On January 14, 2014, it was officially announced that Belgian online radio aggregator Radionomy had bought Winamp and Shoutcast, formerly owned by Nullsoft.
Heads up, the winamp 2.95 download from www.oldversion.com triggers a malware alert from Windows Defender.
Another red flag is that the download is via regular HTTP, not HTTPS.
LICEcap is amazing. It's also been especially good for front-end pull request documentation. Sure, include your code, but a GIF of the feature, working is a nice way to drive home the change.
See, Winamp wasn't "just another player" for some of us. It was the first thing we fired up when we turned on the computer. So, seeing it go down the drain for the last 10 years or so, really hurt . Bloath, bloath and more bloath... damn, I would've opted for RealPlayer if it wasn't for the terrible UI. On the other hand, important features, like plugin playback compatibility was getting worse (for example, there wasn't a single version of Winamp after 5.24 that played back MP3Pro files correctly with the Fraunhoffer MP3Pro plugin, until now ).
>It was the first thing we fired up when we turned on the computer.
Indeed, open winamp and press play. Let it shuffle through my library while I fired up AIM/mIRC/zMUD/etc and would keep playing until I was done with the computer for that session.
Winamp 2 has been my music player for 20 years and it's still my main player that I use with the flac plugin. I never upgraded to Winamp 3 or 5, and Winamp 2.95 is still fully functional on Windows 10. Selecting "Double Size" makes it mostly fine on a HiDPI monitor, except some controls are a bit pixelated.
Winamp 2.95 didn't need to connect to the internet, there is no background service, no application manager bloatware, no ads or music recommendations, and it loads in 1/10 of a second without any startup service or preloader. It really whipped the llama's ass.
Straight up win32 software back then just was simpler, and the programmers back then like Justin Frankel, Ludvig Strigeus, etc. cared about program efficiency. A single programmer could write several popular applications within the decade, and now every application needs a giant team. What happened?
Expectations, I guess? You need to have a shiny UI, smooth animations and cross-platform.
I wrote a small media player back in 2009 called "SmallTune", using Delphi and only Win32 calls. It didn't have the VCL and SysUtils and all that stuff. It utilized BASS.dll and the exe was 230kb in size. It used ~3 MB of RAM. Some screenshots can be found using archive.org [1][2]. It featured a simple library and internet radio.
But boy, was that one hell of maintenance. I dropped the project some months later, because of my girlfriend (I was another person back then). Recently, when I found the source by accident, I started building a Win32 application using .NET Core 3.1 and CoreRT out of curiousity. To my surprise, it worked quite well. I don't know, maybe I'll revive Smalltune some day. I miss it sometimes.
As an aside, I've heard it discussed (on the likes of Slashdot) that one of the reasons Winamp 3 sucked so badly was that they rushed a release that was basically meant to be a complete rewrite just to have "mp3" in the application name.
I remember trying to download Winamp 3 at school. The web filter would block it because it found the string 'mp3' in the URL. In retrospect the administrator wouldn't have seen any more use in allowing students to download a media player than to let them spend bandwidth on the media itself. Up until 2003 ~300 students split a T1. In that year the city started offering municipal broadband and the school switched to 2x 3M/256k DSL.
Yeah :-) Show them the keyboard shortcuts. Like the zxcvb set for the main 5 controls (prev track, play, pause, stop, next track), or pressing j (for jump) and then typing a part of the name of the song you remembered to play what you want at the speed of thought + typing. They'll understand that ~~it's really fast~~ it really whips the llama's ass!
Or you could globally remap them to the Quake-controls and do ctrl+shift+E to pause, next and previous with W and S, 5 sec forward/backward with A/D and on/off with Q.
Nothing like fragging your friends while playing loud music but able to skip a song if it doesn't fit the moment, all without even flipping active window. Never looked at another player because of this function.
Just had to adapt with ctrl+shift+B for next song since S was hard bound in some game.
