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Winamp source code leak
- MrGilbert 5y agoI'm afraid that, at one point in time, a DMCA takedown might backfire at the archive. I mean, it has been taken down on Github, but it's of course available at archive.org - it would hurt the internet as a whole if the archive needs to close it's doors. Hopefully that will never happen.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt depends on whether Github or Winamp can be arsed; given that it's been posted on HN now, they are probably on the trail now. Archive.org can't just ignore a DMCA takedown, that would threaten their safe haven status.
- gmueckl 5y agoWinamp at this point in time is just a trademark that ended up at a Belgian company. And I think they want to use it to launch a music streaming service. The rest of Nullsoft went down with AOL. I wonder which party would even have the legal rights to move against such a source code leak.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- garaetjjte 5y agoThey are claiming they have rights to the code too: "I am acting on behalf of AudioValley SA who currently owns the copyright to the Winamp code after a purchase from AOL."
- RF_Savage 5y agoI wonder what happened to NSIS, the NullSoft InstallSystem? Used it myself as a teen to have a professional looking installer for my software releases. I still occasionally see software with NSIS installers and Nullsoft copyright. So I wonder what entity is behind it now days.
- garaetjjte 5y agoNSIS is open source, seems to be maintained by the community.
- thedoctor_o 5y agoNSIS has nothing to do with the lot that own Winamp & it was a clearly defined "not part of the sale" as it has been OSS from early on around it's v1.0 iirc which was a long long time before Winamp was eventually sold. I still think they should be using their own forum with an archive of the NSIS sub-forum to ensure that there's a clear distinction between them & the lot that now own Winamp (as there's no benefit for them to be keeping that forum running other than a trickle of ad revenue) but that's down to those that lead NSIS to decide upon. -dro
- dmos62 5y agoWe should have infrastructure for sharing things like this without putting a centralized entity like archive.org in the crosshairs. Bittorrent comes to mind, but it could only be part of the solution.
- danlugo92 5y agohttps://gun.eco/ https://gun.eco/
- 0des 5y agoIPFS is perfect for this.
- dvdkon 5y agoAlmost, but since it publicly associates the files you share with your IP address, I don't see most interested people willing to use it in this context.
- 0des 5y agoPinning services exist, VPN's exist, also every other technology including torrents exposes your IP.
- soylentcola 5y agoTrue, but torrents et al make you a peer, so you're also distributing, not just saving a copy locally. At least that's how I've always understood it in terms of legal risk. But yeah, VPN has (so far) been enough for me to avoid being low hanging fruit when torrenting something I don't have a license to "distribute" while seeding.
- dmos62 5y agoTo be fair, most Bittorrent users have not had any legal issues (while downloading copyrighted stuff).
- haunter 5y agoI never get how Archive.org can get away with... everything? Like every single console game is there. Nintendo is very famous to take down ROM sites yet their full library is on Archive.org. And that's Nintendo only, all the PS1, PS2, PS3 games and the whole Xbox/360 catalog is there as well. It's crazy In some aspect Archive.org is better than some private torrent trackers
- kingcharles 5y agoarchive.org regularly removes things when they are alerted :(
- bt1a 5y agoSounds like we need an archive.org archive
- spicybright 5y agoI'm so happy they somehow keep going. I've found so much otherwise dead software there, esp. obscure windows 3.1 games I played growing up :)
- nicoburns 5y agoThere's plenty of precedent for archives. National libraries get a copy of everything published, and anybody is allowed to borrow and read from it for free. I think there is a recognition that preserving history is important.
- gibspaulding 5y agoI've been worrying about this as well. I recently found a Beetles discography on Archive.org even after TPB turned up almost nothing. It's great being able to find things, but It'd be a shame to loose all of the legitimate content because of getting associated with blatant piracy.
