8 ms·
Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
- jlkuester7 6y agoWinamp definitely had its appeal in the "small but packed with features" category, but it always seemed to lack polish. These days my go-to music player on Windows is https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine-windows https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine-windows It is open source, super clean and polished. At 33mb it is not quite as compact as Winamp, but not bad for today's standards....
- dang 6y agoSee also: 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689280 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616323 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154421
- archived22 6y agoHuge fan of Winamp. Damn. How many good product died or stagnated, because of stupid politics.
- addicted 6y agoWhat did politics have to do with the creation of Winamp 3?
- StavrosK 6y agoI contend that Winamp is the best MP3 player to have ever existed. Nothing comes close to its speed, usability or extensibility, even 20 years later. Foobar fans may disagree, but I stand my ground.
- Y-bar 6y agoSoo many good memories with Winamp! But I always had a few major gripes with it: - The tiny interface was hard to navigate. - The queue was ephemeral and much too easy to clear. Any time there were more than one person controlling the music someone would by accident clear out all selected songs when all whey wanted to do was add their selection to the queue. With no way to restore it. My personal vote is iTunes 4.5 with Winamp 2 a close second.
- kodisha 6y agoTiny interface was quite nice, and not that small, considering it was built during the age of 800x600 or 1024x720 resolutions.
- Y-bar 6y agoYes, most of us had CRT:s back then. But it was still too small. Someone at my uni made a better skin to solve the problem (whose name and skin I have lost since).
- joombaga 6y agoYou can change the double click action to "enqueue item" instead of "replace queue". You can also use the "Playlist Undo" extension.
- modzu 6y agofor windows yes it's still true!! but in that 20 years I've also moved on from windows: nothing comes close on macos and on Linux I've been using audacious which i must say does sound amazing. lack of cross platform options inspired me to start reAMP: https://github.com/conceptualspace/reAMP https://github.com/conceptualspace/reAMP it's still very much an experiment but the end goal is an open source player made with the same love of music that inspired the original winamp. some of the features im working on: - smart shuffle algorithm: no repeats until playlist exhausted; randomized between artists so artists with many songs do not monopolize the playlist - studio quality audio analysis (VU meter, oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, full track waveform, displays for bitrate, samplerate, channels, format, encoder) - controls to loop, change tempo - remote control via mobile with queuing and adding youtube URLs ('party mode') - logarithmic volume control
- magicalhippo 6y agoThat looks great! I settled for foobar2000 after giving up on Winamp not long ago, but one thing I sorely miss is cue file support. That is, being able to add a cue file that points to a flac/mp3 file and have the songs show up in the playlist. Though one thing from foobar2000 that I'd miss is Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP plugin, as I listen to music mostly via headphones. Does reAMP have something similar?
- ubercow13 6y agocue files definitely work fine in foobar2000. What doesn't work? You can even edit cue sheets as if they were normal tagged single-track files. There is also this plugin that makes them behave a bit more nicely: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=117167.0 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=117167.0
- magicalhippo 6y agoOh lol. I've got the "register supported formats on startup", yet it hasn't registered cue files. So I just assumed it didn't support them... Well then, cheers!
- codeulike 6y agoShoutout for Foobar, which now installs from the Windows Store, so no faffing about with installers or finding the right download button that isn't an advert pretending to be a download button
- johnchristopher 6y ago> Foobar fans may disagree, but I stand my ground. Why do you feel the need to taunt ?
- balfirevic 6y agoIt sounded more like a hat tip to the only other player that could possibly compete (Foobar user here).
- StavrosK 6y agoYep, that's how I meant it.
- wl 6y agoSoundJam MP was better. Mac only, though. It lives on in a heavily bastardized form as iTunes and now the macOS Music app.
- geerlingguy 6y agoYeah; soundjam was like a slightly refined version of WinAmp, still had skins and visualizations, but it was limited to Mac only. iTunes original few SoundJam-based versions weren’t too bad, it started getting messy as tons of features besides music playback were jammed in.
- Sharlin 6y agoAnd it played everything! These days I’m not even sure what program to install if I want to listen to, say, tracker modules.
- kweks 6y agoTry XMPlay on for size. Plays absolutely everything (zipped iso of chiptunes? No problem! FLAC? Of course. Obscure forgotten video game format ? Definitely.) Skinnable, lightweight, portable.. free. Been my player for years.