I've had no better interaction with computers than the "jump to song" dialog in Winamp. It was always instantly responsive, worked when I wanted it, how I wanted it.
No love for Winamp 5? It has enough of a media library to be useful. With the default classic (Winamp 2-era) skin, it loads fast enough and is snappy enough for me.
You can't make money out of shareware, so now everything is SaaS. This makes software way harder to write since now you're responsible for a distributed platform, including devops.
Competition is fierce now. There are very low barriers to entry, which made hobbyist projects (which is what Winamp would be considered now) mostly free.
If there's any money left in those low-barrier markets monopolies expanded into them. The only way to compete with them is with added value like a huge library of music (Spotify). Good luck trying to strike deals with record labels as a lone developer. VCs will devour any corner of opportunity in a blink, demanding growth, which will turn a perfectly fine piece of software into a feature-crept SaaS privacy-invading social platform.
TL;DR: money isn't in software anymore for self-employed people.
> You can't make money out of shareware, so now everything is SaaS.
Do we know how sales of Reaper are doing? That's Justin Frankel's latest project, and it's shareware in the truest sense (downloadable, 5 second nag screen & no other limitations - "you are on day 329 of your 30 day trial period").
Of course, Justin probably doesn't need the income because he has Winamp/AOL money, but I was under the impression that Reaper was at least providing a full time income. And it's certainly supported by most of the music hardware/software industry.
I would roundly disagree. If you find an unexploited niche and effectively corner it, there are still opportunities out there.
Just look at Bitwarden. It started out as a free and truly secure answer to password managers that were cross-platform and web/browser-based, but had issues with trust and privacy. A lone developer put his money where his mouth was, and built the product up into a SaaS that is now a small but profitable company. It’s now the fastest growing password manager out there, and certainly one of the more popular among techs.
> You can't make money out of shareware, so now everything is SaaS.
This is mixing two concerns: Selling stand-alone applications and the specific shareware distribution model.
The SaaS world is struggling with the "freemium" model, too. Nothing pretty much changed there, you get your nag-screens, limited features etc.
Selling apps still works for a lot of people. Sure, it's harder when there's a popular free version available, but the same is true for SaaS again.
One major issue is the pernicious "growth" mindset: Today it's often not enough to earn some decent money, you have to "found" something. And sure, it's friggin' hard to grow a company out of a shareware product.
Marketing. It has become extremely difficult to be found by a large audience on the internet. There are many gatekeepers who want their share before they allow you to become visible to the audience they control.
Old versions of Winamp suffer from some pretty severe vulnerabilities. For this reason I don't think it's a great idea to run anything except the latest official Winamp beta or the latest WACUP.
Oh man, you have made my world that much better today. Thank you. Good coffee, and Winamp 2.95 back on my machine at long last. What more could I possibly want?
Winamp was my first general-purpose music player. When I switched OS to GNU/Linux I switched to XMMS (originally called X11Amp), which was a clone of Winamp. XMMS was later forked to Beep Media Player, and Beep Media Player was forked to Audacious Media Player, which I still use today.
I use the GTK interface of Audacious Media Player now, because it works better with higher resolution screens, but the old Winamp-style interface is still supported, and Audacious Media Player still has all the speed and simplicity that made me love Winamp when I first tried it.
Does anyone else remember the mp3 player wars? Sonique, NAD, Winamp...it was like the early Android/iOS split of the mid-90's. I remember so much from that era!
Winamp 2 & 3 were my sweet spot. I want to say versions 2.53 through 2.56(?) are the versions indelibly burned in my memory. Such a breath of fresh air from the Real garbage of the day. Hope Frankel and Lord are well.
What made you like Winamp3? All I remember about it was that it was a slow hot mess that didn't load my old playlists, and went back to 2.something after a month.