- Y_Y 5y agoMeatspace libraries often have a big collection of CDs too. This is part of our cultural heritage, and I think making it accesible in this form is a no-brainer. (By the way, maybe it was a typo, but the spelling is "Beatles". They were better at songwriting than puns.)
- kiallmacinnes 5y agoI'm not 100% sure of all the details, but archive.org has some exceptions[1] to the DMCA & thanks to California, it's officially considered a library - which again, I believe gives it some more leeway on the DMCA. [1]: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php https://archive.org/about/dmca.php
- toomuchtodo 5y agoIn the event a DMCA notice must be actioned, the content is no longer made available ("darked") but it remains archived for the future.
- rambojazz 5y agoUnfortunately the Archive link does not archive all the files in the repo.
- opless 5y agoDid you not check 'code -> download zip' ?
- Sosh101 5y agoDoesn't work
- fps_doug 5y agoDoes work
- echelon 5y agoSorry for bringing the thread completely off topic, but your username triggered a tinge of nostalgia for something I haven't seen referenced or thought of in a long while. Is your username a reference to the mid-2000s pre-youtube video series, "Pure Pwnage"? That's right before the Internet became dominated by platforms. EzBoard was taken over by phpBB, Invision, etc. Blogs. Sorry, I need to turn off the nostalgia. Fitting that this happens in a Winamp thread, though.
- smcl 5y agoI agree very era-appropriate username to be commenting on this story! I have distinct memories of fps_doug leaping around (crouch-jumping?) and screaming "I could dance all day! BOOM headshot!" (and the other guy doing "uber macro") in those videos though I couldn't for the life of me tell you what happened in any of them
- fps_doug 5y agoYes :) Not that I post very often/frequently, but that's the first time anyone ever asked about or referenced my username.
- dale_glass 5y agoWow, I think it's been more than a decade since I even thought about Winamp, let alone used it. It still seems to be free to download though? What is even the point of keeping the code closed?
- OneTimePetes 5y agoTrojans, Spyware and Miners. Oh my.
- EForEndeavour 5y agoNaive questions: - what do you mean by "miners" in this context? Malicious contributors sneaking crypto-mining logic into the codebase? - doesn't the concern about Trojans and spyware affect every other open-source project in existence? How have they been protecting against that, and why couldn't the Winamp maintainers take similar measures?
- RF_Savage 5y agoMore like precompiled binaries being distributed by malicious stuff added in. How will you know which winamp.exe is the legitimate one?
- dale_glass 5y agoCode signing has been a thing in Windows for a long time now. Besides that, just the usual "the official .exe is whatever you find at the official site" Downloading from random archive sites fortunately is a trend that went away.
- caddywompus 5y agoInterestingly enough, there has been a community project dedicated to keeping the last Winamp version alive (last version from the original creators), and it really great to use. https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/ It includes a skin that allows it to work on modern display resolutions. It's really interesting to see just how low-res screens were when it was in it's hey-day, given that they are nearly unusable on a 4k monitor. Edit: I was too young to remember the releases, but replies are indicating that version 5 was in fact, not the most popular :P
- tiffanyh 5y agoMy memory is fuzzy on this but didn’t most consider Winamp 2.x the best. Winamp 3.x was considered bloated. So to help rectify the problems of 3.x, Winamp release version 5.x (the best of 2 + 3). Though I recall many still used version 2.x even after the 5.x release. Question: so when you say folks are trying to keep the "last version" alive, which version are you referring too since later versions weren’t loved.
- dreamlayers 5y agoWinamp is highly modular. Most functionality is in plugins, and you could only install the plugins you want. For example you could exclude the media library, modern skins, and video playback. So, 5.x doesn't have to be bloated.
- caddywompus 5y agoI'm actually not too familiar with it, I was too young to use the original Winamp back when it was released, and can only remember playing around with the skins, along with RealPlayer on Win98 I'm guessing they went with version 5, since it looks like versions after that might have been a full rewrite?
