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Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself
- maybird 14y agoVLC happened?
- ck2 14y agoAOL happened - kiss of death.
- saraid216 14y agoI think it's fair to say that, between VLC and Apple, Winamp still might not have made it if AOL hadn't been incompetent. But AOL was and it does rather boil down to their fault.
- rcfox 14y agoDo people use VLC as their main music player? I've always found its organization pretty primitive.
- antiterra 14y agoA friend of mine who worked with Winamp early on detailed how she had been misled into signing away any claim of a stake, just before the acquisition. Though she should have read before signing and there's a chance she didn't deserve anything, misleading someone about the nature of a contract is dishonest and greedy. I understand that, to HN readers, this will be read as hearsay, but the allegation has definitely tainted my opinion of the company, founders, and product. As such, it's a reminder: when you do business, get everything in writing up front and never assume that, because you're "friends" with your partners, everything will be handled fairly.
- dchest 14y agoIt's unfair to raise such accusations in public without providing any details; especially considering that the accusation comes via a third-party.
- bradpineau 14y agoWinamp... now THAT reminds me of the 1990s.
- tatsuke95 14y agoNot for me! Still using it daily. People laugh every time they see it. But it does what I want, it's lightweight, and has some great commercial plugins.
- mtgx 14y agoWhat are they using? Besides iTunes.
- tatsuke95 14y agoiTunes and WMP, mostly. To be honest, I don't know what else people are using. It's one of the places I've had to do the least research in software. WinAMP has been a stalwart for over a decade.
- For_Iconoclasm 14y agoMost people that I know use foobar2000.
- mariusmg 14y agoYeap, foobar2000 is basically the "standard" now.
- cdcarter 14y agoAnd a surprising number of people now use Spotify or Pandora for their primary music interface.
- yuushi 14y agoI still use it as well. I didn't realise it was something people laughed at - WMP takes up too much screen estate, iTunes has far too much bloat, and I don't need a music player with the complexity and learning curve of emacs.
- josiahq 14y agoFirst time I launched visualizations via Winamp in my dorm room was a very happy moment. Some serious app nostalgia there. And, Wesley Willis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM
- fish2000 14y ago+1 for Wesley and his personal zoomorphic hellscape.
- tatsuke95 14y ago>“There's no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition,” Rob Lord" Then why did you sell it for <$100MM? This is nothing against the software. In fact, I still use WinAMP on my PCs (no lie). But it annoys me when people pile on about what happens to their companies after they are acquired. If the legacy of your company is important to you (and no one says it has to be) why are you selling out? AOL isn't to blame for WinAMP going down hill, Nullsoft is for selling to them. I'd have taken the money too, but I wouldn't sit around and say "Look what they did to my company!" We seem to get that a lot around here. Big Tech Corp always takes the blame, never the entrepreneur. Well, big companies ruining acquisitions is practically a meme...what did you expect?
- shalmanese 14y agoFor four kids in Arizona before the rise of internet communities giving advice about entrepreneurship, I think selling for 100M is a pretty reasonable decision.
- tatsuke95 14y agoI would have taken the money in a heart beat. But to complain about how AOL, in hindsight, could have built iTunes out of it is mildly annoying. It's a mentality I see sometimes entrepreneurial culture. Taking it to the "next level" is hard, whatever that level happens to be. It's why you sell, rather than going it alone. If you think you can build iTunes (or Google, or Facebook, or Amazon or...) then build it. Don't sell to someone else and wonder why they didn't or couldn't.
- earl 14y agoTo be fair, it's only the aol acquisition that gave them potential access to the time warner music library and the ability to go negotiate deals with the other content owners. I think it's unlikely 4 guys in arizona making $100k/mo with no connections could have made that happen.
- 14y ago
- philipbroadway 14y agoWinamp 3 was the only thing I missed about windows. The visualizer plugins and skins still pass anything available now. Had no idea there was a mac version, so I tried downloading it. Mac version plays mp3, no radio, visualizers, or plugins.
- StavrosK 14y agoDo you mean that interstitial version that used XML and had a whole new interface and everything?
- shrikant 14y agoIIRC, the Nullsoft team admitted they rushed out that release because they really wanted a version that had "mp3" in the name. Also, that interface was called Wasabi.
