5 ms·
People forget that Winamp was instant on a 60Mhz machine with a spinning rust drive. It’s difficult to buy a computer that slow these days. Modern CPUs modulat
by corysama 5y ago
People forget that Winamp was instant on a 60Mhz machine with a spinning rust drive. It’s difficult to buy a computer that slow these days. Modern CPUs modulate their speeds by far more than that as part of their moment by moment power management!
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoRelated: when MacBooks switched to SSDs, the performance of my old spinning-disk MBP dropped noticeably basically overnight.
- Narishma 5y agoSame thing on Windows. It became incredibly slow on HDDs when SSDs started to become popular.
- cassepipe 5y agoHaving an Hdd running at 100% on Windows 8, slowing everything down, is actually what made me switch to Linux Mint. Never looked back.
- selfhoster11 5y agoWhen I first bought an SSD and noticed the crazy speed-up, my next thought was that developers will get used to it as the "new normal" and stop caring about IOPS which would slow down SSDs (ruining my blink-of-an-eye super-speed fun) and make HDDs near-unusable. Two to four years later, here we were on Windows, and to some extent, on Linux too.
- jdsully 5y agoThe amount of effort involved in making sure reads were sequential back in the HDD days was immense. It’s not surprising people dropped that as soon as possible.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoWinamp 2 was instant. Winamp 3 and 5 were slow.
- jayd16 5y agoWinamp didn't stream all music in existence over the internet. How is it really comparable?
- Firehawke 5y agoIt had Shoutcast.
- jayd16 5y agoWas Shoutcast all that fast? It didn't seem nearly as rock solid as the rest of winamp but I guess it could have been my internet at the time.
- goodpoint 5y agoYes, it was instant.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoYou could go to the shoutcast website, get the shoutcast links for the radios you were interested in, then make a playlist that could be dealt with just like any other playlist. And it was almost instant.
- kleiba 5y agoIt's comparable only on an abstract level - mostly because there's hardly anybody who really wants/needs "all music in existence over the internet", most people just want to "listen to music that I like". On that level, Winamp did the job just fine.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y agoIt really did not for me by that standard. I have access to orders of magnitude more music now that I know I like than I did during the Winamp days and I was a pretty early and savvy user back then so I had more access than a lot of people. If we're trading music player performance for the massive increase in availability I'll make that trade.