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OP here. Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415 - I thought a short subjective history would be

OP here. Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415 - I thought a short subjective history would be useful and interesting. (Sources all linked inline.) I posted to my Facebook asking "does anyone still use this thing?" and a whole pile of people enthusiastically responded that they're still on Winamp 20 years later. Amazing the goodwill software can generate just by not sucking ...

noonespecial 10y ago
It did more than not suck. Lots of software sucked by just not being good at what it was supposed to do. That got ignored. Winamp radically not sucked by being basically the only piece of software in that space that didn't try to turn your computer and your love of music against you while you were using it. It doubled down on that pile of win by being highly competent at what it set out to do as well. That rightfully earned much love. A lesson a great many web service companies could learn from today.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  oh God, RealPlayer. I'd suppressed the memories. That said, Real's open-source version, Helix Media Player, was not awful (and didn't have the same tentacular behaviour).
  - dethswatch 10y ago
    Remember why they made is virtually impossible to download directly from their side, for reasons I can't recall? That was awesome.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Winamp is basically what a music player by the people behind http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/ would be.
mudetroit 10y ago
Funny little Winamp anecdote. We were going to be reinstalling Windows on a box, 17 or so years ago. (Now remembering the days of reinstalling the OS as just a routine action.) anyhow, before we did we decided to see what would happen if we just deleted the entire registry. The only application that continued to run was Winamp. Deleting the registry even broke some graphic components so it looked awful, but it just kept working.
scholia 10y ago
Nice story. And yes, I still have WinAMP, even if I don't use it much... Picky point: Apple opened the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003. The iPod came first.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Ah! Will add that :-)

noonespecial 10y ago

It did more than not suck. Lots of software sucked by just not being good at what it was supposed to do. That got ignored. Winamp radically not sucked by being basically the only piece of software in that space that didn't try to turn your computer and your love of music against you while you were using it. It doubled down on that pile of win by being highly competent at what it set out to do as well. That rightfully earned much love. A lesson a great many web service companies could learn from today.

davidgerard 10y ago
oh God, RealPlayer. I'd suppressed the memories. That said, Real's open-source version, Helix Media Player, was not awful (and didn't have the same tentacular behaviour).
- dethswatch 10y ago
  Remember why they made is virtually impossible to download directly from their side, for reasons I can't recall? That was awesome.
Asooka 10y ago
Winamp is basically what a music player by the people behind http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/ would be.

mudetroit 10y ago

Funny little Winamp anecdote. We were going to be reinstalling Windows on a box, 17 or so years ago. (Now remembering the days of reinstalling the OS as just a routine action.) anyhow, before we did we decided to see what would happen if we just deleted the entire registry. The only application that continued to run was Winamp. Deleting the registry even broke some graphic components so it looked awful, but it just kept working.

scholia 10y ago

Nice story. And yes, I still have WinAMP, even if I don't use it much... Picky point: Apple opened the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003. The iPod came first.

davidgerard 10y ago
Ah! Will add that :-)