It's better to archive software (well, everything!), regardless of what it is. Helping people find and use archived historical software is a wonderful idea.
Guess I'm slow. I'm halfway through recursively fetching download.nullsoft.com/winamp/ with the intention of seeding a new torrent on TPB. Is that what you grabbed?
Will you also indemnify AOL against all third party claims should someone use the software, it messes up their Windows 9.3 filesystem, and they end up suing... however meritless the case may be? Will you accept responsibility for acting as the DMCA contact and updating the site within the time limits provided in the Safe Harbor provisions should a skin, plugin, or visualization infringe someone else's copyright? Will you also update the apps for free to keep current with mobile and desktop OS changes?
I'm guessing AOL has looked at all this and sees $$$ for both the business risk as well as maintaining software which they have deemed does nothing for their company goals. As a result, they are better off focusing their limited resources towards efforts which do further their goals.
This is why I really, really hate the modern, diversified corporation.
The decision of whether to continue a product line within a large corporation is very, very different from whether or not a product line could keep a small business afloat. If you're a small business, the only question is "are we making payroll?". Within a large, diversified corporation, you have to ask if a project is as valuable as your alternatives. Mom-and-pop's with a sustainable business can't and don't say, "Yeah, this is profitable, but it'd be more profitable if we dropped everything we're doing and put our resources towards a different sector entirely." But it's entirely feasible and rational for a large corporation to look at it's hundred sub-businesses, axe the ten least profitable, and put the people to work on the ten most profitable.
I'd be a lot happier if modern corporations were small, narrowly focused beasts, and not the monstrous conglomerations we have instead.
I would guess that there will be some sort of re-branding/re-launch of something since the message refers primarily to the winamp.com domain. Someone may have purchased the domain or AOL may do something new with it.
As @thinkpad20 said. I bet there are a lot of people that would fix things, provided it is not systemic design errors that would require global refactoring.
The original developers all departed in 2003/2004, winamp has been maintained / extended by whomever AOL could find to work on it for about a decade now. That doesn't bode terribly well for the current state of the code base.
How would the vulnerability discovery work? Is the current code encrypted so that it can't be viewed?
My understanding of the process is that code is written in a language that must be compiled. After it is compiled, it is then "packaged" into an installer file, whose internals cannot be examined. After it is installed, it then consists of a directory full of files which help run the program, but these can still not be examined.
Is it true that the code cannot be seen at all these stages? No way to reverse engineer it?
And by open sourcing, an experienced person could see ways to break the code by causing infinite loops, creating false helper files, using a fake "mp3" file, etc?
Vulnerabilities can still be discovered in the compiled code, but they are easier to discover in the source code. Simply running a static analyser on the code will probably point out numerous possible vulnerabilities already.
At least on Linux. The original was x11amp, which becamse XMMS. But there are much better options, especially if you want to go text mode. MOC (http://moc.daper.net/), or even mplayer if you just want simple playback. And of course, the original mpg123. Let's just say, open source music players are a solved problem.
Winamp has pretty much been Adware since Nullsoft was bought by AOL. It takes time to get an old proprietary codebase into a state where it can be released publicly. It could contain poor written code, rude comments, adware, phoning home, GPL or patent violations, secret RIAA backdoors, etc.
Probably due to licenses on libraries they use which would be in conflict with open source libraries.
Some company needs to buy the trademark and intellectual property from winsome, get rid of open source-incompatible libraries, open the source code, start a community, clean it up from all the nags, and release, release, release.
AOL if you are reading I'm willing to make an offer before you completely toss it to the trash. Perhaps we should start a kickstarter project to come up with the necessary capital to make a serious offer.
Probably due to licenses on libraries they use which would be in conflict with open source libraries.
Some company needs to buy the trademark and intellectual property from winsome, get rid of open source-incompatible libraries, open the source code, start a community, clean it up from all the nags, and release, release, release.
AOL if you are reading I'm willing to make an offer before you completely toss it to the trash. Perhaps we should start a kickstarter project to come up with the necessary capital to make a serious offer.
Thank you Justin Frankel for this wonderfully whimsical piece of software and all the code you have shared over the years. I wouldn't have been a programmer if it weren't for you being providing such a stellar role model.
