Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it's still nice to see.
Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.
Remember that before Winamp, there was DOSamp! I used to use version 0.8. Playback was jerky on a 486DX2/66 but once I upgraded to a Pentium, it was smooth sailing.
They seem to be just as cagey about the licensing. Not that there's any obligation for people to be FOSS if they want to give software away, but the intentional avoidance of the question is always instructive. Just say that it's not FOSS, it's fine.
> Will it be free ?
> Yes WACUP will be free to download & to use.
> This is an independent project & due to the amount of time & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where the future will take me & this project.
foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata all at once.
A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.
> A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case,
I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy to customize almost any way you want. There's even a scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current layout.
As for the functionality they find it lacks, well, there's probably a component for that.
Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of functionality out of the box that other media players don't have, like the very robust features found in the "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.
to be fair, it's a lot easier to tell if you do or do not like something than it is to design something you do like. I run into that with vim colorschemes all the time
you'd have a hard time replicating this UI [1] or other winamp skins in foobar2000, so i'm not sure i'd call it a successor except in the sense that it can play anything you throw at it.
I consider it a successor in that it's compact with an emphasis on user customization and community-designed plugins/components. Like Winamp, most functionality you get out of the box is provided by bundled plugins, and they can be replaced with alternatives.
Out of the box, you could certainly customize it to have a similar layout to winamp even if none of the dressing looks at all the same.
My layout[1] is certainly very different than Winamp, but still conforms a lot more to the basic shape of Winamp than the usual giant screen-filling squares that are iTunes, Windows Media Player or the Spotify desktop client.
I'm working on my own cross platform music player that I think has a more polished interface than foobar. I have mac builds now and will start doing windows builds soon:
Overall I’ve had a great experience with Flutter. I tried a few cross platform stacks before settling on it and it feels like the most polished and mature choice.
I love QMMP ( https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/ ). It is compatible with Winamp Skins, supports network playing (shoutcast) and works pretty well in my Linux Mint installations. I may be old fashioned, but man my brain has got so much "muscle memory" on years and years of Winamp use during the 90s ...
I cannot live without stuff like equalizers, visualization plugins, Last.FM scrobbing and even automated track "ripping" of radio stations.
It makes me so sad the state of current audio players like YouTube Music, Spotify, Tidal and the likes. featurewise they are so... bland. Millenials and GenZs just don't enjoy music the same way I used to enjoy it. Maybe it is because there so much of it now that it doesn't matter so much
Literally just yesterday I was staring at Winamp's basic visualizer because I was trying to make something similar in my Godot game.
I'm still not sure exactly what I'm missing, as I have the "gist" of the visualizer working, but it just doesn't look as smooth as Winamp's. I think I need slight persistence and the little effect with the 'caps' that slowly fall down for each column (right now mine looks too jittery).
Those might be called peaks or peak indicators: common in audio interfaces to indicate the maximal decibels in each frequency bucket over the last second or so, so that you don't miss seeing a split-second super loud sound.
It may carry downstream license obligations of its own, that prohibit/complicate public release.
Relatedly, they might be hoping that one of the people looking at it might be willing to buy out or take over contractual responsibility for any components that can't be relicensed to traditional open source. Basically, parading the source around like a debutante because other channels to find buyers haven't panned out.
Or it's just real-world commercial code and is kind of embarassing by the standards of public open source projects.
I still use it for all of my locally stored MP3s. I haven't seen a music player in a long time that focused on playing music rather than being a media library.
Foobar2K still has an active low key community, it has plugins and a framework that allows tech users to add features and share them, but the main release has the approach I prefer - good display capabilities for media library meta data with flexible layout options .. and it's on the user to populate that meta data with third party tools (or plugins).
Primarily it's just a player, potentially it's a lot.
Very weird. They provide a very specific future date for this, and avoided using the term "open source". I can't recall any other company doing this. Most of the time, companies provide a github repository at the same time they make such announcements. Even for twitter, Elon Musk promised the algorithm would be opened, and then some time later it was just there. While generally it is a positive thing to see code being available, I wouldn't think too much into it until I can see the license and the code.
Years ago Microsoft used to do stuff like this, notably releasing .NET Framework under its Reference Source License (you're allowed to look at the code, but that's about it).
