far as organizing my music. It put WinAMP 3.0 in a new light, and I decided to give it another shot. Nope, still garbage. Then I tried the newly-released WMP 9. That was garbage too.
So I retired my Linux Jukebox and migrated to iTunes. Then I got an iPod. Then I got a PowerBook. Later I threw out my beige boxes, learned Cocoa and iOS development, and now that's what I do for a living.
So if WinAMP 3.0 wasn't such a mess then I might still be a Windows developer. Thanks, WinAMP, for inadvertently putting me on a new path.
Unfortunately, WinAmp so indoctrinated me into manually managing my mp3 folders that even after I switched to iTunes, it was still years until I finally let it manage the library structure for me.
I finally gave in and let iTunes start managing my files for me about 2 years ago - it's one of the best computing decisions I've ever made.
If you're still manually managing your music files' folder structure, I strongly encourage you to let iTunes start doing it. What you lose in fine-grained control (I never liked 'Artist/Album/songs' subfolders, I preferred a big list of 'Artist - Album/songs' folders) you make up in a much better listening experience.
This follows my rough transition, too. I was a die-hard Windows user. Winamp3 was terrible. Constantly cleaning up and organizing my MP3s was stupid and wasteful. iTunes, although "bloated", took care of all of that.
I then got an iPod. Then another one. Then an iMac/MacBook. Now I'm all iOS (iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pro/Airs, etc). Haven't used Windows since, oh, 2003 or 2004?
Really an interesting example of the halo effect at work. I bet a lot of folks scoffed at Steve Jobs when he described that very same process.
The developers defended Winamp 3.0 for a while, but eventually they realized that it sucked. The next version to come out was Winamp 5, which was supposed to be a combination of Winamp 2 and Winamp 3:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041204223306/http://www.winamp....
>“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,” Rob Lord"
Then why did you sell it for <$100MM?
This is nothing against the software. In fact, I still use WinAMP on my PCs (no lie).
But it annoys me when people pile on about what happens to their companies after they are acquired. If the legacy of your company is important to you (and no one says it has to be) why are you selling out? AOL isn't to blame for WinAMP going down hill, Nullsoft is for selling to them.
I'd have taken the money too, but I wouldn't sit around and say "Look what they did to my company!" We seem to get that a lot around here. Big Tech Corp always takes the blame, never the entrepreneur. Well, big companies ruining acquisitions is practically a meme...what did you expect?
I suspect that AOL made promises about how things would work and how they would be a multiplier for Nullsoft's efforts.
In an acquisition I was involved in, the acquirer made us all sorts of promises about how the new world order would be wonderful. They even made sure everyone was involved in training on their company "way" and values etc. Things didn't go that way - several of our people left early because they preferred small companies over large ones, and there was a need for a considerable amount of planning and integration with the acquirer. This left less manpower available for our products and things ended up worse off than if we had not been acquired. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a year before leaving. The products were quietly shelved a few years later with the acquirer effectively having burnt $300 million. The irony is that at he beginning they said they had made mistakes with previous acquisitions, had learned from it and wouldn't do it this time.
I used to work for Isilon - Still well promoted, but more than half the team I worked with has left in disgust since the acquisition. I made out like a bandit with my stock, though :)
I used to really like them, but when I recently tried restoring a folder after accidental deletion, I found files corrupted and misnamed. Nothing worse than a backup company that doesn't properly backup your files. Real shame, they used to be great.
For four kids in Arizona before the rise of internet communities giving advice about entrepreneurship, I think selling for 100M is a pretty reasonable decision.
But to complain about how AOL, in hindsight, could have built iTunes out of it is mildly annoying. It's a mentality I see sometimes entrepreneurial culture.
Taking it to the "next level" is hard, whatever that level happens to be. It's why you sell, rather than going it alone. If you think you can build iTunes (or Google, or Facebook, or Amazon or...) then build it. Don't sell to someone else and wonder why they didn't or couldn't.