And I bet many people don't even know that after Winamp Justin Frenkel started making his hands dirty with digital audio workstation coding and made a fantastic one! http://www.reaper.fm/ with a unbelievable set of features for 4 Mb (yessir!) and super competitive licensing options (but you can still try the full software free with no limitations whatsoever!). If you make music with your Pc or Mac this will shock you on many levels, starting from filesize! This guy knows what he's doing! Thanks Justin! If winamp code will be made public there will be a lot to learn!
Wow, i learned Reaper as part of a coursera course on Earsketch of Georgia Tech. I would never have guessed reaper was connected to winamp this way. Reaper is indeed a non-bs daw, among so many great ones....
I used Winamp for years, and have used Reaper for years and didn't realize they were connected. Makes perfect sense now that I think about it. Thanks for pointing that out.
Honest Business Model
We offer a good product at a fair price.
We don't spend money and effort on marketing, complicated piracy protection, or other things that do not directly improve REAPER and the user experience.
We think the good will generated by playing fair and being responsive to users is more valuable to our business than short-term profits.
Too bad, I liked their Android player as well. One of the few pieces of software I have used continuously for... oi... longer than I care to admit. Makes me sad.
Android user here too. I remember just a year ago I tried a dozen apps for ShoutCast playing and it was the best. Sad to see it go. Used it a lot back on Windows back in the day when that was my OS as well. Was one of the few players with lots of high quality skins, including large size ones, and game pad controls, great for parties.
I still use Winamp as my main musicplayer - it's customizable, import/exports to iPod easily, doesn't spam me with updates, doesn't force me to buy things through it, reads basically every format and above all it is really light.
It's a shame - seems like it died because it doesn't have a content purchasing mechanism forced on the user.
If you want a nice, cross-platform, sane, fast alternative, including streaming between users, you should have a look at the open source Tomahawk. http://www.tomahawk-player.org/
Tomahawk is the only cross-platform media player I've seen that looks really good on OS X, too. I don't have much need for a desktop media player anymore with a phone always in my pocket, but I really enjoyed using it when I did.
Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.
I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
Nothing will ever beat the joys of finding new "skins" for the Winamp player -- I had so many amazing ones lined up, and loved nothing more than switching them all out.
I still do that fairly often. Audacious can load Winamp skins. Sometimes its interface borks on my collection (35,000+ songs), but it's responsive enough.
My desktop still looks very much like it did in the 1990s...
> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a player as winamp was but it did manage the library / tagging bits quite well. It seems to still be active so may be worth a look.
For a multiplatform solution, I used a MusicBrainz Picard client for batch autoidentification and ID3 correction. However currently I feel that I wasted too many hours of my life hoarding and caring for a local mp3/soulseek library and nowadays only listen to online music.
MediaMonkey [1] is awesome to find something. It's mainly a music organizer that just happens to be able to play music but it works great even with scattered single mp3 files. Autoplaylists [2], scriptable and extensive search options. Been using it for over 6 years now and never looked back :)
I definitely recommend MediaMonkey Gold. It will keep your library organized, but however you want it, with no hassle at all. And if you're insane like me and keep a flac library, you can keep an mp3 mirror for your mp3 player/phone.
And you can switch between space used and time/processing power needed. Instead of keeping mirrors you could tell it to convert the files (depending on what you connected) on the fly into whatever format you want.
As others have said, foobar2000 for the minimalist, free approach with lots of configuration options, or MediaMonkey for a really good bit of paid software. The paid version of MM syncs perfectly well with iDevices and pretty much anything else too. Highly recommended. Also it doesn't force you into any particular directory structure in your music library so it'll take what you give it.
I recently fixed the id3 tags of all the mp3 music I own using MusicBrainz picard. Very useful software that uses a global database of music signatures.
Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95, which is allegedly the best version out there.
Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple.
I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.
Me: Can't I pause that song by hitting space?
WMP: No, there are no keyboard shortcuts!
Me: I wanna play all the songs of this folder!
WMP: Ok, but I'll mess up the order! By the way, are you interested in purchasing
more songs from this artist? Cause I got a VirginMega link just right here!
Me: No thanks...
WMP: Why not? I mean, iTunes gets away with it, why can't I?
Me: I just want to play some music.
WMP: Really?? JUST that??
Me: I wish.
Peter was notable for maintaining a lot of the audio output backends for Winamp. People who had problems with their Creative Labs sound cards (read: basically anyone who owned one) causing playback glitches in Winamp would post about it on the Winamp forums and peter would get really cranky and eventually figure out how to fix it. (:
You have to enable a setting to see [dead] posts, and you can't reply to them. That's why people post as siblings, hoping that the banned person will come back to the thread and see their name.
