8 ms·

How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

49 points by luismedel 2y ago

ggm 2y ago
Used it heavily. Fed it with gnutella. I liked the skins option and ran with a quad ][ amp look because I gad a quad 2 valve amp which subsequently got destroyed in a flood. It didn't kill a pc to run either. Low overhead and low screen real estate.
tombert 2y ago
I hate the expression "ahead of its time", but I do feel like Shoutcast in Winamp was way ahead of its time. I was watching live video streams from random people for years before I had ever heard of Twitch, on a fairly crappy internet connection. AOL really did them a disservice.
- z0r 2y ago
  I remember watching some channels that just broadcast random MSTK3K episodes, and I think I discovered them by clicking around the Winamp UI. Thanks for bringing back some good memories
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yep, that's how I discovered some of the channels there as well. I don't remember the MST3K channel, but there were lots of channels that broadcasts kind of obscure anime that I hadn't heard of at the time. The thing that fascinated me more, though, were the people setting up there own talk shows. I was kind of one of those irritating edgy-atheist teenagers, and so I remember listening to the "The Infidel Guy Show" every week, and I thought it was so cool that he was able to make his own call-in talk show for fun. It felt like the internet was able to un-gatekeep stuff so that regular consumers could finally be in charge of their own entertainment.
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      I remember all of the above. In many ways those streams presaged a lot of what would later become the early YouTube cultural context, edgy-atheist teens, obscure anime (and anime music videos), MST3K, and all. Remix culture was hot back in the day, and I'm glad that in a lot of ways, that vibe never really went away, though it has centralized a lot more than seemed likely from the view from back then. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and things like Reddit, Twitch, and Discord are doing a lot to keep the internet weird, in good ways, despite not being easily indexed or searched, or perhaps because of it.
      - tombert 2y ago
        I agree with everything you said. The early broadband internet before YouTube was pretty weird. Internet video was very obviously possible (and there were sites like iFilm that showed that, as well as Shoutcast), and everyone kind of knew it was the "future", but it was also kind of unclear where the hell it was actually going to go and what the "future" actually meant. I remember before YouTube, I was playing around with Screenblast Movie Studio as a twelve year old, hacking together music videos from pirated episodes of The Simpsons and Spongebob, or recording and editing together little skits I would me, and all I would ever be able to do was burn a DVD and show it to friends. One of my first internet purchases was a PCI capture card, actually, so I could plug in my 8mm video camera into my computer. Even in 2003 I knew it was possible to share videos online, but I didn't really have money to host it myself because they would eat an enormous amount of bandwidth. It sucks that everything became centralized, but at the same time it is pretty cool that pretty much anyone can upload and share videos now. I upload unlisted videos to YouTube all the time whenever I edit something I want to share with friends.
        aspenmayer 2y ago
        In 2008 I was fascinated with justin.tv, which would later essentially become Twitch. The communities that sprang up around streamers and content creators on that site would foreshadow the double-edged sword of parasocial relationships which have now become commonplace on especially image and video-centered social media like YouTube. I had built a portable live-streaming setup with an Asus Eee PC 901 with a Logitech USB webcam, and would record to the internal SD card. It was surprisingly capable and shock-proof due to the early internal SSD. I had the Linux variant because it had faster flash storage, but was weirdly partitioned between a fast 4GB and slow 16GB dual-SSD setup. I somehow managed to trim my Windows XP Pro install down to fit in the 4GB partition with nLite and used no swap file but switched to a fixed size swap on a RAM drive from system memory. I was able to get modded BIOS and system tray utilities that allowed for dynamic under- and overclocking and formatted my SD card to appear as internal storage to workaround some issues. In the end I didn’t reach my goal of a fully mobile livestream setup due to the lack of fast enough mobile data, but it worked serviceably on WiFi of the time. I had a lot of niche interests and strong opinions loosely held, and desired to use such tools to find my tribe online, as I had not yet moved to SF, and my world travels had so far been to relatively out of the way areas. Its almost quaint to look back on that project, as all of that and more is now table stakes for even the lowest-end Android phone, and shortly after I moved to SF in 2009, I would get an HTC G1 and would root and stock ROM it with an expanded battery to essentially redo that entire build all over again with a single standalone mobile phone, though the camera quality and app support was lacking. By the time Periscope came around, I had already moved on to some other “current thing” boondoggle tech hobby projects. I now personally believe that seeking meaning through external acknowledgement and validation is putting the cart before the horse and also neglects both my own expression for its own sake and appreciating others as ends unto