- philipbroadway 14y agoyep - and this was my favorite theme! http://www.allwinampskins.com/winamp_skin.yaxay3.html http://www.allwinampskins.com/winamp_skin.yaxay3.html
- Codhisattva 14y agoWinamp is a great start up success story that's for sure. Homegrown, self taught developer learns Windows programming just because he wants to play mp3 files. Amazing success follows. Three cheers to Justin for that.
- reiichiroh 14y agoWhat ever happened to Sonique?
- dchest 14y agoAccording to Wikipedia, sold to Lycos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_%28media_player%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_%28media_player%29
- biomechanica 14y agoI absolutely loved that player. I actually STILL use it. It runs really nice under wine. I thought about doing a clone of it and making it open source under the GPL but I'm still not quite as productive as I can be in C yet.
- LeonidasXIV 14y agoThen use something else than C? I mean, there is a ton of players written in Python using GTK and GStreamer.
- biomechanica 14y agoI like C. I like its performance and its syntax. Call me crazy. edit: It's not that I don't like Python. I think it's a great scripting language. But for me, it's just too slow. Speed is important to me.
- lmm 14y agoIf you'd written the python version and had profiles showing it was too slow, I'd believe you.
- swdunlop 14y agoA key part of a lot of these pygtk players is that they rely on gstreamer to do the heavy lifting. Organizing a pipeline of "this source, this format, that sink" is not a performance problem -- it's a plumbing task. :)
- kprobst 14y agoThat was a shame. I'm still using Winamp 2.81 (from 2002, 10 years ago). As long as it continues to work on Windows, I'll never let it go. Never could get used to the later versions.
- barrkel 14y agoI'm using v5.623. With the lite install and classic skin, there's almost no difference (for my use cases).
- StavrosK 14y agoSame here. I don't think there's any difference for any use case, it's pretty much the same player. I do remove all the bloatware, though.
- iamben 14y agoYeah, same here. Used it everyday from the late 90s until I moved to Spotify (and then not at all when I moved to Macs last year). The classic player was/is such a wonderfully designed piece of software. Just minimise it and stick it to the top of the screen. Uncomplicated, unobtrusive.
- huhtenberg 14y ago2.95 here, released Jun 2003. That's one lasting piece of software, I can't readily think of any non-system software that is this old and still perfectly usable.
- brass9 14y agoSame here. Had been using 2.95 till a few months ago. Upgraded to 5.6. 5.x is not so bad.
- slig 14y agoAnyone using the OS X version? All I need is playlists and start/stop using the special keyboard keys.
- alan_cx 14y agoI must have missed something huge because I've been using Winamp for as long as I can remember and never ever seen a need to change. I don't see what's been undone. Missed opportunities to expand and become some big evil money scraper, sure, but what I see today is still a product that does what its supposed to do, and that's that. What's the problem here?
- latch 14y agoMaybe it's just me, but every other quote in that article has been changed with square brackets. every [company] I thought was doing interesting things. I was being helpful by [looking at] product features [on a] business level On and on...I've never seen so much of that _ever_ before.
- hexagonal 14y agoWhat browser/user-agent are you using? They might be doing something wacky with non en-US traffic.
- sp332 14y agoHere's an interview/behind-the-scenes piece that Rolling Stone did with the creators of WinAmp in 2004 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou8YIbH0j_3qSpepPy1VruHeyliYWI2zvjbZk_pn8W8/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou8YIbH0j_3qSpepPy1VruHe... I thought it was funny how the Rolling Stone author comes across as a drooling fanboy :)
- michaelpinto 14y agoTo me Winamp was always more of an accessory to Napster than anything else. Don't get me wrong, it was a solid program -- but it was really not much more of a utility through my eyes. On the other hand Napster really stands out in my mind as something revolutionary (ethics aside).
- TheGateKeeper 14y agoThat's how you should view all software, frankly. As a utility to get the job done.
- glanch 14y agoI still use winamp. I tried VLC, but I can't seem to make the playlist permanently visible while it plays media. Maybe I'm an idiot, but that frustrated me so I went back to winamp. I'd love to hear a tip from anyone about how to make VLC always show the playlist..
- bane 14y agoFor a while AOL support winamp pretty well. I remember watching hundreds of hours of streaming TV (and streaming radio) over Shoutcast and in2tv when AOL was trying to become a media company. Now that all seems to be dead...fortunately some of it live on...VLC supports shoutcast TV and there are still dozens of stations still broadcasting.
