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Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
- crb 9y agoWhat's going on at Ars Technica? Between this (a straight-up repeat from 2012 with no obvious reason to bring it back now), and reblogging Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian articles from the same time frame (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-... and http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/ http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/), have they cut their budget for new writing?
- kartD 9y agoTheir comment section since last year has devolved into Reddit style one-liners (especially political articles). The articles are really average these days. The one I'm really worried about is Anandtech, the articles are still excellent but they're so understaffed(A10 chip deep dive was canceled, behind on Mac reviews)
- sureste 9y agoYes. Ars Technica has changed. I do find their articles are not as good as they used to be. Although, articles from Peter Bright and Kyle Orland are still high quality. I like their occasional (weekly?) articles on board games. I do not like their movies/series articles that much. Mixed bag on their Cars Technica stuff. However, I find there's too many articles which are only tangentially related to tech or science. Example: the story of the woman that shot her boyfriend while recording a video for their Youtube channel. Your observation about their comment section is spot on. Comments beyond page 1 are buried.
- MadSax 9y agoArs is far too political I think and they're very lopsided.
- internet2000 9y agoIt's Independence Day weekend. They're giving the writers a break, while republishing old stuff to keep the content flowing.
- BoorishBears 9y ago>As many of us are busy crafting the perfect playlist for grilling outdoors, most likely such labor is happening on a modern streaming service or within iTunes. But during the last 15 years or so, that wasn't always the case. Today, we resurface our look at the greatest MP3 player that was—Winamp. This piece originally ran on June 24, 2012 (and Winamp finally called it quits in November 2013).
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- whatever_dude 9y agoThey probably spent too much in two failed redesigns.
- logfromblammo 9y agoDon't let the byline fool you, this is a rerun from [2012].
- qarioz 9y agoIt's simple. They sold themselves to AOL.
- w4rh4wk5 9y agoCan't people just move on and use AIMP?
- pnopnopno 9y agoOr xmplay. From the guys who made BASS
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- racl101 9y agoFun fact: the catchphrase "Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass!" was inspired by Wesley Willis.
- sailfast 9y agoRIP. A true visionary in the vocal vamp arena and a gem of Chicago's North Side sidewalk synthesizer music scene.
- devindotcom 9y agoI still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it is no longer possible to run on Windows, probably.
- pbuzbee 9y agoI'm in the same boat. I worry, though, that the move to streaming means that the days of controlling my own music library are numbered.
- NTripleOne 9y agoHow? Streaming is not mandatory and I don't see physical media saying goodbye any time soon, if at all. People are gonna want collections - be it physical or digital - because that's what humans are like. If the music industry ever switched to streaming only, there'd be a MASSIVE decline in the industry.
- ZeWaren 9y agoSame here. I wish it was open sourced. That way we could fix the bugs and make sure it runs on newer operating systems.
- bb88 9y agoI stopped using it because it had a slow memory leak. I monitored the process in windows and it grew 4kb every second or so. But yeah... fun times.
- bb88 9y agopirated != space shifting.
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- coldtea 9y agoOn the Mac, if you long for a Winamp-style player, try Vox.
- behnamoh 9y agoVox has been a great music player with constant updates over the months. I don't know what other music players would satisfy my need on OSX.
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- FussyZeus 9y agoSo basically, a corporation bought a company they had no idea how to run, ran it into the ground pursuing monetization that worked elsewhere (kind of). This sounds like every acquisition between 97 and 05. I wonder how many great products were destroyed by the big corporations attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole, and failing every time?
- anindha 9y ago“When you think about what AOL had in early 2000,” he told Ars, “the only thing that they were missing that [would be] essential to today’s media system is a hardware device. They had the number one software for playing [in Winamp], and in theory, although not in practice, the [Time Warner] content library that could have been a pioneer in streaming. And a radio service. It had all the elements. AOL could have been Spotify, it could have been Pandora.” Winamp was one of my favorite programs. It was really fast, took very little memory and was really easy to use.
- cyberjunkie 9y agoFoobar is a better player today, but Winamp was so much fun till 2.xx. They had colour and great interfaces. They were the rock stars at the time of boring sotware UI. Then Winamp 3 and then 5, and AOL and UuUUUgghhhgh! Nullsoft made some neat software, like NSIS... http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/ http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/ http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nscopy/ http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nscopy/ Does anyone remember Sonique?
- lnx01 9y agoI used Sonique for a bit but I went back to Winamp because Sonique was too sluggish on my PII233/64MB/3GB laptop.
- kubakuba 9y agoWinamp was the only app that kept working after windows crashed:)
- ionised 9y agoAs soon as I became aware of Foobar2000 WinAmp dropped off the radar completely for me.