themselves rather than means to my own self-actualization and generally am content to keep to myself to the degree that I do, while deepening my appreciation of others as individuals who are largely also just trying to connect, to be seen. I’ve mellowed out a lot in most ways, and going through all those experiences made me realize I was at the time a kind of misanthropic pick-me who was good enough, good looking and lucky enough, and smart enough to set myself up to fail by optimizing for the wrong outcomes. I knew what I wanted but lacked a long enough view to actually achieve what I wanted in my life, relationships, friendships, or goals. I didn’t do the work, and I felt a misplaced sense of entitlement to rewards I likely deserved but didn’t earn, so even my humble achievements felt hollow. Once I realized that I was the problem and my project was to work on myself first, a lot of my desire to hack tech things together for its own sake took on a more personal focus. To quote Halt and Catch Fire, computers aren’t the thing; they’re the thing that gets us to the thing. That thing was always true human connection and community. Once I realized that community is the end itself and not just the means to distract myself from my own thoughts, I had a much better understanding of myself and what I needed to do to be my best self. It all began with me. Wherever you go, there you are, and it’s better to be comfortable being alone and better still to not be alone, so that experiences shared can multiply the concurrent rewards for all involved. Sorry for the wall of text lol, hopefully that resonates with somebody.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Net radio was a really big thing in the 90's and I remember listening to people playing electronic music that way. You couldn't buy it anywhere but you could listen to it on the internet.
  - romanhn 2y ago
    RealAudio was my go-to before Winamp showed up. It's crazy to me that RealNetworks is still around.
    - tombert 2y ago
      Today I learned that RealNetworks is still around...how? Who on earth has used any form of RealPlayer or Rhapsody in the last ten years? I guess they have other products now but I haven't heard of anyone using those either...
      - romanhn 2y ago
        What if I told you that Creative Labs is still around, still selling Sound Blaster cards...
        tombert 2y ago
        I actually already knew that, actually have an anecdote with them. In 2021, I bought a soundbar from Creative. The quality of the soundbar was actually pretty good, but it had a really awful noisegate issue where if the scene was too quiet, it would just cut to zero. For some movies this wasn't a big deal, but for most movies it made them unwatchable. We put up with it for a year, but we got sick of it and I was about to buy a replacement. I tried the updated firmware on Creative's website, and it didn't help, but then I found some YouTube video with like 10 views that claimed to have a fixed firmware from Creative that wasn't publicly available, and they had a link to some shady mega.co.nz download for it. Stuff like that screams "malware!", but I figured that I was about to throw the soundbar into the Goodwill pile anyway, so if I break it no big deal, and it's not like the soundbar was connected to the internet, just optical audio, and I don't think anyone could install a crypto minor on there, so against my better judgement I installed the firmware and... It worked! It fixed the noisegate problems entirely, and now the soundbar is actually excellent. For some reason, Creative still hasn't bothered uploading the fixed firmware on their website though. So it's weird, Creative is still around, and making theoretically-decent products, but they lack a lot of polish. Kind of a sad fall from grace.
thriftwy 2y ago
The age of MP3 players ended when streaming became ubiqutous. I know some OSS players that became worse over time. The usablity hero that was amaroK became so bad after an overhaul that it was forked as Clementine. For example, if you had shuffle on, and double-clicked a song in your playlist, a different random one will start. Then Clementine now sometimes hangs when you rewind an MP3. It understands where the new position is and that it is supposed to be playing, just can't. They also unlearned a tiny UI improvement that I've contributed a decade ago. Indeed they would be a much better product if they did nothing other than fixing bit rot. I remember there was a Gnome option, wonder if it is alive. Can't remember the name though.
- toast0 2y ago
  > The age of MP3 players ended when streaming became ubiqutous. I mean, I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but I use Winamp to stream music all day at work, and I have for 20 years. I've been a paid subscriber at Digitally Imported [1] off and on (mostly on) since 2008. But I've been streaming from them with winamp and sometimes other players since probably 1999. Audio streaming existed before Winamp and Shoutcast, but a lot of early streaming was built around Shoutcast. I've used other players, but came back to Winamp. I could stream in a browser window, but winamp uses 18 mb of memory, and I don't think I can have a browser tab open for less than that. Plus, having it in a dedicated application means I don't have to worry about my browser freaking out and ruining my audio experience. [1] https://www.di.fm/ https://www.di.fm/
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    I've been wondering where it all went.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I hadn't heard of them, and the price seems really good. I love the idea of being able to use apps like Winamp or similar. Does di.fm have much mainstream music? What is the selection like compared to a Spotify our Youtube Music? I wouldn't even care that much honestly if they have mainstream music, as long as they have music I would like and can discover without extreme effort.
