Winamp Is 'Opening Up' Its Source Code 85
In a press release today, the best music player of the 1990s announced that it'll open up its source code to developers worldwide. "Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development," said the company. "This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve."
Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp, explains: "This is a decision that will delight millions of users around the world. Our focus will be on new mobile players and other platforms. We will be releasing a new mobile player at the beginning of July. Still, we don't want to forget the tens of millions of users who use the software on Windows and will benefit from thousands of developers' experience and creativity. Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version."
Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp, explains: "This is a decision that will delight millions of users around the world. Our focus will be on new mobile players and other platforms. We will be releasing a new mobile player at the beginning of July. Still, we don't want to forget the tens of millions of users who use the software on Windows and will benefit from thousands of developers' experience and creativity. Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version."
Yea? (Score:5, Funny)
In other news: "We are also opening up our source code!" announces RealPlayer.
Re:Yea? (Score:5, Interesting)
I also wondered what would be the relevance, and why Winamp would still have a CEO. Checking their website, it appears they make a range of software for audio creators and managers. The "winamp" media player is something they don't need anymore so they use it as a way to keep themselves in the news, and apparently it works.
Whip the Llama's ass (Score:5, Funny)
>> why Winamp would still have a CEO.
Somebody needs to care for the Llamas.
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The Llamas were removed to protective custody due to animal abuse.
Re: Whip the Llama's ass (Score:2)
The younger generation will never know the glory early days of the Internet, where schizophrenic homeless guys singing about sexualized livestock could go viral. Yet when I look at most of the TikTok videos, there are still essentially whipping the llamaâ(TM)s ass.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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Re:Yea? (Score:5, Informative)
Its good shit. (Score:2)
I also still use winamp. It was always a great program and, as far as I can tell, nothing has come along since that's better.
Re: Its good shit. (Score:5, Funny)
Until it's rewritten in rust anyways.
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For many years I used a Linux clone called Linamp. Could use the same skins as winamp. Nowadays I just use Strawberry Music Player, which is also available for Windows and macOS.
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Try AIMP (version 2.71? I think has the best pitch shifter)
Re:Its good shit. (Score:5, Informative)
x11amp was a good alternative, qmmp and audacious are good now.
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Foobar2000 [foobar2000.org] would like a word.
Re: Its good shit. (Score:2)
It's good. Configuration is a bit complicated, but powerful. I sometimes run it on Linux using wine, but that's a little clunky.
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Apparently you've never heard of VLC.
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There's a difference between not wearing makeup and refusing to comb your hair. VLC is fugly. :)
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Subjective opinion I guess. Mine is that VLC's interface is clean and simple and gets out of your way.
I really dont want my valuable screen real estate taken up with a bunch of pointless graphics.
Re:Yea? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a small, simple program, that doesn't have any bloat and just works, Winamp is still a good choice.
If you want a small, simple program, that doesn't have any bloat and just works, I am pretty sure Foobar2000 is still available. Or any Linux default-on-your-distro music player.
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Or any Linux default-on-your-distro music player.
Most distributions which install a dedicated music player by default install a really big one.
On the other hand, I don't see why that's a problem any more. Even my cheapie laptop has 8GB RAM, my desktop has 32GB, I can afford to run Rhythmbox or whatever.
Re: Yea? (Score:2)
VLC works fine as a simple music player.
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Is it dedicated to being a music player?
Re: Yea? (Score:2)
No but is it that important? It does the job without getting in the way or requiring you to create a library. It also happens to be able to play videos, also without getting in the way.
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No but is it that important?
It's important to whether your comment was relevant.
Re: Yea? (Score:2)
If you want a small, simple program, that doesn't have any bloat and just works, I am pretty sure Foobar2000 is still available. Or any Linux default-on-your-distro music player.
VLC is a small, simple program that doesn't have any bloat and just works. VLC is a music player. I was complementing your answer to that quoted message so yes, 100% relevant.
Re: Yea? (Score:1)
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Foobar has a music library, which I find to be bloat.
Winamp has a music library. Your point is moot.
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Foobar is practically its own programming language. It's complicated as fuck and often people will spend hours configuring it.
Re: Yea? (Score:2)
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Why not? Seems like you're opting out of anything remotely tied to usability. Sure, you could operate without all of those tools... but you really put an unreasonable barrier in your way. A good piece of music library software is a really great thing.
I like MusicBee quite a lot, actually. Does a remarkable job.
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Foobar has a music library, which I find to be bloat. I can organize my music into folders thank you very much. And i don't want an indexer that remembers all these libraries and their metadata
Why not? Seems like you're opting out of anything remotely tied to usability. Sure, you could operate without all of those tools... but you really put an unreasonable barrier in your way. A good piece of music library software is a really great thing.
I like MusicBee quite a lot, actually. Does a remarkable job.
