Winamp Down for the Count 815
Artifex writes "BetaNews is reporting that the doors at Nullsoft have been closed: 'The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.'" The Register also has a story.
OS Winamp (Score:4, Interesting)
Expected Outcome. (Score:5, Interesting)
Read more here: http://p2pnet.net/story/2965
Winamp 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully the programmers will leave and start some free Winamp like project in the Firefox vein..
Open Amp, here we come
-- Jim.
Now all we will get is bloatware (Score:2, Interesting)
What's a good alternative for people stuck with... (Score:5, Interesting)
If anyone wanted to listen to my Icecast streams, or the ogg recordings I made, I always pointed them at Winamp, as it worked, and was free. And I couldn't be bothered answering lots of questions about codecs, and stuff.
What's the best thing now?
Re:It's successor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, did we ever see evidence that AOL had any intention of using Netscape or Winamp for anything, or was it just to kill the projects?
Re:It's successor? (Score:2, Interesting)
I really hope we don't see a Windows Media Player era.
Buying it from AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
Goodbye old pal. (Score:4, Interesting)
But Winamp was the first free gui audio player that I ever really enjoyed. I remember sending playlists to friends as a way to encourage them to download it. Thanks for helping to make computers cool, Nullsoft. You were great.
Re:sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Woah! (Score:5, Interesting)
- Google Winamp
- Google OpenOffice
- Google Firefox/Phoenix (complete with gmail integration)
- Google Linux (BSD?)
Now that they've sold their souls to the devil (i.e. - gone public), they've certainly got the resources to put it together with the much needed polish that the mainstream is looking for.
Re:It's successor? (Score:5, Interesting)
AOL seemed to have a clue, but didn't really know how to act on it. Time Warner simply sees no value in a product when there is a working Microsoft version of the same thing.
XMMS (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Time to open it up! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's successor? (Score:3, Interesting)
Winamp is Dead, Long Live Winamp! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Time to open it up! (Score:2, Interesting)
Competition will be good for iTunes. If iTunes is one of the good guys, competition should help it stay that way. If it's not a good guy, well... the last thing we need is for iTunes to become the next IE.
Re:Looking for a good WinAmp replacement? (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, it looks like CDex, only CDex isn't meant to be my media player.
Is there a plugin/interface that will make it look like Winamp/XMMS? Or even better, a XMMS port for Windows?
Why is this a big deal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is this a big deal? Don't get me wrong, I've been a WinAmp user for years, and I love the program for playing my MP3s. But just because it's not going to get any more updates, why is that a big deal?
I mean, we're talking about a program designed for little more than playing audio (and later video) files. Once that is accomplished, and once the bugs have been relatively shaken out, anything else is just the beginnings of bloatware.
WinAmp has seemed to be relatively bug free to me, and works for what it was designed (audio/video) files. Why do we *NEED* more updates (other than if more bugs are found, of course)?
Re:Time to open it up! (Score:2, Interesting)
And the best thing? It had keyboard shortcuts. For someone that rarely uses the mouse that's what got it for me.
I've no need for a successor. Winamp 2.9 or 5 is fine for me.
Re:It's successor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's successor? (Score:5, Interesting)
At one time, Netscape, Nullsoft, Spinner etc. were considered to be 'divlets', all with their own identity, all churning out cool stuff that could be reused etc. You think about what these groups produced:
So what does AOL do? Drive them all into the ground and suck Microsoft's cock. Oh I think some of these things are offhandedly in the AOL client (e.g. radio) but innovation? What's that?
The reason for all this is that AOL has a corporate culture of infighting and conservatism. If two groups compete for some work, it is the one that doesn't rock the boat, that promises the fastest results and with a vision compatible with marketing drones that wins. The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead. It doesn't matter that an inferior product will go in or that it will become a millstone in a year or two.
Meanwhile the innovative product withers on the vine and the group responsible is shitcanned. Why? I don't know but I reckon IE & WMP are like comfort blankets to AOL marketing. If you start going all scary on them by showing them something without 'Microsoft' in the title, they get nervous. I bet even the Mac group in AOL feels like an unwanted child.
