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Media Software

Winamp Media Player To Return as a Platform-Agnostic Audio Mobile App Next Year; Desktop Application Receives an Update (techcrunch.com) 175

Posted by msmash from the back-from-the-dead dept.
The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic audio mobile app that brings together all your music, podcasts, and streaming services to a single location. From a report: It's an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it's still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community -- and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well. For those who don't remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say it's long in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So it's with pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way.

"There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience," said Alexandre Saboundjan, CEO of Radionomy, the company that bought Winamp (or what remained of it) in 2014. "You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built. People want one single experience," he concluded. "I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. And we want people to have it on every device."
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Winamp Media Player To Return as a Platform-Agnostic Audio Mobile App Next Year; Desktop Application Receives an Update More

Winamp Media Player To Return as a Platform-Agnostic Audio Mobile App Next Year; Desktop Application Receives an Update

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  • This doesn't sound good. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:38PM (#57481130)
    From the article:
    "What I see today is you have to jump from one player to another player or aggregator if you want to listen to a radio station, to a podcast player if you want to listen to a podcast — this, to me, is not the final experience,” he explained. It’s all audio, and it’s all searchable in one fashion or another. So why isn’t it all in one place?"

    Kinda the reason I use WinAmp is because it is not this.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If want a one size fits all just use VLC. That's what I've been using since Winamp stopped being developed. That and I stopped using Windows years ago. Winamp was cool in the 2000s, but this is just an attempt to cash in on the name.

      • You're pretty much spot on with this. VLC is the next best thing. and it is really across all platforms. I loved winamp so much I downloaded every bootlegged version available. But with VLC I dont have to break the "law"

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The VLC media library is an abombination, with playlist support not far behind.

        In contrast the WinAmp media library and playlist support was awesome.

        The obvious solution would be to improve the media library and playlist support in VLC to feature-match WinAmp.

    • Re:This doesn't sound good. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by darkain ( 749283 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#57481324) Homepage

      Except, Winamp is ALREADY this. Winamp has an extensive plugin system. It can already play podcasts. It CREATED internet radio through Shoutcast. Other plugins are available for other data sources too... I know this, because I remember writing them and publishing them myself.

      • To me the thing was that out of the box it was a super-lightweight player. It could play basic formats and had a minimal interface but could be extended to do just about anything, even esoteric stuff like chiptunes from game ROMs. It got a bit more bloated over the years till the point where I still used it but only because I had it installed and not for any real advantage over other players.

        • Re:This doesn't sound good. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by darkain ( 749283 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @05:21PM (#57482296) Homepage

          This is why myself and a ton of the other people from the plugin community jumped ship over to foobar2000. fb2k is developed by the guy who wrote the MP3 decoder for Winamp, but had issues with the audio processing pipeline of Winamp degrading audio quality. Disputes happened. He left. Built fb2k. And the rest is history! It is by far the cleanest, lightest music player available for desktop now. Multiple tabbed playlists are awesome. My largest playlist has ~16k tracks in it, and supports pretty much real-time text searching. And yup, it supports audio codec "components" as they call them to extend it with more file support or other functionality.

          • I tried foobar2000 after moving to W10 at work, but found it would split many of my albums into 2, I think because some songs used a different encoding in the tagging. Maybe this has been fixed now.

            I returned to Winamp but had to exclude some folders from scanning as it would hang. This new update could be my salvation.

            In terms of interface Winamp is the most streamlined and foobar2000 is great. Rhythmbox at home pisses me off with its 'play the next thing you randomly browsed to' - the primacy of the Winam

            • but found it would split many of my albums into 2, I think because some songs used a different encoding in the tagging. Maybe this has been fixed now.

              It sounds like you're using the Album view. There's no "fix" for this situation. There is only switching to a different view (e.g. sort by folder and change the display not to group by albums), or fixing the album names. To identify as a common album the MP3 only needs to have a common Artist (if Various isn't ticked), Album name, and year (if it is used). I really question how people were able to even rip content where this differed in the first place.

              My own opinion in interface differs from yours. Winamp

      • " It CREATED internet radio through Shoutcast."

        This is why I wondered how it died in the first place...

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by darkain ( 749283 )

          "AOL", that's how it died.

          • It does seem like anything they buy only makes it a year or two past purchase. Im looking forward to trying Winamp on linux. I have always wanted it to work.. never tried it on wine cause I hate wine, however I hear they have done a lot of good things as of lately. Especially with valve helping. May have to give it a try when it claims it can play GTA V.

  • I still use Winamp (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And most of my geek friends still use it too.

  • WinAmp is great... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So long as they keep it simple like it was and don't "modernize" the UI experience. I always liked the low requirements it had to do all the things it did. Audacious runs on my Linux machines in it's WinAmp mode quite nicely.

  • Yeah (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:50PM (#57481208) Journal

    ...it's going to be 2.1 gig d/l, require a credit card to sign in (we will never charge you, ever!), and gather every single personal data point resident on your system.

    And still won't perform the basic function of playing mp3s as well as 2013 version.

  • Foobar (Score:5, Funny)

    by RickyShade ( 5419186 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:53PM (#57481226)

    But I have foobar2000.

  • I miss Winamp (Score:3)

    by Toxiz ( 4980833 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:55PM (#57481238)
    I loved winamp, and would love to get it back. I don't really have faith that this won't be a terrible cloud heavy version with the old Winamp name. But, here's hoping it's a lightweight music player that doesn't connect to the internet unless I direct it to.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Why don't you get it back? It's still readily available.

    • I'm using an older version of Winamp as it is. I can't imagine, that I'm gonna like the newest version. I just want to play audio files, and easily edit playlists. If I want a full featured audio player, I fire up Serato.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      Just download whatever version of Winamp you want to. Have you tried Google? Winamp isn't exactly hard to find.