If, like me, you only recently decided to start listening to your music collection on a linux desktop and were dismayed to find that xmms was split into some odd client/server model, you can still use the original xmms 1.x. I wrote up how I built it here, since I found it a bit fiddly: https://blog.mclemon.io/debian-building-the-original-xmms
Just a quick note that, unless there's a very specific reason why you want the original XMMS (nostalgia, or a specific plugin?), it may be more convenient to go with Audacious. It has a "Winamp" mode that gives you the same interface. It also supports classic skins, from back when UIs weren't all flat and boring, so that you can look at your desktop without yawning for more than ten seconds.
Building heirloom :-) GTK and glib isn't a big deal, but Audacious is packaged by pretty much all distros.
Does anyone know what happened to the company that bought Winamp? If I recall correctly they announced that they were going to be releasing modern versions of Winamp a few years ago but there's been nothing but radio silence.
I would argue that WinAmp and XMMS where the last good audio players. Why is it that modern music players think that the need to do library management, why are they fullscreen applications?
We need to start maintaining winamp and the clones again.
For pure mp3 playing, foobar2000 is like winamp except still getting updated, with less ugly (more OS-conforming) UI. For even more simplicity, there's no reason you should need a separate app for mp3s and movies, and mpc-hc is the best no-nonsense media player.
I think there is a reason to keep audio and video playback separate, because you approach them differently.
When you are watching video, it's usually where your attention goes, whereas listening to audio is something done "in the background", while your attention is elsewhere (reading, writing, playing a game, or even cleaning the house).
Therefore to me it is obvious that an audio playing application should behave like a good butler - readily available when you need to e.g. change the playlist, but invisible otherwise - and I would compare a video playing application to a live entertainer.
A video playing application should of course also get out of your way so you can focus on the actual video, but there is a subtle difference nevertheless.
The author of foobar2000 even made another music player that is much simpler, great for people like mrweasel, I think: https://perkele.cc/software/boom
In my opinion, it is the best audio player and available for almost any system. Can do things you would assume are basic features, but most players fail to implement. Like mirroring stereo sound through all you other speakers you might have.
I don't mind having library management, and I would love to have a Linux clone of foobar2000. Nothing else has its tag management and search/sort capabilities.
I put lots of custom tags in all of the tracks I've ripped, downloaded, or recorded live, and I have yet to come across a Linux music player that allows me to search them or sort by them.
Clementine comes close, but not quite close enough. Maybe I need to get some Copious Free Time and rip into its sources.
It basically works perfectly for me, though it can take a bit of setting up. The only downside I'd say is that drag and drop from outside foobar is a bit wonky, you can't always drag and drop from a native file manager (though it always works if you drop onto the status bar instead of the playlist). You can also bypass the wine audio stack: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/foobar2000-on-linux-how-to-b...
That was a late (and welcome) addition that's still optional - you can use Winamp 5.x in classic mini-player mode, with nothing but the queue and playback controls, using your file system to manage what you're playing. I don't, apart from ephemeral files, but apparently it's a thing people like.
Did we? Winamp lost the audio player wars to iTunes because it was the only way to sync music to iPods. But iTunes was a bloated mess, always had to run on startup and had the iTunes Store jammed into it as well.
As a result of this comment I finally jumped through the necessary hoops to get MilkDrop working with foobar2000 - seeing it running at 1080p/60fps feels like I've just arrived in the future.
100% agree. Milkdrop visualisations were awesome. There are some replacements available (you can check out Plane 9), however, I find them nowhere close to good old Milkdrop.
Remembering all the time I wasted collecting and curating a personal MP3 library (now replaced completely by Spotify), I wonder what current practices I spend a lot of time on that will be become obsolete.
I used to religiously upload all my listens to Last.fm, and play all my music through apps that had Last.fm sync capability. I have detailed listening data (down to the day) available for 2005-2015, roughly ~100k listens in all.