Consider what could have been. Winamp 5.0 has streaming music, videos, a library, a CD burner, ripping, an integrated browser. With a little push it could have been iTMS. Time Warner has tens of thousands of tracks and movies to sell and AOL is (or was) the perfect outlet to sell them. The much vaunted 'synergy' they kept talking about was right under their noses. But apparantly that's not much use to a massive multi media conglomerate. Oh no, "let's sack them all".
Or consider Gecko. It was cross-platform, standards compliant and modular. AOL could free themselves from Microsoft forever. They could develop a cross-platform and modern client. They wouldn't have to wait for MS to fix bugs, or workaround some broken implementation - they could do whatever they liked with it. So what does AOL do? It stumps for the bitrotten piece of crap from their mortal enemy. And I'm sure Microsoft is ecstatic about that, since it basically ties AOL's hands.
It really does boil down to incompetance. Sheer bloody incompetance.
The last guy out... (Score:4, Interesting)
I Haven't Forgotten, And We Will Never Forget. [gedikian.com]
An insider's view of the end of Nullsoft...
-ch
Free the llama! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Woah! (Score:2, Interesting)
-gamp?
-goffice?
-gbrowser?
-glinux?
There's other software they could do, too! Too bad "gimp" is already taken, though...
Re:Looking for a good WinAmp replacement? (Score:3, Interesting)
I Owe My Job To Winamp (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in 1997 I wrote an mp3 streaming server that was originally intended as the audio equivalent of a webcam I could chat and play music.... obviously this quickly turned into the webs first live mp3 radio station. Problem was that there were no mp3 players that could stream content, I had to give my friends a perl script wrapped around mpg123. (as it happened this script also turned the client into a relay server, creating the earliest p2p streaming distribution system).
So it laboured in obscurity for a while until Winamp added HTTP streaming support and suddenly I could tell all those windows users to download winamp and point it at port 3223 on the server cluster. The code was released under the GPL, and I had a few downloads, but it required some real hackish thinking to get it to work for most people. That's when I started getting job offers in California (I was working as an astronomer in Northern Ireland).
Of course then Shoutcast got released and it pretty much did what mp3serv did, mp3serv promptly became even less interesting. But that didn't matter, because mp3serv was so obscure that nobody ever found it, it was only once there was a proprietory solution that people started to look for an open source solution. Icecast came along, it was much cleaner and smarter than mp3serv, so I took all the good bits from mp3serv and integrated them into Icecast and LiveIce.
That was 1999, by that point I was ready to quit my PhD and take a real job......
Re:Buying it from AOL (Score:2, Interesting)
XMMS is almost an exact duplicate of WinAmp (if not completely identical) for Linux. You have the XMMS source, no money involved. Get porting.
Re:Cui bono? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, why the hell do you think Winamp added video capability? They were gearing it up as a WiMP competitor, and got cold feet. Same thing for Netscape...they developed it, then got cold feet and signed a contract to continue including IE with AOL.
I suppose if Google REALLY wanted to become a solid competitor to AOL / MSN / Yahoo and the rest of the internet junkie companies, they could grab this opportunity and run with it. But I don't think they're THAT determined.
Re:Woah! (Score:2, Interesting)
And IIRC I first tried an alpha of Winamp5 and about three months later it popped up on their site. It shocked the hell out of me, since alpha usually is developer-speak for "yup, in another year or so we might release this, regardless of how 'finished' it is!". It's also quite stable for being such a "quick" development.
As for the "liking" I really don't see much wrong with WA5. WA3 was not good, focus was on skins and not usability, while WA5 managed to combine these two. WA3 was full of really funky stuff (such as the hassle to get hotkeys working) while WA5 worked flawlessly and has a functional AND good-looking default interface. In fact, the default interface is so good that I'm using it, since there's no other skin/theme/hotdog that does what I want.
Re:Open Source Winamp 3 = Wasabi (Score:1, Interesting)
AOL lacks all of these attributes, hence the closed-source, closed-door, closed-down-operation.
glad to know that the spirits behind winamp are not dead [cockos.com].
Re:Never. (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, they did open source AOLserver [aolserver.com], so they're actually somewhat friendly to the idea (surprisingly).
Re:Textbook Example of "What Not To Do(tm)" (Score:2, Interesting)