- dakrisht 14y agoNice read to make you remember the good 'ole days of MP3 ripping when it actually took some work. I'm not sure if Winamp could have ever reach iTunes level but it was a major piece of software in the 90s. Nostalgia!
- stratos2 14y agoUsed to love winamp, it was the only think used to play media. Until it got so bloated. Imagine it had a simple, clean interface and loaded lightning fast. I would never use anything else.
- madrona 14y agoInteresting to compare this to the tales of AOL's mismanagement in this comment thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4120136 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4120136
- polyfractal 14y agoSometimes I think I'm the only person who never liked Winamp. I always found it awful. Why do I need fancy skins for a media player? I found Foobar2000 and never looked back. I know you can customize the hell out of Foobar...but I personally loved the default "giant list of searchable songs" format.
- Groxx 14y agoI generally used it because it had better format support than others I'd tried, but no, I hated it too. Tiny buttons, non-resizable interface, bleh. It's everything I hate about skeuomorphic interfaces.
- huhtenberg 14y agoIt wasn't the skins, it was its .exe size that was fascinating :)
- notJim 14y agoAt the time, there was nothing out there that competed with WinAmp--it was simple, fast, and pretty easy to use. It also had features like global hotkeys (before media keyboards were common, or before I had one anyway.) From what I remember, there was a giant-list-of-songs thing (I never used it, but I remember going to parties and there would be a computer sitting somewhere with the giant list of songs up.) Anyway, Foobar came out 5 years after Winamp, and was in fact written by someone who worked for Nullsoft, so I wouldn't say they were competitors exactly, more like Winamp inspired Foobar.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- carry_bit 14y agoWinamp is the only media player I have found adequate so far because of the Nullsoft Signal Processing Studio.
- thought_alarm 14y agoBack in the day I used WinAMP (and X11amp) as a simple front end to my web-based Linux jukebox server that I had ripped all of my CDs on to. Those were the days of AudioGalaxy and Red Hat 6 and WindowMaker. It was a marvelous time, for a couple of years anyway. Then WinAMP 3.0 happened, and it was buggy garbage. Then I discovered what iTunes could do for me as far as organizing my music. It put WinAMP 3.0 in a new light, and I decided to give it another shot. Nope, still garbage. Then I tried the newly-released WMP 9. That was garbage too. So I retired my Linux Jukebox and migrated to iTunes. Then I got an iPod. Then I got a PowerBook. Later I threw out my beige boxes, learned Cocoa and iOS development, and now that's what I do for a living. So if WinAMP 3.0 wasn't such a mess then I might still be a Windows developer. Thanks, WinAMP, for inadvertently putting me on a new path.
- Tyrant505 14y agoClassic. It is strange how us geeks travel down these paths, making us who we are...
- hammock 14y agoWinamp: it really whips the llama's ass!
- mfieldhouse 14y agomaehhhh!
- nostromo 14y agoYou're not the only one. I moved to iTunes from WinAmp when I got tired of meticulously organizing my mp3s into folders. That was the feature that sold me on Windows iTunes. Then came iPods, MacBook Pros, iPhones, iPads and now maybe $10k+ later I'm hook line and sinker into the Mac Eco system.
- antr 14y agopure nostalgia. i think many of us share that very same history
- shasty 14y agoWinamp was always a piece of crap.
- jcr 14y agoThe most often overlooked, but technically best, music player of the late 90's was Kojofol. It's a shame it was never released as open source, but I'm fairly sure it couldn't be. The author had no license for the patented audio compression codecs it used, and it even contained an mostly unknown variant called "Astrid AAC". It's the last bit that has always had me fascinated, and no, it's not AAC as you know it. It was actually a variant of the VQF format with some MPEG-ish bits thrown in there for fun. It always sounded just gorgeous compared to other codecs at equivalent bit rates/sizes. I have a copy of Kojofol around here somewhere along with some old "Astrid AAC" formatted files. I've always thought about reverse engineering it, but there's really no point when you'd just end up in a lawsuit.
- AnandTr 14y agoKojofol was "overlooked" because it sucked.
- conradfr 14y agoKjofol claims of fame was its non-rectangular skins. I think the French developer went to work to Nullsoft and created Wasabi i.e skins in Winamp 3.