It’s still happening. Bad companies are swapping between using ‘open source’ inaccurately (to get grants and funding) and saying ‘source available’ (when people call them on their bullshit) now.
They might not be in a position to relicense all of it, or might not be sure of exactly how to do so appropriately.
Large, living companies like Microsoft can work with their lawyers to confidently understand what they're releasing when opening up old code and indemnify theythemselves appropriately, but a troubled company on its last legs can't nexessarily budget for all that.
Commercial software of that vintage was not built from dependencies that were all open source themselves, nor were there necessarily contributor/contractor agreements that kept copyright in a suitable place for open source relicencing. They might have been prepared for explicit rights transfer to another party, and maybe disclosure as they're suggesting here, but relicensing is a different thing.
I'm one of those 12 people apparently. I don't know, I still listen to mp3 music on my PC almost every day... And I have yet to find another player that is as fast and lightweight as WinAMP
It's great until you move your music and the notice that the carefully sorted playlist you kept updating over 10 years doesn't use relative paths and you can't do search and replace because it's binary.
Not lightweight, but I've fallen in love with MusicBee (https://getmusicbee.com/) and it's been my only music player for at least the last 10 years. Love everything about it.
I remember as a hobbyist Windows programmer (Borland C++ Builder) I was really envious of the skills required to build something like Winamp - especially the UI. Back then, advanced learning resources and examples were effectively non-existent or at least, hard to find and stitch together.
Skinning was pretty easy to do. The packaging format was a zip archive with a renamed extension. You could do a lot with a little photoshop skills and trial and error.
So many people used it that skins would get a lot of distribution, too.
Modern software won't run on a 30 year-old Win95 computer like Winamp did. CSS inside browser-based applications does not count as skinning; that's just an abomination.
That's one of the biggest reasons I still use it. Other music players have strictly fixed UIs that often focus on organizing a music library rather than actually playing your music. I'm quite happy organizing my music using the file system.
I owe my entire career to the fact that Winamp added the ability to re-skin.
I had just graduated graduate school for international economics, and was working for a government contractor who only hired me because I had a masters (they could charge the government more). Because of this, I literally had nothing to do and would just sit in the office.
I eventually figured out an excuse to get my employer to buy Photoshop for me and I started learning it on company time. When Winamp came out with the update to add skins, I ended up making one of the very first skins (meshAMP) which became really popularly.
This led to contract job with STB (to design interfaces for a TV Tuner card they had) and eventually 3DFX (paid in 3d video cards), and eventually a career change and a job as a graphic designer.
Except, I was not a good designer, so I quickly learned to program (ASP.net and then JAVA), which led to Macromedia Flash, which led to Macromedia Generator, which eventually led to a job offer from Macromedia (now Adobe), where I still am (sadly, sans Flash).
Screenshots might take 10’s of kibibytes. Not very baud efficient. Use the webring links at the bottom of the page to find another website that has pictures. Sign their guestbook as thanks.
I found the secret to C++ programming for Windows was using the C API.
It was a long time ago, but IIRC I was using Visual C++ (a very nice compiler that was the first to implement the STL as written) having abandoned Borland Foundation Classes (? name ?) which was dreadful. Woeful.
MFC, the MS C++ offering for writing Windows apps was impossible to use and undocumented at the time. We subscribed to those piles of CDs that MS would send out regularly and I could only find decent documentation for the C API, not the MFC one. Weird.
I used an explicit event loop (simple for a Computer Science graduate like I was) and the C API inside my C++ programme and it worked a treat
I remember fondly writing a winamp clone in school with a team project. We scraped together a rough plugin based player, input and output plugins (a super limited network streaming variant), etc.. good times grinding on a neat project. Yikes, that was like 25 years ago.
Justin Frank used to hang out on IRC in #winprog or something, and I can remember when he was showing us how he made the UI skinnable. Asking for ideas and input etc.
Winamp has a ton of proprietary licensed library code (codecs, Gracenote API, etc) that all has to be replaced with open source equivalents before the code can be released. I believe the skeleton crew that they had working on maintaining Winamp a few years ago started on some of this work, but I'm assuming that the whole codebase needs to be audited to make sure that they're legally in the clear.