autokad 2y ago
I used winamp in the late 90s and early 2000s. During that time it was a necessary program to have on the PC, but I stopped using it once MP3 players and ipods became more common / affordable. Then youtube came out and when on my pc, I mostly listened to music that way. Its extremely rare that I want to play an mp3 on my pc, thus no need to use something like winamp.
- dakiol 2y ago
  Opposite scenario. I keep all my music in mp3 files, so I use music players. Can anyone recommend a good music player (preferably open source)? I rely currently on vlc and the default apple music player on macOS.
  - Moru 2y ago
    I'm still uing Winamp, works the best for my use case. Easy to find my music and easy to control the player with global hotkeys so never have to leave the game/editor/wasd-position just to change song :-)
  - wizardwes 2y ago
    Past few times I've set up a computer, I've been using Clementine. It's decent, does the job pretty well, and you can add web radio streams as well
  - default-user 2y ago
    https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ Granted it requires a server, but is easy to use on any client as a web app.
deanCommie 2y ago
If Winamp lived it would've HAD to become first a music store, and then a streaming service. And we'd be getting articles about how Winamp "used" to be simple, but is now "bloated", and all the internet greybeard nerds (hi, it's me) would be talking about how they just want to play the tens of thousands of local MP3s they have not pay for a subscription to stream from the web, which is why they're "still on Winamp 5". So, while I do think there's an alternate future where "Winamp" became as big and as ubiquitous as iTunes or Spotify, or both combined, I don't think there's a future where it does any better than those and there is no 2024 (or 2017) nostalgia for what it once was.
timkpaine 2y ago
Frankel is a a developer I hold in really high esteem. IDK what I would do without LICEcap, which I use on a daily basis (and I'm sure it was just a little side project they through together to make debugging easier in a short amount of time). And REAPER is probably the only user-customizable and extendable digital audio workstation in existence. You can see the echos of Winamp in it...
- Optimal_Persona 2y ago
  It's perplexing that the article makes very little mention of what Justin Frankel did after Winamp - founding Cockos and creating REAPER, LICECap. As you note there's nothing quite as fully scriptable/customize-able as REAPER in Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)-land. I've not found a media player I like as much as the original Winamp - especially the ability to use plugins, and how devs and users could easily change the look/feel. I've never understood how literally the worst media app I've encountered (especially on Windows) - iTunes - took over, aside from the fact that it made it easy to buy music and load it onto your iDevices.
- WhatIsDukkha 2y ago
  Here Justin Frankel is talking with Paul Davis (the Ardour developer) about... developing DAWs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rP7lWnnxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rP7lWnnxI
- bkyan 2y ago
  If anyone is interested, here is Frankel's personal blog → https://1014.org/ https://1014.org/
munchler 2y ago
Edit: Should actually be labeled (2012). Was republished in 2017.
- __s 2y ago
  article was written in 2012, & republished in 2017 > 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).
- nailer 2y ago
  Yep. My 486 DX4 100 was just fast enough to decode an MP3 using winamp as long as I didn’t do anything else on a CPU. Does anyone else remember layer3.org? Or VQF? Kjofol? The Xing encoder 16mhz scandal?
  - toast0 2y ago
    Yeah, I jused K-Jofol for a while, I seem to recall it used a smidge less cpu, and it had wild themes with shaped windows. I recall using this litestep theme, with a matching k-jofol skin [1]. Current track title would show up in the bar near the center about 10% up off the bottom. That was fun. I also remember using mpg321 on a 486, because integer based decoding was just faster enough that I could play almost all my mp3s on that. [1] https://archive.org/details/turtlesoupii-mariner_202208 https://archive.org/details/turtlesoupii-mariner_202208
    - nailer 2y ago
      So cool. Microsoft would eventually start aping this style with some of the more insane media player skins, but Kjofol popularised it years beforehand.
romanhn 2y ago
When I got a new laptop six months ago, it was my first new computer since the 90s where I didn't install Winamp as one of the first steps. Really only because it was my first non-Windows machine. Didn't even get deep into researching Mac alternatives before realizing that I haven't played an mp3 file more than a handful of times since signing up for Spotify years ago. Streaming irrevocably changed how I consume and think about music.
zombiwoof 2y ago
a bunch of drifter con artists didn't deliver anything with sustainable value. shocked not shocked.
freedomben 2y ago
> Amazingly, given all the time elapsed, AOL still makes a decent amount of money on the site and on the program—while the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually. How does it make this money? What's the source of revenue? Are there ads in Winamp?
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  This was in 2012 and the article explains the revenue generation mechanisms. Freemium, winamp.com ads and some browser toolbar thing partnered with google.