- yoasif_ 14y agoLooks kinda like Audion for Mac: https://panic.com/audion/ https://panic.com/audion/ (at least in terms of skinning). Also, looks like Winamp hired the K-Jofol team and released a skin aping it: http://www.winamp.com/skin/k-jofol-v5/142308 http://www.winamp.com/skin/k-jofol-v5/142308
- astrange 14y agoI am not aware of anyone being sued over codec RE. But are you sure it's not just TwinVQ MPEG4?
- bguthrie 14y agoThe original, lean Winamp was a fabulous piece of software--I can't think of many other products I've used that made me so happy, or seemed so much like magic. I still remember feeling awed by the idea that your computer could play, and Winamp was the face of the revolution, managing somehow to seem both nerdy and hip. I stopped using Winamp a bit after the acquisition, so I really enjoyed the article - it filled in a lot of gaps for me. I guess now I know why it started sucking, eventually. Thanks to Frankel and the rest of the team for their hard work - what a cool time and place to be alive.
- pdeuchler 14y agoI do miss my Star Trek theme. I've never been able to find a replacement for iTunes.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pitdesi 14y agoI still haven't found a solution better than winamp with advanced crossfading output (which was last updated in 2002) to DJ a party... I usually bust out my 5-year old PC because nothing beats the crossfader of winamp (coupled with the awesome keyboard shortcuts - the ability to search for anything in the ID3 tags and enqueue the song via keyboard is so useful for a DJ) Anyone have a better solution? Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp... It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.
- blcArmadillo 14y agoAll I can say is winamp is open on my computer playing my music as I write this. Are there really other players out there that do a better job? Seems like a lot of people use iTunes but I've always found it to be a very slow media player. But maybe things have changed I need to reevaluate the current offerings?
- swdunlop 14y agoI find Quod Libet to be my tool of choice, now. The query language is a bit ridiculous, but Mutagen is great for cleaning up crappy tags from my mp3 purchases. Despite being a PyGTK app, it has been fairly responsive and snappy despite my ridiculous media-hoarding habits. http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/
- ageektrapped 14y agoSame. Winamp is the only player I use. The feature that sets it apart: I set a playlist, and _the playlist stays around_ until I change it, no need to explicitly save anything and it survives restarts. WMP and iTunes always forget what you were playing across sessions, at least the last time I tried them.
- vq 14y agoI use MPD. It's really lightweight, have a simple and straightforward concept of playlists and I can use the standard *nix tools to mutate and create playlists. http://mpd.wikia.com http://mpd.wikia.com
- user49598 14y agoWinamp 3, as an application, got it all right. Software developers even today struggle to get applications to be so usable. Dead simple interface Super fast start up Super fast search Easy playlist creation and management Simple keyboard shortcuts Simple configuration Huge library of plugins Zero distractions Stable I still miss winamp. To this day there hasn't been another media player that just got completely out of my way and let me listen to music.
- spectre256 14y agoIt sounds like you are describing Winamp 2. As I recall (and the article seems to confirm) Winamp 3 added no useful features while killing stability and speed. I do remember liking winamp 5 (there was no 4) though.
- masklinn 14y ago> As I recall (and the article seems to confirm) Winamp 3 added no useful features while killing stability and speed. Aye. It added deeper skinning support, but was slow, crash-prone and incompatible with everything built for winamp 2. Winamp 5 was built on the Winamp 2 codebase with some Winamp 3 techs in (such as "modern skins")
- nikcub 14y agoI will always remember Winamp as providing one of the 'wow' moments in my tech life - the first time I downloaded an MP3 from a BBS and played it (only 4MB a song!) Also remembered for one of the greatest release slogans after the mess with the later versions: > "ALMOST AS NEW AS WINAMP 2 Nullsoft Winamp3" [1] [1] Archive version: http://web.archive.org/web/20030920142516/http://winamp.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20030920142516/http://winamp.com/
- aluhut 14y agoI still use winamp 2.9. It is minimal and it still plays mp3s. I don't need it for anything else.
- HCIdivision17 14y agoIs there any other music player with a media library organizer as excellent as Winamp's? I don't mean that contentiously, but rather I just haven't enjoyed any other. Enter text into the search box, and it will filter simply massive playlists as you type. The instant feedback is great in filtering, especially if I forgot what an album was called but knew some other esoteric detail. But I don't use it as a Swiss-Army chainsaw anymore. I just use it for listening to music in Windows. It's pretty good at that. (And version 5 isn't that bad - it's just version 2 plus 3 after all!)