I can't remember the last time I thought of winamp, I moved on to foobar2000 and then to streaming services. Even with this announcement, there's no mention of a licence... Too little too late, maybe if foobar2000 became open source but I'd doubt it.
I'm surprised they haven't announced any AI features yet.
It seems like every 5 years ago there's a big "Winamp is BACK" announcement paired with some new nonsense related to whatever the big tech buzzword of the day is. Last time it was blockchains.
Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO.
Still waiting on KaZaA open source. Kids these days don't know what it's like trying to download a music video and end up watching someone getting beheaded.
I’m pretty sure kids these days do know exactly what that’s like (although they wouldn’t be downloading the music video and it wouldn’t have taken over an hour for a shitty 2.3mb file)
Why does a company has to go bankrupt to open source? It’s like something that owners want to do in order to be able to fork, not something that is being done for the community or open side of it.
Source code is not the main asset that makes the final product. Doom is also open source but if you compile the source you won't get the game that's on the self. You still need the game assets for that and those are not open source, you need to buy the game to get those.
I just got here from the “DoJ moves to legalize weed” comment section, and I have the same thing to say: I don’t care why people do a good thing, I’m uncomplicatedly happy it happened.
that explains why i had such a terrible fucking time with their “creator” side, was supposed to have a rep, help setting up, promotion, etc and they didn’t do fuck all for a year and then tried to charge me for it a year later
About 20 years ago, I almost got hired on the Winamp team. They were busy working on Winamp 3, which, from what I gathered, was a pretty much total rewrite using modern C++.
The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I wonder which source code they'll open up. Maybe both.
I had to re-read your comment because first time round I thought you were suggesting it was JF's codebase they hated. Everything else he's ever worked on has been phenomenal (especially Reaper, from the very start).
I just remembered I used to hangout in an IRC chat with the creator of Sonique as a pre-teen when I first started to teach myself to code - Sonique being the main competitor to Winamp way back when.
sonique was interesting because most skins ditched 'square-rectangle' all together. Sometimes it was really wacky, like raindrops on your screen. The visulization engine was very milkdrop-y, too.
For anyone looking for a slightly more modern alternative, I recommend foobar2000[1].
It's not quite as pretty out of the box, but it makes up for it with some insane customizability. It also has a very robust ecosystem of components, and works very well in Wine.
174 comments
[ 11.8 ms ] story [ 3270 ms ] threadhttps://skins.webamp.org/skin/d77a144cdb775a0937617389b6e0e4...
https://skins.webamp.org/skin/dd9931b75c11c570ff8ceabee499e7...
Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.
I'm not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.
https://getwacup.com/
And the Android version which I used briefly around 2010 before getting into Subsonic/D-Sub https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-for-android/29...
(Yes I know it's not called that anymore and I'm showing my age).
The architecture of Winamp is made of various plugins. WACUP is replacing them bit by bit.
Once everything is replaced then porting could be possible, though it's been only built for Windows so there must be a lot of Windows-isms in there.
> Will it be free ?
> Yes WACUP will be free to download & to use.
> This is an independent project & due to the amount of time & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where the future will take me & this project.
A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.
I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy to customize almost any way you want. There's even a scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current layout.
As for the functionality they find it lacks, well, there's probably a component for that.
Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of functionality out of the box that other media players don't have, like the very robust features found in the "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.
[1] https://getwacup.com/screenshots/
Out of the box, you could certainly customize it to have a similar layout to winamp even if none of the dressing looks at all the same.
My layout[1] is certainly very different than Winamp, but still conforms a lot more to the basic shape of Winamp than the usual giant screen-filling squares that are iTunes, Windows Media Player or the Spotify desktop client.
1. https://i.postimg.cc/R0JzVTK8/image.png
https://plastaq.com/minimoon
Overall I’ve had a great experience with Flutter. I tried a few cross platform stacks before settling on it and it feels like the most polished and mature choice.
I cannot live without stuff like equalizers, visualization plugins, Last.FM scrobbing and even automated track "ripping" of radio stations.