HN has an amusingly childish policy of hellbanning individuals it deems inappropriate or otherwise objectionable--hellbanning hides the banned account's comments to everyone unless you set "showdead" to true in your account preferences.
Some users have started kindly informing the hellbanned posters that, for whatever reasons, don't seem to notice that no one ever responds or upvotes their comments.
If I may get on my soapbox (if I wasn't already), I find the whole thing symptomatic of Silicon Valley's culture of networking hell and reputation management. It's a policy of elitism; a policy that disenfranchises in the name of some fictional notion of quality; a policy that demonstrates just how rotten the tech industry is at heart.
Why do I go that far? Because community culture is indicative of so many things. This is the community and atmosphere that pg set up, that pg creates, moderates, and maintains.
pg may not be formally 'responsible,' but he's certainly at the head.
Because I'm an asshole, but not enough of one to get hellbanned (at least on this account), I am in some state of suspension: an artificial delay imposed on every request.
(That's what I don't get about HN's moderation: what, did you think I wouldn't notice that you're essentially trying to herd me like chattel? I stubbornly keep this account kicking out of simple contrariness.)
That's all well and good, but let's take a look at what the trigger was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5615120 . If you ran a community -- and realistically there's nothing stopping you from doing so -- would you tolerate that kind of nonsense? I know I wouldn't want to hang around there if you did.
You're right (to continue going slightly meta), it's a policy of elitism, but in the same vein as Wikipedia. They too are still around as a result.
Side note: Quality is quantifiable to a degree and is by no means a fictional notion.
Discussion forums are for discussion. Angry conversation is an emergent property of some discussions, on the net or off, but not the sole response to anything you may disagree with.
My own opinion on hell-banning or any other forms of account "punishment" is that it is, as you say, cowardly and ineffective, as long as the user has no idea that it has occurred. Either inform the user, or completely ban the account. Otherwise you're leaving people screaming into the wind when you could just tell them no-one is listening.
The whole point is that it's not about punishment, it's about preserving the tone.
Telling somebody "you've been banned" will make them upset. Some people get severely offended and they want to fight. So they go and create new accounts and start over, or they seek revenge in other ways. It can be very time consuming to deal with. Granted, this will still happen because some people will realize that they've been hellbanned, but the ones that simply get the impression that people aren't responding to their trolling will get bored with it and go away. Which is a win.
I agree, I've used foobar2000 [1] for over ten years when Winamp (my previous goto music player) started to get all crashy and hangy for no good reason. It's pretty solid, can handle massive playlists and has nice clean and simple UI with no cruft. My only wish is that they did foobar2000 for Android.
I used Winamp heavily until the version where they added video support. That version was extremely buggy for me and I used the previous version for several years until I found Foobar2000.
It looks like 2.90 was when they added video support:
The nice thing about old, simple software is that the attack vectors are often known publicly and are easy to work around. In the instance of Winamp, older versions of 2.x have a buffer overflow exploit in the playlist parsing. So.. don't load playlists from untrusted sources, something most people never do anyway.
I use Windows 7 WMP every day because the media keys on my laptop only work with that and I have never ever encountered any of those problems you are talking about.
- I can pause/unpause with space.
- The song order remains after I drag in the folder.
- Right after the very first start (i.e. on clean win7), it asks you if you want to see ads of songs of similar artists you listen to.
WMP is why I bought an iPod. As a Microsft employee at the time, I struggled longer than any mortal should to get WMP to sync music to my 2003-era Windows Phone. I eventually realized that any kind of synchronization and general usefulness in using WMP with a Windows Phone was nothing but marketing lies. So one day I said, "get in the car, honey, we're going to buy iPods."
iPods led to iPhones, which led to iOS development and Macs, to the point that there are no more Windows machines in the house and I haven't done Windows development in about five years.
All kicked off by the fact that MSFT couldn't make a software music player that didn't suck.
I have also an old version of winamp because a melomane of my friends told me the transitions between songs was better in old winamp than in recent one.
I always used Winamp on Windows, so when I switched to Linux I tried basically every single open-source alternative that worked with my workflow: Per-song ratings, a nested Genre/Artist/Album/Song library browser, global hotkeys, able to handle a collection of >100 GB and a useful playlist/queue system.