Unfortunately, Last.fm as a social network was completely dead, either by user abandonment or by bot infestation. After a couple of years of dead message boards and comments sections, it didn't make sense to keep the scrobbling going.
I still have my old MP3s despite only really using Spotify these days. I don't regret the time spent building and curating that collection in the slightest. If anything, I expect Spotify itself to be the thing that becomes obsolete, leaving me to regret that last several years in which I haven't kept up with adding new music to the collection that I actually own.
> If anything, I expect Spotify itself to be the thing that becomes obsolete
Almost certainly but there will be an alternative company with some migration path for your playlists. Unless omnipresent network connectivity stops being a thing, in which case there would be bigger problems than music.
It's already a problem on Spotify that my playlists rot over time with seemingly random songs being no longer available. Playlists are much less important than the music itself.
I have folders for each year of the '90s and 2000s. This is a personal collection that includes not just what I liked on MTV/radio at the time, but also numerous older tracks that I discovered during those years.
To me, that gives my collection much greater personal and sentimental value than a Spotify retrospective playlist that doesn't align as well with my memories of those days.
Is there anything for Linux that has similar functionality to the Jump To File mechanism for finding and enqueuing songs to play next within in a playlist without altering the playlist itself? It was so good that it was integrated into (IIRC) Winamp 3.
Audacious can actually load Winamp (2) skins, and has the same 'jump to' feature (make sure you use the GTK version, the QT one doesn't have this yet). The search is actually much faster and properly asynchronous wrt your typing, so it's better than Winamp's.
> Is there anything for Linux that has similar functionality to the Jump To File mechanism for finding and enqueuing songs to play next within in a playlist without altering the playlist itself?
Well, in MPD the queue and playlists are separate entities, so you can just add things to the queue without affecting the playlist which you were playing from. But I don't really understand what that Winamp feature does all in all.
As I remember it, in Winamp you load a playlist from the media library (in my case usually all files), and then within that playlist you can use JTFE to select a file to play next. That file in the playlist gets a number [1] next to it and is played next, regardless of whether shuffle is on or not. Any number of tracks in the playlist can be queued like this, each getting a respective queue number next to that tracks entry in the playlist line, and afterward the queue is finished Winamp returns to the standard playback ordering.
So I can have a playlist of all files on shuffle, decide to queue up a specific album or two, and after that it goes back to random shuffle without me having to reset the playlist from scratch.
This ad-hoc playlist-within-a-playlist is also visible within it's own dialog box if so desired.
(I'm starting to wonder how different the abstractions ncmpcpp use compared to mpd, or if it's just a naming thing.)
Edit: or, IIRC, instead of the JTF queue method, you can just immediately jump to a file in a playlist, and after playing that, Winamp returns to the previous spot. I need to make a screencast of this because there's apparently no videos of the functionality around online..
I think my way of listening to music is a bit similar to this. Basically, I use ncmpcpp's "Add random songs" feature with an arbitrary number (let's say 50) to fill up my queue with some stuff from my library. Then if I decide I want to listen to something particular, I search for it in ncmpcpp and then just add it at the top of my queue. It plays it next and then it continues with my random items. My queue is always on consume, so all of the items disappear from the queue after being played/skipped.
Of course, the main "issue" with this is that after the end of the queue is reached, the playback stops. I don't actually mind this, because I can schedule my playback to stop by moving my current item + how many else to the end of the queue. I know that there's a deamon to automatically add random songs at the end of your queue once you run out of stuff in case that's a hurdle (https://github.com/joshkunz/ashuffle).
Thanks for the feedback, but that's fairly different from what I'm seeking.
To be clear, because I've been searching years for this, the main differences are that you are using a shuffled playlist rather than an ordered playlist that is sometimes on shuffle mode, you have to move away from the playlist view to find the album to queue, if you have a shuffled playlist of all files available then you are duplicating files into that playlist to get an ordered selection at the end of the playlist (though you do say you have consume mode on which is a further step away in difference), and you will have to reset the playlist from scratch to get back to a state of having one copy of all files in the playlist.