- gcp 14y agoAs other people have pointed out here, foobar2000 pretty much embodies the feel people had about Winamp in 2000. Though there's some large philosophical differences, like the total lack of skinning, and a much better API.
- raverbashing 14y agowell, when on linux I use: mplayer mplayer /path/to/folder/* can't beat that for simplicity
- conradfr 14y agoI still use it as well. Never really had the need to change since its debut ! One thing I've always done is having a video player AND a music player. I don't like launching a video that mess up my playlist. I pause my music, watch video and resume audio afterward. Back then, before WinAMP, I think the only player was the "official" Fraunhofer Institut player, which was very basic. It was a time where CPU consumption mattered, when encoding a mp3 would take up to an hour :) I like the Media Library coupled with the playlist. I like the Bento Skin. I like controlling it from the taskbar. I like that it plays EVERY format out there. I doesn't come with stupid "sound enhancement" settings by default. I listen to Shoutcast radios at work. That said, there is annoying bugs that have not been fixed for ages, which is never a good sign for a software : - notification suddenly not showing and you have to refresh the skin (F5) - the media library artist list messed up and when you click one, another one is eventually displayed (some kind of sort with artists' name beginning with "The" I think). -- In 2008 we "worked" with AOL to have Shoutcast radios in a tablet (pre-iPad era). They were a pain in the ass just to display the Shoutcast logo, while absolutely not helpful in the technical side. -- And Justin Frankel develops Reaper these days, a DAW that I happily bought.
- chris123 14y agoSucking the life out of companies, products, and people is AOL's function in life. And it's damn good at it.
- tzury 14y agoOne word, AOL. There are many more in this startup's cemetery, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL Let alone the total acquisitions value which is grater than AOL current valuation in order of magnitude.
- gonzo 14y agoNot mentioned, Dimitry Bolyrev, author of MacAMP and one-time roommate of Justin Frankel, who got cut out of the deal by Frankel's lawyer-scum father.
- molecule 14y agoXMMS.
- jorleif 14y ago"the company insisted on using its own indigenous billing system" This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full framework? I mean, sure efficiency on paper (and only on paper as we see in this case), and probably a certain kind of clarity to the organization, but still. The right way to do this would be to have the support functions, such as billing be services that business units use if they think they are beneficial, and otherwise not. It would force support functions to be efficient in a whole different way, market driven, rather than "make executive happy"-driven.
- kahawe 14y ago> This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full framework? There might be actual reasons of efficiency and using synergies and if you ever have to comply with regulations, you have one central unit to work on. But I think usually these decisions stem from either a positive will of organizing - because if you have two billing units or systems, things might get out of hand or control and having one just seems more neat and organized and people fear that chaos. Or they stem from nothing but cold, cut-neck, selfish political reasons. Evil-business-guy doesn't want another fish handling money in his pond because just imagine if that little fish turns out to be bigger than evil-business-guy's own billing system? On top of that, even smart-business-guy VERY likely gets a bonus on how much his billing system billed and how well it performed... you think he will let that bonus slip just because it MIGHT be the right thing for winamp? And as a unit helping to bring in the cash, billing typically has a lot of natural influence. And of course we have a lot of 20/20 hindsight in this case. This is a typical example of how difficult it can be to set really good, beneficial goals in an organization and how many natural conflicting interests there can be - and all that in a humongous giant like aol on top of that.
- jorleif 14y agoI understand that this "positive will of organizing" is related to legibility in the sense of James C. Scott (see e.g http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-calle...). But this failure mode is so common, that one would think that it would be in mergers and acquisitions textbooks already! As you say incentives may play a role as well, but I think it is very common that large organisations never actually consider the option of not organizing something, in this case, letting Nullsoft do their billing whatever way they wanted at first, and integrating it later once it is stable enough to allow a complex development project. To lead an organisation, one has to know what is happening in it - This has a complexity cost, which should be explicitly managed. New acquisitions would need to be treated differently, and full assimilations into the acquirer may not be a good result at all.
- zobzu 14y agoOne day WinAMP (nullsoft) was bought by AOL. Anyone remembers? That's when WinAMP started being worse. And that's about what the article says.
- kamaal 14y agoThe problem is most of us think Winamp doesn't even exist anymore. Couple of days back, a close relative of mine bought a used laptop from his friend. I and my cousin generally do technical stuff like OS installation for most of my family members. While browsing through the installed software we noticed Winamp, And we were like 'Does Winamp even exist anymore'!!! And it just came out spontaneously out of our mouths. Winamp isn't in trouble, it is just not relevant anymore.