- skeeter2020 5y agoIf you want a fun read that wastes a few hours, poke around the interwebs for the story of Justin Frankel and WinAmp. There's been some recent posts on HN about how "the Internet is played out". Not sure if I agree, but this guy definitely belongs in the mythos of web 1.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel
- manyellsea 5y agoDownload zip doesn't work for me, found a mirror here https://sizeofcat.ru/so.cl/1638195782/ https://sizeofcat.ru/so.cl/1638195782/
- timdorr 5y agoThis appears to work (for now): https://web.archive.org/web/20210418214109if_/https://codeload.github.com/CONIGUERO/winamp/zip/refs/heads/main https://web.archive.org/web/20210418214109if_/https://codelo...
- marcodiego 5y agoInteresting as a historic document. If someone is willing to port it to newer systems or compilers, also maybe of some value. I really don't see much value considering there are already reasonable good, lightweight (I think) and multi-platform (like qmmp) which offer support to winamp skins.
- fps_doug 5y agoIt's the same as the Opera Presto leak a few years ago. You cannot legally maintain or update, let alone distribute it. Back then you could find a few minor patches in Russian forums but that's about it. So even if there's people capable and willing to maintain it (which for a browser I think is an order of magnitude more work), there is no easy way to have a collaboration platform that also gives the project enough visibility, so motivation is pretty low.
- Y_Y 5y agoIs this legal obstacle true everywhere? If a company stops making a breakfast cereal permanently, then I can replicate it and sell my own. Why not a browser that Opera is never going to sell again?
- NoSorryCannot 5y agoCopyright law will generally cannot be applied to a breakfast cereal anywhere. Patents or trademarks may apply, however, but these work differently. Is it the same everywhere? No, but it is similar in a lot of places, due to political agreements and convergence.
- userbinator 5y agoThere's still plenty of that "true hacker" mentality (for lack of better term) in lesser-known and mostly non-English sites out there. Chinese is common, as is Russian, not surprisingly. I dare not disclose them because I know they'll get too much and unwanted attention, but look hard enough and you will find.
- thefourthchime 5y agoI nearly got a job with them back around 2001. At the time they were revamping their development group. I had written some plug-ins for Winamp so I familiar with the plug-in structure. It looks like the new lead developer wanted to rewrite everything. Using all kinds of object-oriented methodologies. The older code was all C based and very simple. I wasn’t fan of the new direction.
- Y_Y 5y ago> the new lead developer wanted to rewrite everything. Using all kinds of object-oriented methodologies. The older code was all C based and very simple. A tale as old as time.
- andrew_ 5y agoIs it bad that I start hearing the Aladdin (1992) soundtrack whenever I read that line?
- khedoros1 5y agoNot Beauty and the Beast?
- smolder 5y agoA whole new world, a new fantastic paradigm! No more structs, Or bad raw pointer luck, I will use the whole damn STL. A whooole neeeeww woooooorld!
- asveikau 5y agoA whole operator new world? (Apologies.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dkonofalski 5y agoYes, it is bad. You got the wrong movie. ;)
- 5040 5y agoWinamp was still my music player of choice until a little over a year ago when I finally made the switch to MusicBee.
- vvpan 5y agoMy hero. If I was not on Linux I feel like I'd be on the same boat. On Linux I use mocp which is a console-based directory-based player, so pretty much the same thing.
- tomrod 5y agoWeirdly, mocp always led to memory leaks for me on Lubuntu. These days I mostly listen to soma.fm (you can use mplayer for their feeds[0]) or youtube in browser [0] A small gist I am super proud of as I don't write much bash: https://gist.github.com/tomrod/0b5caceec1a10acfb134aefb5fd85b93 https://gist.github.com/tomrod/0b5caceec1a10acfb134aefb5fd85...
- zerr 5y agoWhat are the reasons to switch from Winamp to something else?
- Svperstar 5y agoI also switched to MusicBee. It has a very modern UI that "just works" as they say. Everything included out of the box no need to bother with plugins for me.