guidedlight 2y ago
WinAMP looked like nothing else on the very utilitarian Windows OS, and I think that was a big part of the appeal. To me the design seemed like a copy of the earlier MOD players that were popular on the Amiga platform.
- bombcar 2y ago
  It was simple and it worked even on relatively underpowered machines. If it had had a standard windows GUI we would have used it all the same - it could load a 13,000 song playlist off a network share without trying to load each file, so time to first sound was incredibly short.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nicetryguy 2y ago
I still use Winamp! Why? Well, i listen to video game soundtracks, but not compressed or even high quality recordings, the actual source files ripped from the games and reproduced with plugins much like an emulator would. You can even juice quality settings way past what the original consoles would play them back as, such as being tied to 22kHz on a Sega Genesis or 32kHz on a Super Nintendo, i can reproduce the original songs at 96kHz lol. The sound quality is far superior than any compressed / lossless / uncompressed / or even an original hardware solution for that matter. Now, there are plenty of individual players for these files, HOWEVER, if i want to play ALL of the music from ALL of the consoles on one playlist, there is no valid substitute for the Winamp plugin system. So yes, valid use cases still exist, and i will be whipping the llamas ass for the foreseeable future.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  how about the foobar2000 plugin system?
- Sophira 2y ago
  My favourite media player (post-Winamp 2) has always been XMPlay[0]. It perfectly supports Winamp input plugins (as well as its own native type of plugins), meaning I wasn't stuck with using Winamp. The player also sports excellent demoscene tracked music support (the reason for its name - XM is the file extension for FastTracker II tracked music), but really it's a fantastic media player for a lot of formats in its own right. It supports a lot of formats natively. For anything else you need to download plugins for it separately[1], but even today it's by far my preferred player on Windows. I'd heartily recommend it for your use case as well. [0] https://www.un4seen.com/ https://www.un4seen.com/ [1] https://support.xmplay.com/ https://support.xmplay.com/
- poisonborz 2y ago
  Foobar and AIMP support Winamp DSP plugins.
lxgr 2y ago
> There's no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today [...] It is in exactly the same position as far as I can tell – i.e. replaced by streaming services like Apple Music.
stuaxo 2y ago
Obligatory mention of the current fork of winamp: WACUP https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/ Based on core that was open sourced around Winamp 3 DrO one of the ex devs is gradually re-implementing all the other parts.
jsz0 2y ago
Winamp was doomed to be a relic of a simpler time. Even if you take the iPod and iTunes Store out of the equation Winamp's file-centric approach was a limitation as people's music libraries increased in size and complexity. All their attempts to add more modern features just made Winamp worse for the people who did like its simplicity and file-centric design.
- Zancarius 2y ago
  Sad truth, honestly. I still have a fairly sizeable mp3 library primarily from CD purchases decades ago, and later from Amazon music downloads. I don't listen to it. I stream from YT Music these days. It's just easier and more convenient. Plus my musical tastes and preferences are really, really, really strange. Streaming ticks all the right boxes. I fought going this route for the longest time, mostly on principle. I lost that fight.
quitit 2y ago
A key contributor to its success is that competitors media players often couldn't play mp3s without skipping on the hardware of the day, and that included microsoft's own media player. So for many this was the only useful way to play mp3s on windows.
tacomonstrous 2y ago
As a poor grad student, I used to unwind by watching Arrested Development playing all 3 seasons in a loop over Shoutcast. Fun times.
m348e912 2y ago
I have tremendous respect for Justin Frankel. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that but it seemed likely that AOL and Nullsoft were not the best culture fit and taking Spinner out of the equation, I still don't think it would have worked out well. That being said, Winamp was and is one of the best media players ever created. It's the prime example of how good software can be when the creator is fully aligned with his/her users.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Speaking of corporate culture clashes, remember WASTE? AOL pulled the download pretty quick. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    I remember! I think I heard about it from the Penny Arcade forums or a spinoff one of the mods made. I was really into a lot of niche p2p stuff back then and then lost touch with that group and the scene, but still have lots of fond memories of that file-sharing era and the camaraderie such coordination engendered. I feel like something was lost with the transition to more pseudo/anonymous sharing mechanisms that came later. There's something special about finding cool files and browsing what else the same person is sharing.
nuclearsugar 2y ago
Milkdrop, the music visualizer bundled with Winamp, is still alive and well in the VJ community through the NestDrop app. (co-developer here) https://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.php https://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.php