Did Winamp ever have a built-in music store? I was under the impression that people basically stopped caring about Winamp mostly because the newer versions of Windows Media Player (7 and up) were "good enough" that mainstream users didn't see any need to go hunting down an alternative player.
Nobody really likes iTunes as a player, it's only notable because of the store and the device lock-in.
To be honest, iTunes a kind of bloated, it is a memory hog and it could be easier to use. But they have the store and the connection with the i-devices and are shipped with the macintoshes, and I believe that is their greatest feature.
I don't use the store (except a few promotional tracks I downloaded for free) and I don't own an iDevice (though I used to). I use iTunes because it's easy to use and offers features that make listening to music more enjoyable (smart playlists, etc).
Few? It was the prevalent player on Mac even before the iPod and the store. And with hundreds of millions of people using it, I don't hear many complaints.
Mainly stuff about how it "does too many things", as if I would want to juggle 4-5 different programs for my digital media library, store, etc...
Well, when public companies plan acquisitions and mergers, it's essentially always claimed that they're going to make the company they acquire more valuable. You spend $100,000,000 of your investors' money on Nullsoft because you think with you on their side, they'll be worth more than $100,000,000.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise when they become worth radically less due to mismanagement - not because mismanagement is unusual, but because mismanagement persists in spite of the large costs.
To be fair, it's only the aol acquisition that gave them potential access to the time warner music library and the ability to go negotiate deals with the other content owners. I think it's unlikely 4 guys in arizona making $100k/mo with no connections could have made that happen.
I think it's unlikely in this case. Content producers ask for enormous up fronts, and you'd either hire very good in house attorneys or pay Fenwick & West or Wilson Sonsini a ton of money. Not to mention the RIAA had just lost in June '99 their lawsuit against Diamond, manufacturer of the Rio mp3 player, [1] essentially challenging the legitimacy of the idea of mp3 players period. In 2000 the RIAA was in the midst of suing napster [2]; Rhapsody, the first legal music service that I'm aware of, wasn't released until 2001, and they didn't get anything but indie music until mid 2002 (not quite sure about this date). [3] I think it's safe to say it took both contacts and a ton of money, neither of which nullsoft had outside aol.
Is content sharing the only opportunity they had? Perhaps; thinking at that time was focused on making a content and tech juggernaut. I remember a Time cover (I think) talking about how AOL+Time Warner was a great deal.
Still, given a chance to figure stuff out on their own, I can only assume that they would have figure something out and even had a chance to implement it when not curtailed by AOL.
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who never liked Winamp. I always found it awful. Why do I need fancy skins for a media player?
I found Foobar2000 and never looked back. I know you can customize the hell out of Foobar...but I personally loved the default "giant list of searchable songs" format.
Winamp had tons of skins, but I only ever used two. One was the default, the other looked like an old wooden jukebox.
But that wasn't the reason to use Winamp. I started using it when it was basically the only game in town, but for a long time there was no reason to switch. Winamp had a few things going for it:
1. It was amazingly small, and consequently it was terrifically fast. The tiny window also gave you all the information and controls you needed, hogging preciously little of your 800x600 or 1024x768 display.
2. I could use it efficiently. My favorite feature (which I still miss sometimes) was you could bring up a box and start typing a song name and jump straight to playing it. I think it was the J key. When you got in your mind "Hey, I'd like to hear X", you could do it in a second or two.
3. The ecosystem was huge. There were thousands of skins (most terrible, some looked pretty amazing) and tons of plugins. People made visualizers, ways to control the software with external interfaces, all sorts of neat stuff.
It still amazes me how small Winamp was. I didn't like Winamp 3. I tried it for a while but it felt bloated and the jump feature was gone. Despite the near universal unhappiness, the developers defended version 3, making them seem out of touch. After a while I downloaded the previous release again (2.95?) and used it for years. I eventually moved to iTunes shortly before I got an iPod.
The last I heard about Winamp was a few years ago when Winamp 5 came out. My reaction then was amazement that it was still around. I'm amazed it's still around now.
"My favorite feature (which I still miss sometimes) was you could bring up a box and start typing a song name and jump straight to playing it. I think it was the J key."