It probably lacks some of the advanced stuff you would want, but I use it as I still do with Winamp: setup keyboard hotkeys to execute audacious -[rft] (skip around in songs from any app), load a folder (or folders) of songs and play them. Throw on ProjectM and you have a poor man's substitute for Milkdrop. And there's Shoutcast support as well.
The UI runs in skinned mode (pictured above) or in a more traditional mode that doesn't look out of place on your desktop.
I use cmus too. For those who don't know it is a command line music player with a VIM-like command line interface ("/" to search, ":set x=x" to set various options).
MPD is pretty popular too http://www.musicpd.org/
It has a client/server model and you can create your own music streaming service by controlling it remotely and streaming back over http.
ncmpc/ncmpcpp is a client for mpd that resembles cmus quite a lot.
I remember as a teen talking to the developers on IRC, in one of the Windows development channels. I remember thinking they were crazy because they didn't want to use the standard Windows components to do the UI. I also remember wondering why anyone bother spending a half hour downloading 1 song over a 56k modem when you could just set your Sony Discman on top of your computer!
Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and effort into a project.
Even though I moved to another player on my desktop long ago, I still use it on my Android device. Sad that it's going away :(. They should definitely open source it.
523 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadThanks for all the skins and memories!
Edit: Will this affect Shoutcast?
http://www.shoutcast.com/
[1] http://www.archiveteam.org/
This comment is brought to you by https://archive.org/details/software
I'm guessing AOL has looked at all this and sees $$$ for both the business risk as well as maintaining software which they have deemed does nothing for their company goals. As a result, they are better off focusing their limited resources towards efforts which do further their goals.
The decision of whether to continue a product line within a large corporation is very, very different from whether or not a product line could keep a small business afloat. If you're a small business, the only question is "are we making payroll?". Within a large, diversified corporation, you have to ask if a project is as valuable as your alternatives. Mom-and-pop's with a sustainable business can't and don't say, "Yeah, this is profitable, but it'd be more profitable if we dropped everything we're doing and put our resources towards a different sector entirely." But it's entirely feasible and rational for a large corporation to look at it's hundred sub-businesses, axe the ten least profitable, and put the people to work on the ten most profitable.
I'd be a lot happier if modern corporations were small, narrowly focused beasts, and not the monstrous conglomerations we have instead.
My understanding of the process is that code is written in a language that must be compiled. After it is compiled, it is then "packaged" into an installer file, whose internals cannot be examined. After it is installed, it then consists of a directory full of files which help run the program, but these can still not be examined.
Is it true that the code cannot be seen at all these stages? No way to reverse engineer it?
And by open sourcing, an experienced person could see ways to break the code by causing infinite loops, creating false helper files, using a fake "mp3" file, etc?
Some company needs to buy the trademark and intellectual property from winsome, get rid of open source-incompatible libraries, open the source code, start a community, clean it up from all the nags, and release, release, release.
AOL if you are reading I'm willing to make an offer before you completely toss it to the trash. Perhaps we should start a kickstarter project to come up with the necessary capital to make a serious offer.
Find me @gubatron
Some company needs to buy the trademark and intellectual property from winsome, get rid of open source-incompatible libraries, open the source code, start a community, clean it up from all the nags, and release, release, release.
AOL if you are reading I'm willing to make an offer before you completely toss it to the trash. Perhaps we should start a kickstarter project to come up with the necessary capital to make a serious offer.
Find me @gubatron
Honest Business Model We offer a good product at a fair price.
We don't spend money and effort on marketing, complicated piracy protection, or other things that do not directly improve REAPER and the user experience.
We think the good will generated by playing fair and being responsive to users is more valuable to our business than short-term profits.
<title><div id="ad_play_300"><script type="text/javascript"> <!-- adSetType("F"); htmlAdWH("93301178", "300", "250"); adSetType(""); //--> </script></div></title>
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-...
It's a shame - seems like it died because it doesn't have a content purchasing mechanism forced on the user.
Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.
I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.
Sad to see it go...
IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA'S ASS
My desktop still looks very much like it did in the 1990s...
End of an era. Sad day.
Foobar 2k works very, very well.
I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a player as winamp was but it did manage the library / tagging bits quite well. It seems to still be active so may be worth a look.
