I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?
For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...
I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:
The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.
Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.
EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618
REAPER is awesome! It has been my DAW of choice for 15 years now. It opens instantly, it's very fast and snappy and it practically never crashes.
I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.
You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.
You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.
You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.
You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.
In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.
Reaper has been growing MASSIVELY in popularity in recent years. It's actively on course to topple Pro Tools as the de factory standard for recording studios. It was considered "the little guy" and a niche product just a few years ago but industry professionals have been discovering it and it's popularity is going exponential.
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1]
> nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now
- Justin January 2026
WASTE became popular in our area just as LANning was ending its heyday. Even now I think the whole course of technology could have been altered if WASTE was utilised in a "corporate VPN" fashion, instead of the rise of Juniper routers and Sharepoint spaces, we could have had much simpler secure work-collaboration protocols.
That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).
I won’t nitpick too hard because the percentage doesn’t move much, but Netscape went public in ‘95 so it’s got to be before that. The minimum would be ‘91 (first website) but that’s too early. Super geeky but I will peg it at April 1 1995, which was the first release of Apache HTTP.
The difference comes down to focusing on what we think of as the core infrastructure of the internet (the first modern browser, apache), versus _access_. I think there was a pretty big jump around 1996, 1997 in dialup subscribers. To get geekier though, we could actually peg it at late 1993/1994, the eternal september.
Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield.
What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms.
It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2].
NDIS is extremely elegant and runs on just about every windows version. It also has plugin support for almost anything you can imagine. I used it for my concept project of building a re-usable installer for python modules: it takes the installers own file name as the input for what python module to install. So you can basically have a new installer for any python module just by renaming a file
I wrote this when vibe coding wasn't a thing, could be a cool idea though to add mirror support for some resources the installer downloads and fallback to archive.org if hosts are down. That's one of the very cool things about NSIS -- everything you need for it already exists. Downloader, authentication, compression, all kinds of neat stuff. There's some many plugins for NSIS you could build working software just out of NSIS alone.
Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco
This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0]
Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives.
The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too.
Anyway.
It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them.
[0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.
35 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] thread> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...
I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:
https://www.reaper.fm/
The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.
Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.
EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618
EDIT TWO: You can run his Ademo demo on archive.org, type "ademo 1" at the C:\ prompt in the web based DOSbox to run: https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft
I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.
You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.
You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.
You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.
You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.
In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@TheREAPERBlog
> nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now - Justin January 2026
[0] https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3
[1] https://www.askjf.com/
Peer-to-peer (back when P2P was all the rage), encrypted, decentralized private networks.
Group of friends and I used it post-college as a way to share files and chat, and was much better than AIM or other instant messaging at the time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
I think I'll stick with 1996 though :)
What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms.
It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2].
0 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page
1 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_i...
2 - https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis
https://github.com/robertsdotpm/win-auto-py3 (example exe points to resources on an old server i no longer have. so won't run but all the files and code are there and work.)
I wrote this when vibe coding wasn't a thing, could be a cool idea though to add mirror support for some resources the installer downloads and fallback to archive.org if hosts are down. That's one of the very cool things about NSIS -- everything you need for it already exists. Downloader, authentication, compression, all kinds of neat stuff. There's some many plugins for NSIS you could build working software just out of NSIS alone.
https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523
Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives.
The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too.
Anyway.
It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them.
[0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.