Still exists. Don't know if it went away at some point between v2 and now, but it's definitely in the version I'm using (5.623).
I use Winamp every day, and while I too didn't like v3, I tried pretty much everything under the sun but kept coming back to Winamp. Recent versions are pretty good, while I seem to remember v2 as being better, when I think of it, it actually wasn't. For example the library feature didn't exist back then, and that's my main way of using it nowadays.
No substitute, but in iTunes on OS X, cmd+option+F with the song/artist/album you are looking for, and then, [Tab][Space] accomplishes the "Select a song / album / play list and the PLay" - it takes about a second as well (particularly as the [tab][space] gets ingrained in your finger DNA.)
With all that said - iTunes has grown into a bloated beast that I hope Apple gets around to fixing ASAP.
PS: If anybody knows how to remap something other than the awkward cmd+option F to "Search Music" - and for mega-bonus points, do so globally, I would be forever be in your debt - unfortunately "Search Music" doesn't appear to be one of Spark's (http://www.shadowlab.org/Software/spark.php) actions.
And aside: I do not find command-option-F that bad. I move my left thumb or middle finger to the left command, left ring finger to the left option key and press F with my left index finger.
Answering my own question - quicksilver apparently does 90% of what I want to do - (Search - doesn't show the full track list, but does show the first match from iTunes)
LaunchBar also searches iTunes fantastically well.
I switched from Quicksilver to LaunchBar a couple years ago and haven't looked back. One of my big issues with Alfred is that searching for songs requires you to switch into its "iTunes mode" or some such, instead of just being a quick Cmd-Space away.
cmd+opt+f has to be one of the most awkward keyboard shortcuts for functionality I've ever seen. It's a little better to utilize quicksilver to access itunes search on a better shortcut. Check out this article (http://macapper.com/2007/05/09/how-to-control-itunes-with-qu...)
You don't. Meaning you don't have to use them if you don't want them. I never used any theme for WinAMP. Although I know friends who did, and enjoyed more organic shapes for their mp3 player.
> I found Foobar2000 and never looked back.
Sounds like you were really late to the party, fb2k's very first public release came around 5 years after WinAMP's... and shortly after the Winamp 3 release which was universally panned.
Not only were Winamp 1 and 2 pretty much the only game in town, they were the only players which could 1. actually decode mp3s without skipping on a basic machine of the time and 2. offer the features now taken for granted like playlists and shuffle modes, as well as rapid metadata edition or efficient keyboard shortcut. It also provided a number of very good plugins.
Don't take me wrong, I'm currently an fb2k user, but fb2k was in many ways a response to the bungling of Winamp3 (Peter Pawlowski freelanced for NullSoft, and as noted earlier the first public release of fb2k shortly followed that of Winamp 3)
Yeah, I probably was pretty late to the party. I was still pretty young around that time, and my memory is hazy.
I know I used Winamp (some version) to play all my crappy Napster MP3s. I don't remember anything good or bad, just that I used it. And then at some point I remember hating Winamp...probably version 3 from the sounds of it. I think that's when I switched to FB2k
The good versions of Winamp were essentially a giant list of searchable songs with a lightweight skin. It was fast and lightweight and was able to handle thousands and thousands of songs in a single playlist. 10 years later and both iTunes and Clementine will choke if I add 5k songs to a playlist, yet Winamp 2 handled it without a problem.
The skinning feature was overrated, and I never understood why there were so many skins. In the years I hung on to Winamp 2, I may have changed the skin one time. Most people picked one and forgot about it.
I think I heard somewhere that Foobar2000 only exists because Winamp 3 messed everything up so badly. I don't know if that's true, but Wikipedia says Winamp3 was release in August 2002, and the first release of Foobar2000 was December 2002, so the dates would be correct.
I remember wa vs fb discussions about who was the lighter. At the time (i think it was around 2007), with a heavy medialibrary, Winamp5 ended using less ram than Foobar. Everyone was surprised.
Random jump, isn't winamp v3 a reaction to Sonique ?