- maurits 14y agoAh, winamp 2.2-something nostalgia. What a lovely brilliant little player it was. Reminds me of my other favorite player when I switched platform. The story of Audion: http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
- viraptor 14y agoThe greatest thing I remember from winamp was the visualisation plugin. It was a high performance graphics processor really. You could draw a couple of lines oscilloscope-style (plot based on volume in each band), throw in some blur, surface transformation, etc. and you could get amazing 3d-looking "textured" models moving around. It was an amazing framework for playing around with generated graphics. There were some great authors too who could make really nice visualisations effortlessly (or at least it looked like that) - I saw a "rendered" insides of menger sponge done in just a couple of lines of Dynamic Distance Modifier layer. Mind-blowing experience trying to figure out how it worked (like watching demo scene stuff). I remember actually that once AVS got keyboard control, we tried to use it for a presentation in maths class. That's right - a music visualiser was easier to use for some high-school guys than other frameworks to do a 3d graphics presentation!
- sabret00the 14y agoI actually wrote an article about WinAMP and where it's failing a little while back: http://s00techified.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/soo-what-happened-to-winamp/ http://s00techified.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/soo-what-happen... WinAMP like so many projects ultimately needs a steroid shot. It was never supposed to be an iTunes. But it was supposed to be the go-to player for Windows Users. It's a shame it's just stifled. AOL should open source it.
- BadassFractal 14y agoStill using Winamp lite to this day, and I also greatly enjoyed the creator's other great product: Reaper. Nostalgia for simpler times.
- mcdowall 14y agoWinamp was great back in the day, suffered with iTunes for a while and now have deleted all my mp3s and living solely with a Spotify premium account. But I loved those skins on winamp!
- apa-sl 14y agoI'm still using winamp - love it's easily searchable music library and android integration!
- creamyhorror 14y agoWeirdly, I used Winamp from '97 all the way through 2008. I don't remember whether it was v2 or v3 but I was happy with it and never tried anything else. I used VLC only for videos, and switched to MPC(-HomeCinema) later. I heard inklings about the iTunes revolution in the US but I had no iPod nor any need to use iTunes. It was only when I switched to a new desktop PC that I decided to try another music player for fun, which was foobar2000. I like fb2k, but still don't find it as subjectively nice as Winamp was - perhaps because of the default look. (I only use fb2k now, though.) "The llama's ass" will always remain with me, as a vivid and irreverent memento of the first surging waves of the mass Internet crashing upon the shore of my community. Downloading and swapping MP3s in the early days, from websites and via IRC, before AudioGalaxy and Napster...those were exciting times. Thank you for the memories, Winamp.
- ilitirit 14y agoI still use Winamp 2.97. Anything beyond that I wouldn't really classify as good software. I think Justin Frankel was learning C++ at the time and tried to bite off a bit more than he could chew. This was just what I read off their own tech forums and in IRC.
- K2h 14y agoThis article brought back some great memories for me. As a result of reading this, I also looked around for more history on Winamp and enjoyed the post on oldversion [1] that walks through the build history all the way from the DOS version, and a trip to the waybacktime machine [2] to learn about the Fraunhofer winplay3, the only real predecessor to Winamp (packaged with pirated material as a player in the 90's) and now something Fraunhofer wants to deny existed. [1] http://www.oldversion.com/blog/the-history-of-winamp/ http://www.oldversion.com/blog/the-history-of-winamp/ [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/winplay/winplay.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/...
- hastur 14y agoI still use Winamp (with an old-skool theme). There's no better mp3 player for Windows. It's light, has just the right amount of interface, no media library bull crap (doesn't force you to use one, anyways).
- clintboxe 14y agoBack around 2000 I took an old full-tower PC I had laying around and built a MP3 jukebox for my 1993 Volkswagen Fox. It ran Winamp with a plugin for a X10 Mouse Remote. I had a power inverter in the glove box and a fancy new stereo that had a 1/8" jack on the front. With a few bungee cords I secured the tower in the truck and the PC would boot every-time the car started. I skipped school for two days to build it. Without Winamp, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it. Kind of crazy that I can now hop in my car and play pretty much whatever I want using my iPhone & Bluetooth.