49 points by luismedel 2y ago

ggm 2y ago

Used it heavily. Fed it with gnutella. I liked the skins option and ran with a quad ][ amp look because I gad a quad 2 valve amp which subsequently got destroyed in a flood. It didn't kill a pc to run either. Low overhead and low screen real estate.

tombert 2y ago

I hate the expression "ahead of its time", but I do feel like Shoutcast in Winamp was way ahead of its time. I was watching live video streams from random people for years before I had ever heard of Twitch, on a fairly crappy internet connection. AOL really did them a disservice.

z0r 2y ago
I remember watching some channels that just broadcast random MSTK3K episodes, and I think I discovered them by clicking around the Winamp UI. Thanks for bringing back some good memories
- tombert 2y ago
  Yep, that's how I discovered some of the channels there as well. I don't remember the MST3K channel, but there were lots of channels that broadcasts kind of obscure anime that I hadn't heard of at the time. The thing that fascinated me more, though, were the people setting up there own talk shows. I was kind of one of those irritating edgy-atheist teenagers, and so I remember listening to the "The Infidel Guy Show" every week, and I thought it was so cool that he was able to make his own call-in talk show for fun. It felt like the internet was able to un-gatekeep stuff so that regular consumers could finally be in charge of their own entertainment.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    I remember all of the above. In many ways those streams presaged a lot of what would later become the early YouTube cultural context, edgy-atheist teens, obscure anime (and anime music videos), MST3K, and all. Remix culture was hot back in the day, and I'm glad that in a lot of ways, that vibe never really went away, though it has centralized a lot more than seemed likely from the view from back then. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and things like Reddit, Twitch, and Discord are doing a lot to keep the internet weird, in good ways, despite not being easily indexed or searched, or perhaps because of it.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I agree with everything you said. The early broadband internet before YouTube was pretty weird. Internet video was very obviously possible (and there were sites like iFilm that showed that, as well as Shoutcast), and everyone kind of knew it was the "future", but it was also kind of unclear where the hell it was actually going to go and what the "future" actually meant. I remember before YouTube, I was playing around with Screenblast Movie Studio as a twelve year old, hacking together music videos from pirated episodes of The Simpsons and Spongebob, or recording and editing together little skits I would me, and all I would ever be able to do was burn a DVD and show it to friends. One of my first internet purchases was a PCI capture card, actually, so I could plug in my 8mm video camera into my computer. Even in 2003 I knew it was possible to share videos online, but I didn't really have money to host it myself because they would eat an enormous amount of bandwidth. It sucks that everything became centralized, but at the same time it is pretty cool that pretty much anyone can upload and share videos now. I upload unlisted videos to YouTube all the time whenever I edit something I want to share with friends.
      - aspenmayer 2y ago
        In 2008 I was fascinated with justin.tv, which would later essentially become Twitch. The communities that sprang up around streamers and content creators on that site would foreshadow the double-edged sword of parasocial relationships which have now become commonplace on especially image and video-centered social media like YouTube. I had built a portable live-streaming setup with an Asus Eee PC 901 with a Logitech USB webcam, and would record to the internal SD card. It was surprisingly capable and shock-proof due to the early internal SSD. I had the Linux variant because it had faster flash storage, but was weirdly partitioned between a fast 4GB and slow 16GB dual-SSD setup. I somehow managed to trim my Windows XP Pro install down to fit in the 4GB partition with nLite and used no swap file but switched to a fixed size swap on a RAM drive from system memory. I was able to get modded BIOS and system tray utilities that allowed for dynamic under- and overclocking and formatted my SD card to appear as internal storage to workaround some issues. In the end I didn’t reach my goal of a fully mobile livestream setup due to the lack of fast enough mobile data, but it worked serviceably on WiFi of the time. I had a lot of niche interests and strong opinions loosely held, and desired to use such tools to find my tribe online, as I had not yet moved to SF, and my world travels had so far been to relatively out of the way areas. Its almost quaint to look back on that project, as all of that and more is now table stakes for even the lowest-end Android phone, and shortly after I moved to SF in 2009, I would get an HTC G1 and would root and stock ROM it with an expanded battery to essentially redo that entire build all over again with a single standalone mobile phone, though the camera quality and app support was lacking. By the time Periscope came around, I had already moved on to some other “current thing” boondoggle tech hobby projects. I now personally believe that seeking meaning through external acknowledgement and validation is putting the cart before the horse and also neglects both my own expression for its own sake and appreciating others as ends unto themselves rather than means to my own self-actualization and generally am content to keep to myself to the degree that I do, while deepening my appreciation of others as individuals who are largely also just trying to connect, to be seen. I’ve mellowed out a lot in most ways, and going through all those experiences made me realize I was at the time a kind of misanthropic pick-me who was good enough, good looking and lucky enough, and smart enough to set myself up to fail by optimizing for the wrong outcomes. I knew what I wanted but lacked a long enough view to actually achieve what I wanted in my life, relationships, friendships, or goals. I didn’t do the work, and I felt a misplaced sense of entitlement to rewards I likely deserved but didn’t earn, so even my humble achievements felt hollow. Once I realized that I was the problem and my project was to work on myself first, a lot of my desire to hack tech things together for its own sake took on a more personal focus. To quote Halt and Catch Fire, computers aren’t the thing; they’re the thing that gets us to the thing. That thing was always true human connection and community. Once I realized that community is the end itself and not just the means to distract myself from my own thoughts, I had a much better understanding of myself and what I needed to do to be my best self. It all began with me. Wherever you go, there you are, and it’s better to be comfortable being alone and better still to not be alone, so that experiences shared can multiply the concurrent rewards for all involved. Sorry for the wall of text lol, hopefully that resonates with somebody.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
throwway120385 2y ago
Net radio was a really big thing in the 90's and I remember listening to people playing electronic music that way. You couldn't buy it anywhere but you could listen to it on the internet.
- romanhn 2y ago
  RealAudio was my go-to before Winamp showed up. It's crazy to me that RealNetworks is still around.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Today I learned that RealNetworks is still around...how? Who on earth has used any form of RealPlayer or Rhapsody in the last ten years? I guess they have other products now but I haven't heard of anyone using those either...
    - romanhn 2y ago
      What if I told you that Creative Labs is still around, still selling Sound Blaster cards...
      - tombert 2y ago
        I actually already knew that, actually have an anecdote with them. In 2021, I bought a soundbar from Creative. The quality of the soundbar was actually pretty good, but it had a really awful noisegate issue where if the scene was too quiet, it would just cut to zero. For some movies this wasn't a big deal, but for most movies it made them unwatchable. We put up with it for a year, but we got sick of it and I was about to buy a replacement. I tried the updated firmware on Creative's website, and it didn't help, but then I found some YouTube video with like 10 views that claimed to have a fixed firmware from Creative that wasn't publicly available, and they had a link to some shady mega.co.nz download for it. Stuff like that screams "malware!", but I figured that I was about to throw the soundbar into the Goodwill pile anyway, so if I break it no big deal, and it's not like the soundbar was connected to the internet, just optical audio, and I don't think anyone could install a crypto minor on there, so against my better judgement I installed the firmware and... It worked! It fixed the noisegate problems entirely, and now the soundbar is actually excellent. For some reason, Creative still hasn't bothered uploading the fixed firmware on their website though. So it's weird, Creative is still around, and making theoretically-decent products, but they lack a lot of polish. Kind of a sad fall from grace.