Perhaps you were late to the Winamp game? According to the wiki, fb2k came out 5 years after winamp (and was done by a former nullsoft contractor). When winamp was in its prime there really wasn't anything else to compete with it.
At the time, there was nothing out there that competed with WinAmp--it was simple, fast, and pretty easy to use. It also had features like global hotkeys (before media keyboards were common, or before I had one anyway.) From what I remember, there was a giant-list-of-songs thing (I never used it, but I remember going to parties and there would be a computer sitting somewhere with the giant list of songs up.)
Anyway, Foobar came out 5 years after Winamp, and was in fact written by someone who worked for Nullsoft, so I wouldn't say they were competitors exactly, more like Winamp inspired Foobar.
I liked Winamp even though I hate app skins, generally.
fb2k is way too far into the "customize your own player" territory for me. I just don't care (much less have the time) to apply all sorts of tweaks to make it look even halfway decent. It's like the Linux mentality applied to Windows. And then the plugins break at minor version upgrades.
I generally used it because it had better format support than others I'd tried, but no, I hated it too. Tiny buttons, non-resizable interface, bleh. It's everything I hate about skeuomorphic interfaces.
I will always remember Winamp as providing one of the 'wow' moments in my tech life - the first time I downloaded an MP3 from a BBS and played it (only 4MB a song!)
Also remembered for one of the greatest release slogans after the mess with the later versions:
> "ALMOST AS NEW AS WINAMP 2 Nullsoft Winamp3" [1]
The greatest thing I remember from winamp was the visualisation plugin. It was a high performance graphics processor really. You could draw a couple of lines oscilloscope-style (plot based on volume in each band), throw in some blur, surface transformation, etc. and you could get amazing 3d-looking "textured" models moving around. It was an amazing framework for playing around with generated graphics. There were some great authors too who could make really nice visualisations effortlessly (or at least it looked like that) - I saw a "rendered" insides of menger sponge done in just a couple of lines of Dynamic Distance Modifier layer. Mind-blowing experience trying to figure out how it worked (like watching demo scene stuff).
I remember actually that once AVS got keyboard control, we tried to use it for a presentation in maths class. That's right - a music visualiser was easier to use for some high-school guys than other frameworks to do a 3d graphics presentation!
The original, lean Winamp was a fabulous piece of software--I can't think of many other products I've used that made me so happy, or seemed so much like magic. I still remember feeling awed by the idea that your computer could play, and Winamp was the face of the revolution, managing somehow to seem both nerdy and hip.
I stopped using Winamp a bit after the acquisition, so I really enjoyed the article - it filled in a lot of gaps for me. I guess now I know why it started sucking, eventually. Thanks to Frankel and the rest of the team for their hard work - what a cool time and place to be alive.
The most often overlooked, but technically best, music player of the
late 90's was Kojofol. It's a shame it was never released as open
source, but I'm fairly sure it couldn't be. The author had no license
for the patented audio compression codecs it used, and it even contained
an mostly unknown variant called "Astrid AAC". It's the last bit that
has always had me fascinated, and no, it's not AAC as you know it. It
was actually a variant of the VQF format with some MPEG-ish bits thrown
in there for fun. It always sounded just gorgeous compared to other
codecs at equivalent bit rates/sizes.
I have a copy of Kojofol around here somewhere along with some old
"Astrid AAC" formatted files. I've always thought about reverse engineering
it, but there's really no point when you'd just end up in a lawsuit.
"the company insisted on using its own indigenous billing system"
This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full framework? I mean, sure efficiency on paper (and only on paper as we see in this case), and probably a certain kind of clarity to the organization, but still. The right way to do this would be to have the support functions, such as billing be services that business units use if they think they are beneficial, and otherwise not. It would force support functions to be efficient in a whole different way, market driven, rather than "make executive happy"-driven.
> This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full framework?