(I am now wondering how to add files to the top of the playlist (rather than the bottom) in ncmpcpp though :)
Ooh, DOSAMP! I used to use it to play MP3s in high school, when I was still a heavy DOS user and upgraded to a Pentium-133. Then, on Windows, I was firmly in the Winamp 2 camp.
On a related note, we are just about to launch a VJ tool using Milkdrop.
NestDrop allows you to perform with high-resolution high-fps visuals which react in realtime to the music and then broadcasts the video via Spout. Since the Milkdrop engine is at the core you can easily bring in your own presets. Use any audio source to drive the visuals, even live audio.
http://www.nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.html
Whoops. Thanks for the heads up! We just started laying out the webpage to prepare for the release.
Windows is the only supported OS currently.
Basically any range of GPU is supported, according to the resolution you want to run the visuals at. But if you have a decent GPU then you can run up to 4 different video streams concurrently.
I remember there being a website (forgot the name/URL) where people could share their visualizations for Winamp. I downloaded so many presets from there and even recorded some to VHS because I thought they were so cool.
I made my own, too, mostly by taking something made by someone else and changing the code/numbers to see how it would react. I wish I could find those files again somewhere and just spend a moment immersing myself into that universe.
Winamp is great, ah the memories. But just like my gripe with video media, is there anywhere to buy plain mp3s for all artists, store them on my hdd and manage them in winamp? Is that still an option in 2020 without a subscription to something?
Bandcamp. I can download the files I buy as a ZIP and simply import them into whatever player I'm using. On Android that's Phonograph, and on MacOS it's VOX audio player.
In or around 2010, when I finally shed the last shackles of MS, I switched from Winamp to Audacious (w/Winamp Classic interface plugin).
20 uninterrupted years of Bento Classified and whipping the llama's ass!
It's also pretty easy to replace all the standard Audacious icons with Winamp's (at least on Xubuntu). No disrespect intended to Audacious, simply for full effect.
Thanks to everyone behind Winamp and Audacious for building great software!
(Now to start up "The Matrix" on the media monitor and head on over to Slashdot.)
Winamp for me is linked to the time internet was still internet without the giant corporations ruling and ruining the entire single single part with heavily overengineered saas solutions. It was the time of altavista, icq, popup explosions and 1mb download for a program. It was still unexplored cowboy/free for all land, ran by tech dudes. Now its dominated by the absolute evil of capitalism. Not tech, but marketing. bleh
- early Internet - Homebrew Computer Club with a shared ethos of free software and free information for all
- 2000s Internet and later - Bill Gates joins the HCC, refuses to share code, and before long the only incentive to create stuff is to sell it by the truckload, by any means necessary.
Yeah, I remember when Winamp went to hell. I ended up using AIMP, which was fitting because I was "buying" music from some Eastern European "store" that operated under Russian copyright law.
I've got a working macOS Winamp-inspired music player I've been working on. I was thinking of open-sourcing - anyone here interested in something like this?
just came to say ive been a winamp faithful since 2.x and only this year finally found a worthy successor: audacious. open source, crossplatform, and bit perfect
I used MediaMonkey for the longest time in the mid-to-late 2000s. I downloaded MusicBee and wondered if it was the same team behind both apps. The UIs were incredibly similar.
- https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/14/5263086/winamp-radionomy-...
So since this site was launched, it looks like you can now download Winamp from the Official Winamp website:
- http://winamp.com/
For those asking for old versions of Winamp, you can get them here:
- http://www.oldversion.com/windows/winamp/
For those asking for alternatives, there are some:
- https://alternativeto.net/software/winamp/
For other Nullsoft magic, including Gnutella and WASTE, see:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft
Also worth checking out founder Justin Frankel and his new company see:
- https://www.cockos.com/
LICEcap is great.