thriftwy 2y ago

The age of MP3 players ended when streaming became ubiqutous. I know some OSS players that became worse over time. The usablity hero that was amaroK became so bad after an overhaul that it was forked as Clementine. For example, if you had shuffle on, and double-clicked a song in your playlist, a different random one will start. Then Clementine now sometimes hangs when you rewind an MP3. It understands where the new position is and that it is supposed to be playing, just can't. They also unlearned a tiny UI improvement that I've contributed a decade ago. Indeed they would be a much better product if they did nothing other than fixing bit rot. I remember there was a Gnome option, wonder if it is alive. Can't remember the name though.

toast0 2y ago
> The age of MP3 players ended when streaming became ubiqutous. I mean, I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but I use Winamp to stream music all day at work, and I have for 20 years. I've been a paid subscriber at Digitally Imported [1] off and on (mostly on) since 2008. But I've been streaming from them with winamp and sometimes other players since probably 1999. Audio streaming existed before Winamp and Shoutcast, but a lot of early streaming was built around Shoutcast. I've used other players, but came back to Winamp. I could stream in a browser window, but winamp uses 18 mb of memory, and I don't think I can have a browser tab open for less than that. Plus, having it in a dedicated application means I don't have to worry about my browser freaking out and ruining my audio experience. [1] https://www.di.fm/ https://www.di.fm/
- throwway120385 2y ago
  I've been wondering where it all went.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I hadn't heard of them, and the price seems really good. I love the idea of being able to use apps like Winamp or similar. Does di.fm have much mainstream music? What is the selection like compared to a Spotify our Youtube Music? I wouldn't even care that much honestly if they have mainstream music, as long as they have music I would like and can discover without extreme effort.