- bullox 5y agoIt really whips the llama's ass.
- johnsillings 5y agoMan, that audio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS_CWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS_CWM) makes me so nostalgic. Apparently it was a Wesley Willis reference, too, which just makes it 1000x better.
- WithinReason 5y agoFor those looking for a lightweight but powerful music player, Foobar2000 is a good choice!
- gorbachev 5y agoI've been quite liking musicbee. foobar2000 is definitely great as well, I just prefer musicbee's UI a bit more.
- bt1a 5y agoI'm going to second musicbee. It's really fast and the UI is very clean. I don't doubt that foobar can be customized to one's grandest desires - it's just that musicbee works well out of the box.
- geocrasher 5y agoI listened to my first MP3 ever (Creed's "Higher") in 1999 on Winamp. It really whipped the South American camelid's posterior. Dang. I'm old.
- IggleSniggle 5y agoAfter years of listening to Adlib MIDI soundtracks on the computer, I was absolutely blown away to be hearing “Yesterday” by the Beatles coming out of the speakers. I played that tiny little file (not a whole CD!) countless times on repeat. Just unbelievable that such a thing could be coming from a tiny (relatively) little file.
- geocrasher 5y agoYes, I remember feeling that awe as well. For giggles, I just went to YouTube and listened to "Higher" again, and man... that really took me back. Haven't listened to it in years. Still one of my favorite heavy metal songs of all time. I also remember being so thrilled to be able to store several MP3's on my 64mb Sharp Zaurus SL-5600.
- ficklepickle 5y agoWait, creed is metal? I always thought of it more like Christian rock. A good tune, all the same. A 64mb CF card in an RCA Lyra for me. Drop the bitrate to ~64kbps and you can jam most of an album on there :D
- IggleSniggle 5y agoI really don't think Creed qualifies as metal in 2021, but the metal influence is very clear imho. I vaguely recall that they walked a line with American Christendom, being a sort of "Christian crossover" band. I think it's kinda interesting how they made an aesthetic of "consistently singing out of tune" which I think helped them cement their status as more "metal" than "Christian" allowing them to attract from a wider variety of fan-base. Really it's kinda interesting the line they walked, in retrospect. --- Interestingly, I've started dropping bitrate a lot recently, because I like to keep my podcast content pre-loaded. Definitely feels like a throwback: "Gah, my audio content is up to 4gb, I need to either get my listen on, drop bitrate, or reduce my intake!" I wonder when I'll stop caring about how much space I have on my phone.
- tombert 5y agoHonest question, as someone who actually used Winamp back in ~2004: why would you want to use it now? I have some nostalgia for it, sure, but what exactly does it actually offer you that something like VLC doesn't? It seems like it plays my music and videos competently enough, and I don't know anyone who actually uses Shoutcast anymore. This isn't a passive aggressive dig or anything, I would actually like to know.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoWinamp has a plugin for Orchestra 80/85/90 files, which to the best of my knowledge, VLC does not. Wouldn't be surprised if this were the case for many 8-bit era music formats. The time period in which Winamp came to prominence was when there were still lots of people with a foot in the 90s (and 80s) without it necessarily being retro nostalgia.
- throwaway6977 5y agoMaybe it's just familiarity but I always come back for the active playlist features and IMO very good browse/search workflow. Literally never needs updated, until this leak at least...
- theandrewbailey 5y agoI use it because I never stopped using it. I love the classic gray on black modular UI (it looks like high end stereo equipment). Winamp has all the features I want, and nothing has come along that compelled me to stop using Winamp altogether. Since it's the same old Winamp, it's incredibly light and fast. I'll use Foobar2000 and VLC from time to time (Foobar's conversion and bulk tagging are great). I've tried using them full-time instead of Winamp, but they just don't feel right. EDIT: I love how there's an 'active playlist' of what's playing now, and additional saved playlists in the library, and can move/copy entries between them. It's probably accidental design of adding a library later, but I haven't found another player that shows multiple playlists side-by-side without customizing it into something else.
