AOL Making Media Player, Music Store

An anonymous reader writes "BetaNews is reporting that AOL Music is ramping up its efforts to release a new Media Player independent of the AOL client software, with a long-term goal of building its own music store. The company plans to bring AMP outside its "walled garden.""

AOL

[pete-classic]

ITunes . . .

ME TOO!

-Peter

Re:Winamp?

[calibanDNS]

RTFA

Surprisingly, AMP is not based on AOL's Winamp platform, only utilizing Winamp's "Unagi" playback engine. Instead, AMP is built atop the company's Communicator XUL user interface framework. Communicator was first unveiled in beta form two years ago and eventually evolved into Fanfare.

Despite the overlap, AMP is not meant to replace Winamp - even with the recent departure of the player's development team. AOL says its new Media Player is not a competing product and has different audience, as Winamp users are not likely AOL users.

This looks more like AOL's initial pust to eventually get themselves into the music store business, not to replace an existing MP3 player.

Re:Ahh... So they bought it for the name

[edwdig]

Using XUL won't really help make a media player more portable. The hard parts of porting a media player are the sound output and the video display. XUL only helps with the front end. You'd still need to write ALSA and X11 video overlay code to get it to run on Linux.

Re:Ahh... So they bought it for the name

[ad0gg]

Winamp was named after a popular command line based mp3 player for unix called "amp". There was also a macamp for a while aswell.

AMP reference [zwolak.org]

Re:Walled garden?

[Cuthalion]

hah! I worked on Sonique 2, before working for AOL on the media player.

Lycos lost the entire Sonique staff in mid 2001 through layoffs and subsequent quitting. At this point Sonique 2 was about 6 megs of nearly completely undocumented very complex code, with a number of subtle bugs and gotchas. So it's not a big surprise that when they hired a new guy or two to work on it a few months later he wasn't really able to make it ship-worthy on short order.

The original source of Sonique 2's problem though, is that it was 100% engineering driven. We never had any schedules or deadlines, so instead of hunkering down to get something to release quality, we ended up fooling ourself into thinking that advanced features were more important. As a result the alphas support loading skins from PSD files and support most of Photoshop's blend modes in realtime!

It was a tremendously fun place to work, since we mostly worked on the cool parts, but ultimately a little disillusioning.

I believe the main reason Lycos hasn't just axed Sonique entirely is they paid $80M for it and if they stop development entirely they have to admit that that money is a 100% loss. Certainly there's not a lot of incentive to vie for the title of best free media player.

Re:Walled garden?

[Cuthalion]

The last beta was realased over six months ago. I guess they could at this point say "2.0" at any day, but I don't see it improving much over the beta, which is only minimally different from the alphas.