- mycall 6y agoI wish source music was still a thing. MP3 killed the idea.
- mlok 6y agoWhen I was on Windows in the early 2000 I loved Coolplayer for the same reasons. (And cherry on top : no install needed ! You could ship its exe along with the mp3 files) http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/ http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
- squarefoot 6y agoI use Qmmp on Linux (ported on Windows too). Fast, light, extensiblle through plugins, skinnable and so far pretty close to what Winamp was in the old days. https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index.php https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index.php
- dleslie 6y agoOne of the ex-developers is running the Winamp Community Update Project, or WACUP. It's got new features, bugfixes and so forth. I use this all the time. It sits in a tiny corner of my unscaled 4k display. https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/
- astronautjones 6y agobless WACUP. It runs perfectly
- ubercow13 6y agoThank you for this! I didn't know this existed
- samdung 6y agoI remember a dorm mate in college used to run multiple instances of Winamp to do some rookie DJ mixes in parties.
- 6c696e7578 6y agoThat's a bit easier these days with pulse audio and setting each qmmp to a different sound output device. Those were the days though.
- crtasm 6y agoDid they experiment with the pitch adjust plugin that let you go +/- 50% ... but only in 1% steps? I used to have fun with that. A friend recently played a set at an online party using two instances of VLC, went down great!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sp332 6y agoThe Internet Archive has a Winamp skins collection. https://archive.org/details/winampskins https://archive.org/details/winampskins If you open the page for a skin and click the llama way up in the right corner, it will apply the skin to the music player site-wide.
- richbradshaw 6y agoSort of NSFW, blurred images with click throughs, but NSFW text in some skin names.
- dls2016 6y agoSame people are now making Reaper DAW which is the best DAW out there for $60 (and probably better than some more expensive DAWs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel
- d0m 6y agoFrom my memory as a kid.. I remember winamp was amazing. I had many skins and it was all beautifully hooked up in my IRC client. And then, at some points, the UX completely changed. It also started being spammy. Almost like the project was sold to some incompetent people. Then I felt like it lost its magic. It also happened to be the time when streaming from Napster became possible and I completely switched to it.. and then to grooveshark/deezer/all-the-others. Winamp could have been Spotify but went in a completely different directions. Saying that may sound crazy, but that's what Netflix did. It was selling/renting dvd, saw streaming coming and did a full 180.
- superasn 6y ago> Winamp could have been Spotify but went in a completely different directions Yes I remember that the first time I used streaming music it was shoutcast. It was really fantastic with hundreds of different music channels and podcasts. One radio station I was particularly fond off was called Atlantic sound factory. They had a goldmine on their hands and it's a shame they let it all go to waste.
- doublerabbit 6y agoAnd video streaming too. It was uncommon but they had the nsv (nullsoft video) format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft_Streaming_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft_Streaming_Video
- ukyrgf 6y agoYep, "podcast" still feels like an Apple-branded version of shoutcasts to me, 15 years later.
- dleslie 6y agoIceCast still exists. I've been a di.fm subscriber for a looooooong time now. :)
- llampx 6y agoI think Netflix was geared for streaming from the start, and renting DVDs by mail was only their strategy to get off the ground.
- jp0d 6y agoI remember trying to play it on Linux using Wine back in 2004/05! I don't remember if I succeeded! It was the only one thing that I missed from the Windows world.
- 6c696e7578 6y agoThere /was/ x11amp. That became XMMS. There's qmmp though if you want a blast from the past.
- jp0d 6y agoYou're right. I did use it. Thanks for the reminding. Then a bunch of others from other open source projects. I've been mostly using Macs in the recent years.
- 6c696e7578 6y agoThey should (I've not looked) build on Macs - honestly I don't know what sound system a Mac uses. There's always 'elementaryOS' if you like that style of interface.