There might be actual reasons of efficiency and using synergies and if you ever have to comply with regulations, you have one central unit to work on. But I think usually these decisions stem from either a positive will of organizing - because if you have two billing units or systems, things might get out of hand or control and having one just seems more neat and organized and people fear that chaos. Or they stem from nothing but cold, cut-neck, selfish political reasons. Evil-business-guy doesn't want another fish handling money in his pond because just imagine if that little fish turns out to be bigger than evil-business-guy's own billing system? On top of that, even smart-business-guy VERY likely gets a bonus on how much his billing system billed and how well it performed... you think he will let that bonus slip just because it MIGHT be the right thing for winamp? And as a unit helping to bring in the cash, billing typically has a lot of natural influence.
And of course we have a lot of 20/20 hindsight in this case.
This is a typical example of how difficult it can be to set really good, beneficial goals in an organization and how many natural conflicting interests there can be - and all that in a humongous giant like aol on top of that.
I understand that this "positive will of organizing" is related to legibility in the sense of James C. Scott (see e.g http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-calle...). But this failure mode is so common, that one would think that it would be in mergers and acquisitions textbooks already!
As you say incentives may play a role as well, but I think it is very common that large organisations never actually consider the option of not organizing something, in this case, letting Nullsoft do their billing whatever way they wanted at first, and integrating it later once it is stable enough to allow a complex development project.
To lead an organisation, one has to know what is happening in it - This has a complexity cost, which should be explicitly managed. New acquisitions would need to be treated differently, and full assimilations into the acquirer may not be a good result at all.
Here's an interview/behind-the-scenes piece that Rolling Stone did with the creators of WinAmp in 2004 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou8YIbH0j_3qSpepPy1VruHe... I thought it was funny how the Rolling Stone author comes across as a drooling fanboy :)
I must have missed something huge because I've been using Winamp for as long as I can remember and never ever seen a need to change. I don't see what's been undone. Missed opportunities to expand and become some big evil money scraper, sure, but what I see today is still a product that does what its supposed to do, and that's that.
Winamp is a great start up success story that's for sure. Homegrown, self taught developer learns Windows programming just because he wants to play mp3 files. Amazing success follows. Three cheers to Justin for that.
All I can say is winamp is open on my computer playing my music as I write this. Are there really other players out there that do a better job? Seems like a lot of people use iTunes but I've always found it to be a very slow media player. But maybe things have changed I need to reevaluate the current offerings?
I find Quod Libet to be my tool of choice, now. The query language is a bit ridiculous, but Mutagen is great for cleaning up crappy tags from my mp3 purchases. Despite being a PyGTK app, it has been fairly responsive and snappy despite my ridiculous media-hoarding habits.
Same. Winamp is the only player I use. The feature that sets it apart: I set a playlist, and _the playlist stays around_ until I change it, no need to explicitly save anything and it survives restarts. WMP and iTunes always forget what you were playing across sessions, at least the last time I tried them.
I use MPD. It's really lightweight, have a simple and straightforward concept of playlists and I can use the standard *nix tools to mutate and create playlists.
For years it was the only player that could also handle digital tracker (.mod, .s3m, .xm, .it, etc.) files more or less correctly. In those days, downloading a 100k .mod file over my dial-up or a 5MB mp3 was a big deal and being able to find lots of cheap music that was also light on the bandwidth was invaluable.
A key part of a lot of these pygtk players is that they rely on gstreamer to do the heavy lifting. Organizing a pipeline of "this source, this format, that sink" is not a performance problem -- it's a plumbing task. :)
well, it's not just the "plumbing" thing. I still have to worry about animation, loading the application, playlists, etc.
I understand Python could be a good choice and, yes, I agree it would be "easier". But jeez you know.. I just want to use C damn it. I want complete control over the memory. WHY CAN'T I JUST USE C?!! haha
Back around 2000 I took an old full-tower PC I had laying around and built a MP3 jukebox for my 1993 Volkswagen Fox. It ran Winamp with a plugin for a X10 Mouse Remote. I had a power inverter in the glove box and a fancy new stereo that had a 1/8" jack on the front. With a few bungee cords I secured the tower in the truck and the PC would boot every-time the car started. I skipped school for two days to build it. Without Winamp, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it. Kind of crazy that I can now hop in my car and play pretty much whatever I want using my iPhone & Bluetooth.