- rocky1138 5y agoIt's basically a perfect music player. Lightweight, fast, runs on every version of Windows 95+, great playlist manager, skins, and has extensive plugins which support any music file format. Why continue the search for perfection once it's been found?
- w4rh4wk5 5y agoNever understood why people didn't just migrate to AIMP.
- thedoctor_o 5y agoMaybe because not everyone likes how AIMP does what it does. Same for why there's been numerous other media players over the years - one solution doesn't work for everyone or we'd all just be using iTunes or VLC or WMP. Choice is good. -dro
- est 5y agoI still remembers all those crazy music visualizations. It was rarely seen these days. Someone should make a WebGL version.
- jpindar 5y agoI'm surprised other music software or streaming sites don't have visualizations.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoAlready done: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectM https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectM https://webamp.org/ https://webamp.org/
- jugg1es 5y agoIt was my best friend during my teenage hallucinogen phase
- astrange 5y agoIs there any literature on how to write those? 2D graphics is kind of obscure but designing/making those is even more obscure.
- jchw 5y agoI just can’t understand the point of the DMCA takedown here. This software is very dead and abandoned at this point, and the only thing bearing its name is vaporware that appears to be so distant from the original as to effectively not even compete with it. Of course, the copyright holders have every legal right to do so. But doesn’t it seem pointless? This codebase probably has more historical interest than commercial by now. Am I missing something?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- omega3 5y agoNot a lawyer but I guess it relates to a possibility of a loss of a trademark by failure to police.
- jchw 5y agoDMCA is a copyright claim, not trademark. Also, the idea that a single instance of failing to enforce a mark would constitute trademark abandonment is disputed[1]. It certainly seems far-fetched given the general bias laws have towards the rights of corporations, not to mention extremely convenient for legal teams. [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not-require-companies-tirelessly-censor-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
- tediousdemise 5y agoSeems pretty pointless to me, too. I'll make the assumption that the founders have zero financial interest in Winamp. What's the point of exerting IP rights if you have nothing to gain financially... is it pride? A latent desire to stagnate innovation? Making other peoples' lives harder because yours was too? Who knows?
- leros 5y agoIt's very likely about the brand and trademarks. The WinAmp software is dead, but the brand is alive and there is a company trying to build something under it.
- jugg1es 5y agoWinamp was my best friend during my teenage hallucinogen experimentation phase.
- fit2rule 5y agoPretty sure I've got this in my GH stars.
- ComodoHacker 5y agoIf you want Winamp-like experience, try AIMP[0]. It keeps Winamp's traditions on usability, audio quality and features, while not trying to monetize its users in any way. 0. https://www.aimp.ru/ https://www.aimp.ru/
- pachico 5y agoLeak or an attempt to get attention since it doesn't seem to be getting much?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- synergy20 5y agothere are so many music players that can do mp3, why winamp source code is of interest still?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- titaniumtown 5y agoI've never even heard of Winamp before lol
- vermaden 5y agoWinamp was great in 2000s ... Today Deadbeef works exceptionally great on UNIX systems. There is also Sayonara or VLC ... and tons of other usable players. Not sure what happens on Windows systems nowadays but I always include Winamp 2.95 as part of the Windows installation that I do for family/buddies ... I just change the default 'ugly as fuck' theme to something usable and nice appealing :)
- octorian 5y agoI pretty much just use Audacious on Linux/UNIX these days. I think its a descendant of XMMS, and basically the same user experience as Winamp of old. The problem I have with most "modern" players is that they seem to want to be a total music library manager, insisting on doing it all based on their interpretation of the metadata in your files. I'm never happy with this experience, so I'd rather something that lets me simply pick music from a directory structure I decided on an organization scheme for.