autokad 2y ago

I used winamp in the late 90s and early 2000s. During that time it was a necessary program to have on the PC, but I stopped using it once MP3 players and ipods became more common / affordable. Then youtube came out and when on my pc, I mostly listened to music that way. Its extremely rare that I want to play an mp3 on my pc, thus no need to use something like winamp.

dakiol 2y ago
Opposite scenario. I keep all my music in mp3 files, so I use music players. Can anyone recommend a good music player (preferably open source)? I rely currently on vlc and the default apple music player on macOS.
- Moru 2y ago
  I'm still uing Winamp, works the best for my use case. Easy to find my music and easy to control the player with global hotkeys so never have to leave the game/editor/wasd-position just to change song :-)
- wizardwes 2y ago
  Past few times I've set up a computer, I've been using Clementine. It's decent, does the job pretty well, and you can add web radio streams as well
- default-user 2y ago
  https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ Granted it requires a server, but is easy to use on any client as a web app.

deanCommie 2y ago

If Winamp lived it would've HAD to become first a music store, and then a streaming service. And we'd be getting articles about how Winamp "used" to be simple, but is now "bloated", and all the internet greybeard nerds (hi, it's me) would be talking about how they just want to play the tens of thousands of local MP3s they have not pay for a subscription to stream from the web, which is why they're "still on Winamp 5". So, while I do think there's an alternate future where "Winamp" became as big and as ubiquitous as iTunes or Spotify, or both combined, I don't think there's a future where it does any better than those and there is no 2024 (or 2017) nostalgia for what it once was.

timkpaine 2y ago

Frankel is a a developer I hold in really high esteem. IDK what I would do without LICEcap, which I use on a daily basis (and I'm sure it was just a little side project they through together to make debugging easier in a short amount of time). And REAPER is probably the only user-customizable and extendable digital audio workstation in existence. You can see the echos of Winamp in it...

Optimal_Persona 2y ago
It's perplexing that the article makes very little mention of what Justin Frankel did after Winamp - founding Cockos and creating REAPER, LICECap. As you note there's nothing quite as fully scriptable/customize-able as REAPER in Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)-land. I've not found a media player I like as much as the original Winamp - especially the ability to use plugins, and how devs and users could easily change the look/feel. I've never understood how literally the worst media app I've encountered (especially on Windows) - iTunes - took over, aside from the fact that it made it easy to buy music and load it onto your iDevices.
WhatIsDukkha 2y ago
Here Justin Frankel is talking with Paul Davis (the Ardour developer) about... developing DAWs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rP7lWnnxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rP7lWnnxI
bkyan 2y ago
If anyone is interested, here is Frankel's personal blog → https://1014.org/ https://1014.org/

munchler 2y ago

Edit: Should actually be labeled (2012). Was republished in 2017.

__s 2y ago
article was written in 2012, & republished in 2017 > 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).
nailer 2y ago
Yep. My 486 DX4 100 was just fast enough to decode an MP3 using winamp as long as I didn’t do anything else on a CPU. Does anyone else remember layer3.org? Or VQF? Kjofol? The Xing encoder 16mhz scandal?
- toast0 2y ago
  Yeah, I jused K-Jofol for a while, I seem to recall it used a smidge less cpu, and it had wild themes with shaped windows. I recall using this litestep theme, with a matching k-jofol skin [1]. Current track title would show up in the bar near the center about 10% up off the bottom. That was fun. I also remember using mpg321 on a 486, because integer based decoding was just faster enough that I could play almost all my mp3s on that. [1] https://archive.org/details/turtlesoupii-mariner_202208 https://archive.org/details/turtlesoupii-mariner_202208
  - nailer 2y ago
    So cool. Microsoft would eventually start aping this style with some of the more insane media player skins, but Kjofol popularised it years beforehand.

romanhn 2y ago

When I got a new laptop six months ago, it was my first new computer since the 90s where I didn't install Winamp as one of the first steps. Really only because it was my first non-Windows machine. Didn't even get deep into researching Mac alternatives before realizing that I haven't played an mp3 file more than a handful of times since signing up for Spotify years ago. Streaming irrevocably changed how I consume and think about music.

zombiwoof 2y ago

a bunch of drifter con artists didn't deliver anything with sustainable value. shocked not shocked.

freedomben 2y ago

> Amazingly, given all the time elapsed, AOL still makes a decent amount of money on the site and on the program—while the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually. How does it make this money? What's the source of revenue? Are there ads in Winamp?