Is there any other music player with a media library organizer as excellent as Winamp's? I don't mean that contentiously, but rather I just haven't enjoyed any other. Enter text into the search box, and it will filter simply massive playlists as you type. The instant feedback is great in filtering, especially if I forgot what an album was called but knew some other esoteric detail.
But I don't use it as a Swiss-Army chainsaw anymore. I just use it for listening to music in Windows. It's pretty good at that. (And version 5 isn't that bad - it's just version 2 plus 3 after all!)
As other people have pointed out here, foobar2000 pretty much embodies the feel people had about Winamp in 2000. Though there's some large philosophical differences, like the total lack of skinning, and a much better API.
I still use it as well. Never really had the need to change since its debut !
One thing I've always done is having a video player AND a music player. I don't like launching a video that mess up my playlist. I pause my music, watch video and resume audio afterward.
Back then, before WinAMP, I think the only player was the "official" Fraunhofer Institut player, which was very basic. It was a time where CPU consumption mattered, when encoding a mp3 would take up to an hour :)
I like the Media Library coupled with the playlist. I like the Bento Skin. I like controlling it from the taskbar. I like that it plays EVERY format out there. I doesn't come with stupid "sound enhancement" settings by default.
I listen to Shoutcast radios at work.
That said, there is annoying bugs that have not been fixed for ages, which is never a good sign for a software :
- notification suddenly not showing and you have to refresh the skin (F5)
- the media library artist list messed up and when you click one, another one is eventually displayed (some kind of sort with artists' name beginning with "The" I think).
--
In 2008 we "worked" with AOL to have Shoutcast radios in a tablet (pre-iPad era). They were a pain in the ass just to display the Shoutcast logo, while absolutely not helpful in the technical side.
--
And Justin Frankel develops Reaper these days, a DAW that I happily bought.
That was a shame. I'm still using Winamp 2.81 (from 2002, 10 years ago). As long as it continues to work on Windows, I'll never let it go. Never could get used to the later versions.
Yeah, same here. Used it everyday from the late 90s until I moved to Spotify (and then not at all when I moved to Macs last year).
The classic player was/is such a wonderfully designed piece of software. Just minimise it and stick it to the top of the screen. Uncomplicated, unobtrusive.
2.95 here, released Jun 2003. That's one lasting piece of software, I can't readily think of any non-system software that is this old and still perfectly usable.
Winamp 3, as an application, got it all right. Software developers even today struggle to get applications to be so usable.
Dead simple interface
Super fast start up
Super fast search
Easy playlist creation and management
Simple keyboard shortcuts
Simple configuration
Huge library of plugins
Zero distractions
Stable
I still miss winamp. To this day there hasn't been another media player that just got completely out of my way and let me listen to music.
It sounds like you are describing Winamp 2. As I recall (and the article seems to confirm) Winamp 3 added no useful features while killing stability and speed. I do remember liking winamp 5 (there was no 4) though.
WinAMP like so many projects ultimately needs a steroid shot. It was never supposed to be an iTunes. But it was supposed to be the go-to player for Windows Users. It's a shame it's just stifled. AOL should open source it.
The problem is most of us think Winamp doesn't even exist anymore.
Couple of days back, a close relative of mine bought a used laptop from his friend. I and my cousin generally do technical stuff like OS installation for most of my family members. While browsing through the installed software we noticed Winamp, And we were like 'Does Winamp even exist anymore'!!! And it just came out spontaneously out of our mouths.
Winamp isn't in trouble, it is just not relevant anymore.
Weirdly, I used Winamp from '97 all the way through 2008. I don't remember whether it was v2 or v3 but I was happy with it and never tried anything else. I used VLC only for videos, and switched to MPC(-HomeCinema) later. I heard inklings about the iTunes revolution in the US but I had no iPod nor any need to use iTunes. It was only when I switched to a new desktop PC that I decided to try another music player for fun, which was foobar2000. I like fb2k, but still don't find it as subjectively nice as Winamp was - perhaps because of the default look. (I only use fb2k now, though.)