- jp0d 6y agoI don't think it works on Macs. Besides, these days I listen to music only while driving or on trains! I've given up on Linux due to many reasons, mostly because I need a reliable Laptop with a UNIX based OS where all my dev tools work! I recently downloaded Elementary OS for one of my old Thinkpads. I will give it a go then. Thanks. :)
- remote_phone 6y agoThe reason why Winamp died wasn’t because of anything it did, but because more and more people moved to their phones for playing music. And ultimately mp3s lost out to streaming. That’s the only reason why Winamp died. It’s just a relic of the past, but in its day it was amazing. As an old guy I still use it. Asking a 10 year old to use Winamp to play an mp3 would be like asking a 20 year old to figure out how to use a rotary phone now.
- kazinator 6y ago> more and more people moved to their phones for playing music. And ultimately mp3s lost out to streaming. I listen to tunes with the Android version of Winamp. > Asking a 10 year old to use Winamp to play an mp3 You still need an application of some sort to play media. Are you saying that the pre-installed ones on mobile devices and desktop (e.g. Windows media player) are so vastly better than Winamp that Winamp looks like a rotary phone? > And ultimately mp3s lost out to streaming. I'm sorry, but that's not a well-considered statement. Albums are still a thing; people still collect music that they like. Streaming allows people who want to casually listen to music to use their device as one previously used a radio. (Speaking of which, streaming has not even killed radio yet.) A ten year old kid today can still understand that stream content won't always be there, and is inaccessible whenever you are out of mobile networking coverage, so you better capture your favorite material to your device.
- remote_phone 6y ago> Albums are still a thing; people still collect music that they like. Sorry but this is an ignorant statement about the current landscape. A tiny minority of people still buy mp3s or CDs. Most music these days are consumed via streaming. Just because you do it doesn’t mean that most other people do it. Even I still use Winamp and listen to mp3s but that doesn’t mean that most people still do.
- kazinator 6y ago> A tiny minority of people still buy mp3s or CDs* My comment doesn't have anything to do with buying. I haven't bought a CD in some 25 years myself. People still play content stored in their device.
- squarefoot 6y agoI don't know if it still runs on modern Windows versions, however I always put Winamp (later called Lite, ie the original without bloatware) on all Windows machines I installed until the day I abandoned Windows. The original Winamp was a wonderful piece of software that did the one thing everyone wanted it to do, and did it wonderfully; a lesson on how to write optimized software a lot of developers should learn from. Then they ruined it, but that's another story.
- GiorgioG 6y agoIt still runs just fine!
- k__ 6y agoWinamp was pretty nice until v3. Version 3 was pretty shitty. I think they used new tech to build it and also replaced the UI. Later they released v5, which was v2 UI + v3 tech, which was good again. At least that's how I remember it.
- stan_rogers 6y ago5 is still good, and it's still what I use. There are newer things that are shinier, but nothing that works nearly as well for an album listener.
- mycall 6y agoDo any of the skins help it work on hi-DPI screens? That is it's main drawback now for me.
- stan_rogers 6y agoWouldn't know. I have no use for hi-DPI screens. It's just extra processing for no real benefit. (In fact, there's a net negative for my primary computing activities, which mostly involve highly-magnified pixel pushing.)
- woranl 6y agoiTunes and iPod integration killed Winamp.
- at_a_remove 6y agoThis is like a post-mortem of watching high-ranking business people making very important business-y decisions braying loud business noises, brimming with confidence. It's like anything they see is shiny, they think, "How can I get thingy? How can I use thingy to be more business-y?" then later "Thingy is broken" and they wander off in search of another thingy. It's just so frustrating to watch Pakleds in three-piece suits (Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Samaritan Snare") asking if you can make us go. And the people responsible for the terrible decisions probably thought they did a great job, and then were paid as if they did a great job, despite somehow managing this thing into the ground.
- Quequau 6y agoThe main thing I remember about Winamp is how Nullsoft release that P2P thing and made corporate at AOL really angry, so they pulled it, in like a day or so. I also switched from Windows to MacOS just before that and transitioning from Winamp (where a lot of meta data for my collection was stored in the filesystem as directory hierarchy) to iTunes was sorta painful and trying.
- anon102010 6y agoWinamp was incredible - it even had a plugin for syncronized playback that I couldn't replicate easily. You could get 5 friends to all play at the same time - so fun. Then BOOM - ads everywhere, bundled installers, crazy redesign. I didn't know this history.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoWinamp was close to pure assembly coding, wasn't it? It's smoothness and performance at the time of couple-hundred-MHz CPUs was outstanding.