Arch-TK 2y ago
This was in 2012 and the article explains the revenue generation mechanisms. Freemium, winamp.com ads and some browser toolbar thing partnered with google.

guidedlight 2y ago

WinAMP looked like nothing else on the very utilitarian Windows OS, and I think that was a big part of the appeal. To me the design seemed like a copy of the earlier MOD players that were popular on the Amiga platform.

bombcar 2y ago
It was simple and it worked even on relatively underpowered machines. If it had had a standard windows GUI we would have used it all the same - it could load a 13,000 song playlist off a network share without trying to load each file, so time to first sound was incredibly short.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nicetryguy 2y ago

I still use Winamp! Why? Well, i listen to video game soundtracks, but not compressed or even high quality recordings, the actual source files ripped from the games and reproduced with plugins much like an emulator would. You can even juice quality settings way past what the original consoles would play them back as, such as being tied to 22kHz on a Sega Genesis or 32kHz on a Super Nintendo, i can reproduce the original songs at 96kHz lol. The sound quality is far superior than any compressed / lossless / uncompressed / or even an original hardware solution for that matter. Now, there are plenty of individual players for these files, HOWEVER, if i want to play ALL of the music from ALL of the consoles on one playlist, there is no valid substitute for the Winamp plugin system. So yes, valid use cases still exist, and i will be whipping the llamas ass for the foreseeable future.

WithinReason 2y ago
how about the foobar2000 plugin system?
Sophira 2y ago
My favourite media player (post-Winamp 2) has always been XMPlay[0]. It perfectly supports Winamp input plugins (as well as its own native type of plugins), meaning I wasn't stuck with using Winamp. The player also sports excellent demoscene tracked music support (the reason for its name - XM is the file extension for FastTracker II tracked music), but really it's a fantastic media player for a lot of formats in its own right. It supports a lot of formats natively. For anything else you need to download plugins for it separately[1], but even today it's by far my preferred player on Windows. I'd heartily recommend it for your use case as well. [0] https://www.un4seen.com/ https://www.un4seen.com/ [1] https://support.xmplay.com/ https://support.xmplay.com/
poisonborz 2y ago
Foobar and AIMP support Winamp DSP plugins.

lxgr 2y ago

> There's no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today [...] It is in exactly the same position as far as I can tell – i.e. replaced by streaming services like Apple Music.

stuaxo 2y ago

Obligatory mention of the current fork of winamp: WACUP https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/ Based on core that was open sourced around Winamp 3 DrO one of the ex devs is gradually re-implementing all the other parts.

jsz0 2y ago

Winamp was doomed to be a relic of a simpler time. Even if you take the iPod and iTunes Store out of the equation Winamp's file-centric approach was a limitation as people's music libraries increased in size and complexity. All their attempts to add more modern features just made Winamp worse for the people who did like its simplicity and file-centric design.

Zancarius 2y ago
Sad truth, honestly. I still have a fairly sizeable mp3 library primarily from CD purchases decades ago, and later from Amazon music downloads. I don't listen to it. I stream from YT Music these days. It's just easier and more convenient. Plus my musical tastes and preferences are really, really, really strange. Streaming ticks all the right boxes. I fought going this route for the longest time, mostly on principle. I lost that fight.

quitit 2y ago

A key contributor to its success is that competitors media players often couldn't play mp3s without skipping on the hardware of the day, and that included microsoft's own media player. So for many this was the only useful way to play mp3s on windows.

tacomonstrous 2y ago

As a poor grad student, I used to unwind by watching Arrested Development playing all 3 seasons in a loop over Shoutcast. Fun times.

m348e912 2y ago

I have tremendous respect for Justin Frankel. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that but it seemed likely that AOL and Nullsoft were not the best culture fit and taking Spinner out of the equation, I still don't think it would have worked out well. That being said, Winamp was and is one of the best media players ever created. It's the prime example of how good software can be when the creator is fully aligned with his/her users.

Terr_ 2y ago
Speaking of corporate culture clashes, remember WASTE? AOL pulled the download pretty quick. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  I remember! I think I heard about it from the Penny Arcade forums or a spinoff one of the mods made. I was really into a lot of niche p2p stuff back then and then lost touch with that group and the scene, but still have lots of fond memories of that file-sharing era and the camaraderie such coordination engendered. I feel like something was lost with the transition to more pseudo/anonymous sharing mechanisms that came later. There's something special about finding cool files and browsing what else the same person is sharing.

nuclearsugar 2y ago

Milkdrop, the music visualizer bundled with Winamp, is still alive and well in the VJ community through the NestDrop app. (co-developer here) https://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.php https://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.php