It makes me so sad the state of current audio players like YouTube Music, Spotify, Tidal and the likes. featurewise they are so... bland. Millenials and GenZs just don't enjoy music the same way I used to enjoy it. Maybe it is because there so much of it now that it doesn't matter so much
I'm still not sure exactly what I'm missing, as I have the "gist" of the visualizer working, but it just doesn't look as smooth as Winamp's. I think I need slight persistence and the little effect with the 'caps' that slowly fall down for each column (right now mine looks too jittery).
Relatedly, they might be hoping that one of the people looking at it might be willing to buy out or take over contractual responsibility for any components that can't be relicensed to traditional open source. Basically, parading the source around like a debutante because other channels to find buyers haven't panned out.
Or it's just real-world commercial code and is kind of embarassing by the standards of public open source projects.
Primarily it's just a player, potentially it's a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS
https://flathub.org/apps/search?q=Music%20player
Years ago Microsoft used to do stuff like this, notably releasing .NET Framework under its Reference Source License (you're allowed to look at the code, but that's about it).
https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...
Large, living companies like Microsoft can work with their lawyers to confidently understand what they're releasing when opening up old code and indemnify theythemselves appropriately, but a troubled company on its last legs can't nexessarily budget for all that.
Commercial software of that vintage was not built from dependencies that were all open source themselves, nor were there necessarily contributor/contractor agreements that kept copyright in a suitable place for open source relicencing. They might have been prepared for explicit rights transfer to another party, and maybe disclosure as they're suggesting here, but relicensing is a different thing.
https://www.bonequest.com/1099
Skinning was pretty easy to do. The packaging format was a zip archive with a renamed extension. You could do a lot with a little photoshop skills and trial and error.
So many people used it that skins would get a lot of distribution, too.
I had just graduated graduate school for international economics, and was working for a government contractor who only hired me because I had a masters (they could charge the government more). Because of this, I literally had nothing to do and would just sit in the office.
I eventually figured out an excuse to get my employer to buy Photoshop for me and I started learning it on company time. When Winamp came out with the update to add skins, I ended up making one of the very first skins (meshAMP) which became really popularly.
https://archive.org/details/winampskins_meshAmp
(I am cringing looking at it now)
This led to contract job with STB (to design interfaces for a TV Tuner card they had) and eventually 3DFX (paid in 3d video cards), and eventually a career change and a job as a graphic designer.
Except, I was not a good designer, so I quickly learned to program (ASP.net and then JAVA), which led to Macromedia Flash, which led to Macromedia Generator, which eventually led to a job offer from Macromedia (now Adobe), where I still am (sadly, sans Flash).
Anyways, thank your WinAMP!
Anyway your winamp skin is cool
Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm
It was a long time ago, but IIRC I was using Visual C++ (a very nice compiler that was the first to implement the STL as written) having abandoned Borland Foundation Classes (? name ?) which was dreadful. Woeful.
MFC, the MS C++ offering for writing Windows apps was impossible to use and undocumented at the time. We subscribed to those piles of CDs that MS would send out regularly and I could only find decent documentation for the C API, not the MFC one. Weird.
I used an explicit event loop (simple for a Computer Science graduate like I was) and the C API inside my C++ programme and it worked a treat
Those were (not) the days....
This was back in 96-97?
There are 5 press releases total on that site, 2 from 2023, 2 from 2024, and this one from year "1". It just seems very strange.
But what I really want to know is: will it really kick the LLaMAs ass now with AI features?
It seems like every 5 years ago there's a big "Winamp is BACK" announcement paired with some new nonsense related to whatever the big tech buzzword of the day is. Last time it was blockchains.
Looking forward to this code being lightly maintained for minimal compatibility with future OSes. I dislike change!
https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-site-design/46...
Once you are going bankrupt, you are going to lose the asset anyway, so there is no incentive to keep it closed source.
Is it really that hard to figure out why a company open sources when going bankrupt?
The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I wonder which source code they'll open up. Maybe both.
So was that at AOL?
Strange how memory works.
Maybe plug-in NewPipe or similar instead and fork it?
It's not quite as pretty out of the box, but it makes up for it with some insane customizability. It also has a very robust ecosystem of components, and works very well in Wine.
1. https://www.foobar2000.org/