"The llama's ass" will always remain with me, as a vivid and irreverent memento of the first surging waves of the mass Internet crashing upon the shore of my community. Downloading and swapping MP3s in the early days, from websites and via IRC, before AudioGalaxy and Napster...those were exciting times. Thank you for the memories, Winamp.
For a while AOL support winamp pretty well. I remember watching hundreds of hours of streaming TV (and streaming radio) over Shoutcast and in2tv when AOL was trying to become a media company.
Now that all seems to be dead...fortunately some of it live on...VLC supports shoutcast TV and there are still dozens of stations still broadcasting.
This article brought back some great memories for me.
As a result of reading this, I also looked around for more history on Winamp and enjoyed the post on oldversion [1] that walks through the build history all the way from the DOS version, and a trip to the waybacktime machine [2] to learn about the Fraunhofer winplay3, the only real predecessor to Winamp (packaged with pirated material as a player in the 90's) and now something Fraunhofer wants to deny existed.
Used to love winamp, it was the only think used to play media. Until it got so bloated. Imagine it had a simple, clean interface and loaded lightning fast. I would never use anything else.
I think it's fair to say that, between VLC and Apple, Winamp still might not have made it if AOL hadn't been incompetent. But AOL was and it does rather boil down to their fault.
I still use it as well. I didn't realise it was something people laughed at - WMP takes up too much screen estate, iTunes has far too much bloat, and I don't need a music player with the complexity and learning curve of emacs.
"iTunes has far too much bloat" - this is exactly why I stil have WinAmp installed. I use iTunes for organizing my music, downloading podcasts, syncing with my iPod, etc. But I also record my own MP3s - songs, voice memos, etc - and opening them in iTunes is annoying. It's slow, and it immediately adds them to my library, which I don't want.
If I double-click an MP3, it opens immediately in WinAmp. For most anything else, I use iTunes.
To be honest, I don't know what else people are using. It's one of the places I've had to do the least research in software. WinAMP has been a stalwart for over a decade.
To me Winamp was always more of an accessory to Napster than anything else. Don't get me wrong, it was a solid program -- but it was really not much more of a utility through my eyes. On the other hand Napster really stands out in my mind as something revolutionary (ethics aside).
I still use Winamp 2.97. Anything beyond that I wouldn't really classify as good software. I think Justin Frankel was learning C++ at the time and tried to bite off a bit more than he could chew. This was just what I read off their own tech forums and in IRC.
Winamp 3 was the only thing I missed about windows. The visualizer plugins and skins still pass anything available now.
Had no idea there was a mac version, so I tried downloading it. Mac version plays mp3, no radio, visualizers, or plugins.
Nice read to make you remember the good 'ole days of MP3 ripping when it actually took some work. I'm not sure if Winamp could have ever reach iTunes level but it was a major piece of software in the 90s. Nostalgia!
Winamp was great back in the day, suffered with iTunes for a while and now have deleted all my mp3s and living solely with a Spotify premium account. But I loved those skins on winamp!
I still haven't found a solution better than winamp with advanced crossfading output (which was last updated in 2002) to DJ a party... I usually bust out my 5-year old PC because nothing beats the crossfader of winamp (coupled with the awesome keyboard shortcuts - the ability to search for anything in the ID3 tags and enqueue the song via keyboard is so useful for a DJ)
Anyone have a better solution?
Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp... It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.
Then WinAMP 3.0 happened, and it was buggy garbage.
Then I discovered what iTunes could do for me as far as organizing my music. It put WinAMP 3.0 in a new light, and I decided to give it another shot. Nope, still garbage. Then I tried the newly-released WMP 9. That was garbage too.
So I retired my Linux Jukebox and migrated to iTunes. Then I got an iPod. Then I got a PowerBook. Later I threw out my beige boxes, learned Cocoa and iOS development, and now that's what I do for a living.
So if WinAMP 3.0 wasn't such a mess then I might still be a Windows developer. Thanks, WinAMP, for inadvertently putting me on a new path.