- kats 5y agoStop using archive.org to host illegal content, the site is run on donations and they'll have to become less open if people use them as just another filesharing site. Policing uploads requires staff and costs real money. Legal issues cost real money.
- ktm5j 5y agoI might be wrong here, but I think it's more that archive.org had already crawled and mirrored this page. Then the OP or someone else found the content that was already there and shared it with people. It's not that OP or some archive user deliberately caused this page to be mirrored.
- authed 5y agoWe might get a Linux Winamp? Either way, the thing that I liked the most about Winamp (besides mp3 player) was being able to fit winamp in the title bar of my current window (always-on-top).
- tanbyte 5y agoWinamp is still alive?
- beezischillin 5y agoI might be alone here but I still have Winamp on my Windows computers. From my 100 MHz pentium 1 to my bazillion core Ryzen, the only constant has been Winamp. Whether it was playing back mp3s, internet radio or ripping discs, it worked. I like the familiarity. Foobar and Clementine just feel so alien, I could never get used to them. Maybe it’s the compact, floaty UI, which first hog the entire screen. I’ve since switched to mainly macOS but iTunes feels awful and sluggish in comparison, especially with Apple Music, I hate even starting it.
- matthuggins 5y agoI never even accept the iTunes TOS on any MacBook I purchase. I just refuse to let it run.
- kblev 5y agoI'm using Winamp on my Surface Pro 6, switched from foobar2000 for the Media Library feature. (I've been also using Winamp in my teens starting with the first versions up until last ones, then stopped listening to local music files). It's an amazing low resource player. The YouTube playlists I'm listening to in Firefox consume 1.6GB of RAM and significant CPU, the downloaded opus files with Winamp take up a few megs of RAM (and bunch of disk space on my SD card). I tried WACUP but it doesn't work well for me. Very complicated UI, too many settings, it also corrupted my real Winamp library. Regarding the leak - perhaps the founders aren't happy with the direction of the app in the upcoming release (we can notice the ugly website update) so they may have leaked the code. Great news.
- riffic 5y agoI'd love to have lived in a world where Nullsoft never sold to AOL, but it's absolutely okay they did at the time they did.
- axiolite 5y agoHas everyone forgotten Winamp was open source? Winamp3 was released as Wasabi.player, source code was free: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=16613.0 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=16613.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20031210093403/http://www.wasabidev.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20031210093403/http://www.wasabi... Seems nobody cared at the time. Never heard of a community springing up around it, and you can hardly find it now. Got it in my archives somewhere.
- thedoctor_o 5y agoAlas that was never a complete open sourcing & you couldn't just build it from what was provided. There was a small effort to try & fill in the gaps (it used a trac site I think to cover what was going on) but sadly it never amounted to much. -dro
- majke 5y agoI did some digging The source seem to have been on trac on wasabi.t0x.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20060508052407/http://wasabi.t0x.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/trunk/wasabi/src/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060508052407/http://wasabi.t0x... And this might be the same on github: https://github.com/bizzehdee/wasabi/blob/49d293042ce17b0d137b2e4c6fc82a52bdb05091/src/main.cpp https://github.com/bizzehdee/wasabi/blob/49d293042ce17b0d137... Fair to say: doesn't look like it's related to winamp and doesn't look very complete.
- axiolite 5y ago> Fair to say: doesn't look like it's related to winamp Wasabi is just the toolkit. It is indeed used by Winamp. What you need to look for is Wasabi.player, as the first couple sentences in the second link I provided explains.
- throwawaysea 5y agoI still feel Winamp had a better UI than all these modern players, particularly the streaming ones like Spotify. For some reason, even though Spotify has a massive engineering organization, the end product is utterly terrible in its design and usability. I get the feeling no one working there actually likes music or uses their product. And why do none of these players have visualizations? Winamp had such a rich community around things like skins and visualizations that I sorely miss.
- batoure 5y agoCan I just say I am blown away that archive.org crawls github I mean wow