[1] http://www.mediamonkey.com
[2] Autoplaylists are only available for the Gold version.
Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple.
I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.
Also, it was developed by some of the people who originally developed Winamp.
EDIT: He's also been working on an audio player called Boom: http://perkele.cc/software/boom
Some users have started kindly informing the hellbanned posters that, for whatever reasons, don't seem to notice that no one ever responds or upvotes their comments.
If I may get on my soapbox (if I wasn't already), I find the whole thing symptomatic of Silicon Valley's culture of networking hell and reputation management. It's a policy of elitism; a policy that disenfranchises in the name of some fictional notion of quality; a policy that demonstrates just how rotten the tech industry is at heart.
Why do I go that far? Because community culture is indicative of so many things. This is the community and atmosphere that pg set up, that pg creates, moderates, and maintains.
pg may not be formally 'responsible,' but he's certainly at the head.
Because I'm an asshole, but not enough of one to get hellbanned (at least on this account), I am in some state of suspension: an artificial delay imposed on every request.
(That's what I don't get about HN's moderation: what, did you think I wouldn't notice that you're essentially trying to herd me like chattel? I stubbornly keep this account kicking out of simple contrariness.)
You're right (to continue going slightly meta), it's a policy of elitism, but in the same vein as Wikipedia. They too are still around as a result.
Side note: Quality is quantifiable to a degree and is by no means a fictional notion.
This isn't Wikipedia, it's a discussion forum--and the discussion pages on Wikipedia are moderated fairly and openly.
I didn't mean that quality as a whole was fictional, I meant that the notion of quality this policy is attempting to enact was fictional/unattainable.
Flame wars still happen. People still complain about the nastiness of HN comments. It's a discussion forum: angry conversation is what it's for.
Hellbanning does absolutely nothing to improve 'quality of discourse,' it just makes this place nastier.
My own opinion on hell-banning or any other forms of account "punishment" is that it is, as you say, cowardly and ineffective, as long as the user has no idea that it has occurred. Either inform the user, or completely ban the account. Otherwise you're leaving people screaming into the wind when you could just tell them no-one is listening.
Telling somebody "you've been banned" will make them upset. Some people get severely offended and they want to fight. So they go and create new accounts and start over, or they seek revenge in other ways. It can be very time consuming to deal with. Granted, this will still happen because some people will realize that they've been hellbanned, but the ones that simply get the impression that people aren't responding to their trolling will get bored with it and go away. Which is a win.
[1]: http://www.foobar2000.org/
If so, where can I download it and where can I donate to whoever wrote it?
Anyone have a Mac player they use with similar philosophy/featureset to Foobar?
For a ten-year old Winamp I'd have my doubts about Unicode support at the very least.
[1] http://www.aimp.ru/
Multiple playlist tabs, though, are great. Fortunately Audacious has them too.
It looks like 2.90 was when they added video support:
"added integrated full featured video support (NSV and DirectShow (AVI,ASf,MPEG,etc))" -- http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=130748
- I can pause/unpause with space.
- The song order remains after I drag in the folder.
- Right after the very first start (i.e. on clean win7), it asks you if you want to see ads of songs of similar artists you listen to.
iPods led to iPhones, which led to iOS development and Macs, to the point that there are no more Windows machines in the house and I haven't done Windows development in about five years.
All kicked off by the fact that MSFT couldn't make a software music player that didn't suck.
For anyone else looking for the same thing: the one that I ended up choosing was http://gmusicbrowser.org/. See http://gmusicbrowser.org/screenshots/ListsLibraryContext.png.
It probably lacks some of the advanced stuff you would want, but I use it as I still do with Winamp: setup keyboard hotkeys to execute audacious -[rft] (skip around in songs from any app), load a folder (or folders) of songs and play them. Throw on ProjectM and you have a poor man's substitute for Milkdrop. And there's Shoutcast support as well.
The UI runs in skinned mode (pictured above) or in a more traditional mode that doesn't look out of place on your desktop.
Regarding Winamp, I've always loved it's tagline "Winamp kicks the llama's ass" (or was it butt?).
Notwithstanding that Real Player was quite popular in Asia, a few years ago, during the portable media player years.
Lightweight
Unobtrusive, customisable, highly functional UI
Fades out tracks when u stop (to not have a harsh cut off waveform)
Its what I currently use. Current build will probably run on windows for a loong loong time to come tho.
Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and effort into a project.