  • WINAMP.... (Score:2, Redundant)

    by nycsubway ( 79012 )

    It really whips the lamma's ass.. *baaah* *bahhh*

  • XMMS fork Audacious does this (on Windows too) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Khopesh ( 112447 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:01PM (#57481288) Homepage Journal

    Audacious [audacious-...player.org], a descendant of XMMS [xmms2.org] (which was a clone of Winamp), works wonderfully. Its "Winamp Classic Interface" looks exactly like Winamp and even (iirc) supports Winamp skins.

    That said, I do miss the old (original) Whitecap [winampheritage.com] visualization (one of the very few in which you could really see the music in what was still a visually stunning display), which only works on Winamp on Windows. (...not that Winamp's return would allow me to run this again.)

    • I downloaded and installed Whitecap, just because I had never heard of it, (I usually use the old Geiss 4.29 [geisswerks.com].)

      Nice plugin, and the installer prompted me for which media players I wanted to add it to; but, unfortunately, you're right, no Audacious support. Long list of other players, tho.

  • "People want one single experience." (Score:5, Insightful)

    by doconnor ( 134648 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#57481314) Homepage

    "People want one single experience."

    A lot of software has gone down to tubes because of this idea. People don't want one single experience. They want different experiences for different circumstances. They want software with features optimized for how they listen to music, how they listen to streaming radio and how they listen to podcasts. Combining them into one app is both unnecessary and creates undesirable side effects.

    The same thing happened with social media apps tried to be the be-all and end-all of all media, when users want to keep things nice and compartmentalized.

    • To counter your argument, SOME people do/don't want (insert experience here). Some people do want one single experience. I'm one of them.

    • People don't want one single experience.

      Please don't speak for "people". Speak for yourself. You'll find there's lots of people out there who want lots of different things. For example I want one single experience, but I want that experience to start with a base system that is customisable and extensible with a rich plugin scheme.

  • 2.95 for the win (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bobrick ( 5220289 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @03:12PM (#57481370)
    I'm still using Winamp 2.95 for music, and there's nothing that needs to be updated about it. It plays music, has a playlist, volume control. There's also a "browser" which thankfully can be turned off. I suspect this new version will have even more amazing shiny new features that need to be turned off, so basically, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

  • Foobar2000 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why use anything else?

  • 'Bout time... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As one of those people who helped build the WinAmp ecosystem and watched its subsequent AOL implosion I have to say, "Good!", and "It's about time, Radionomy." So, ya know, if you need the original sources for the 2.65-ish build... I still have them hanging around somewhere on an old CD. Justin and Tom were always messy and I was always cleaning up after them. But, by all means, I hope you improve on it somehow. I still rock out with WinAmp sometimes.

  • I hope they continue development of that. With modern GPU it should be possible to do some really amazing real-time beat synced effects.

  • I still use it and it is running right now.

    Usually listening to the MP3-stream of local FM-radiostations.
    (Although finding the URL for the streams can be hard to find...)

    Why on earth people want to listen to radio through a webbrowser is beyond me.
    Putting WinAmp in the system tray makes it go away and not take up space in the TaskBar.

    So, hopefully this "new" development will not make things worse.......

    /C

  • I know there are 'clones' but I haven't found them to be very useful.
    I've tried nearly every player on Linux, and they are either wayyyy too simple or wayyyy to complicated. I don't need a music manager, everything I have is organized by file structure. I don't need a database. I don't need links to album art, or streaming sites, or scrotobobbler, or last.fm, or any of that. I need a decent music player for mp3s. A decent EQ would be nice, and maybe some visualizations if the mood strikes me. That's i

    • You don't use XMMS? Because you basically just described it.

      • As mentioned in another post, Audacious is the new iteration of XMMS. I remember moving from XMMS to Audacious in 2006, as I have a frontend [github.com] for them I originally wrote in 2002 and continue to use.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gosand ( 234100 )

        I've tried them all. If my memory serves, I think the issue with XMMS was that I couldn't resize it. It was very tiny on my screen.

    • Yeah, I went on a search for the "winamp of linux" years ago. The original xmms was the answer for some years, but it was eventually replaced by xmms2 and I didn't like it. I found and still use qmmp, which I really like because it's simple, has an EQ, does everything I want, and works well with my dir structure of music, plus it has playlists. It has visualizations too, though I only ever use the default "analyzer" because I don't care about that. It will also take the winamp theme files.
  • The Winamp is like the Nokia brand for Europeans. There is a mix of nostalgia and trust associated with the brand.

  • It never left! (v 5.666) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Monday October 15, 2018 @04:31PM (#57481964)
    Winamp never went anywhere. Unlike most modern software, it didn't require to check in over the Internet to work, so it still works just fine today. I've been happily using Winamp for a few decades, and hopefully, I'll continue to use it for the foreseeable future. The last version is version 5.666, and it was released as a final "thank you, goodbye" with *all* of the "pro" (formerly paid) features, and none of the crapware. I use it for playing all of my media, for ripping and burning CD's, and all sorts of neat stuff.

    Sometimes, software works as intended, with no problems, and simply doesn't need to be "upgraded" any more. I think this is one of those cases.

  • It is already there. Including skin support.

    https://webamp.org/ [webamp.org]

  • I'm a daily user of Audacious so it doesn't matter much to me, but it would be great for them to ensure modern open source codecs like opus (either encapsulated in ogg or not, streamed or file-based) is as well supported as possible.

  • I rarely used it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I never jumped on the winamp bandwagon, was more of a Sonique user. (Which still works on Win10)

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