FYI, I'm not the GP.
Why not use a music manager? ... alt: it updates the tags, but I don't want a player writing/updating my library ... alt: it stores metadata in hidden files within the collection, and I don't want more junk in there
* it has to either periodically scan my whole library (which is substantial) or use inotify type updates
* it has to store a bunch of metadata outside my music collection
*
*
* portability/lock-in: if I decide to switch music players, I don't want to lose all the metadata it added
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If you want a small, simple program, that doesn't have any bloat and just works, I am pretty sure Foobar2000 is still available.
Fun fact Foobar2000 is written by Peter Pawowski - a guy who used to work for Nullsoft. He cracked the shits in 2002 after seeing what Nullsoft shat out the door with the title "Winamp 5.0" and went to make his own media player that stayed true to the bloat free roots of the original Winamp.
Re:Yea? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah thats the thing. Winamp really was the last great MP3 player. It was simple as hell, and very easy to manage large swathes of files. Then it kind of went away. Then sort of came back. And now, seems to be on life support.
Throw that puppy to the OS community, it'll be in tip top shape in no time.
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Throw that puppy to the OS community, it'll be in tip top shape in no time.
This is sarcasm, right? Tell me it's sarcasm.
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Yeah, of all the different players I've tried, always come back to WinAmp....
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Still rocking the "bento" skin here!
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The Winamp playlist is a play queue. There was no concept of "songs you own that aren't in a playlist". If you wanted to add a song to your playlist, you'd click drag the file from your mp3 directory to the playlist (which is a pretty quick way to add it). Also, winamp defaultly listed song title as "Artist - Song", and so
Re:Yea? (Score:4, Funny)
In other news: "We are also opening up our source code!" announces RealPlayer.
It'll be the first time the open source community begs for them to close it back up....
Still the best (Score:2)
I still use it, and milkdrop too.
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The postprocessor DSP plugins for Winamp, especially Stereo Tool, really whip the llama's ass.
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Not sure what those are, but got me curious and just tried "Extra Stereo" in Audacious... pretty wild. Not sure if I love it or hate it :)
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The Winamp DSP plugins are awesome. You will thank me for bringing them to your attention.
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And the LineIn input and a couple of projectors to create the lightshow for the band I play in.
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It's very light-weight, it never crashes, it does what it's supposed to do perfectly. I have no reason to replace it, and I probably never will.
It's funny the reaction people give when they see it running on my computer.
Re:Thank the Lords Above (Score:5, Informative)
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You may have missed some more recent developments. When AOL bought it Winamp turned into a massive shitshow. Sidenote: Peter Pawowski left Nullsoft after being disgusted with what Winamp turned into and proceeded to write Foobar2000 - a bloat free media player that is just generally awesome.
But fast forward 20 years and the Llama group put quite a bit of effort into de-shittifying Winamp. Winamp 5.9 is more like Winamp 2.x than Winamp 3.x is.
Re: Thank the Lords Above (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep. All the music should just be in a single generic database that nobody even knows the name of because we just use whatever front ends that make API calls to it.
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Try "mpg123" from the command line. Simple and no frills, will play the files you give it in sequence.
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Unfortunately, for this to happen, PC optical drives need to make a comeback first.
Yet, in the same line of thought, I once had many creative uses of punched cards. Too bad nobody seems to make them anymore...
Re: A decision that will delight millions of users (Score:2)
Ahh, Memories. (Score:2)
VLC says 'Hello'.
Great move (Score:3, Insightful)
Just about 25 years too late to matter.
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They figured out that Open Source was the correct direction. True, it took 25 years, but they figured it out.
And that's definitely an improvement over Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, who have never understood that.
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless they are releasing the source code for Winamp 2.x series then they aren't releasing the source code for "the best music player of the 1990s". The 3.x and 5.x series were overly complex and bloated garbage.
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If I remember my history correctly, Winamp 3 was bloated garbage, so they quickly released Winamp 5 which re-incorporated Winamp 2's features back into Winamp 3 (2 + 3 = 5). I've been using Winamp 5 for years in the Winamp classic skin mode and it's just fine.
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5.x isn't overly complex. It was a reversion back to the 2.x code with some enhancements that made it actually run properly. Sure it's got more features than Winamp 2.x but unlike Winamp 3.x it actually still uses quite few resources and isn't bloated at all.
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
That really whips the llama's ass!
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Still not sure why a llama would need a donkey...
WinAmp: Jeff Minter Special Edition (Score:2)
Audacious (Score:5, Informative)
>"This is a decision that will delight millions of users around the world."
I have been using Audacious (and XMMS before that) forever. (And under Linux, of course). Classic, simple, functional, easy. And even with the Winamp skin. I fail to see why anyone would care much about actual Winamp code, much less "millions" of people, which I believe also runs only in MS-Windows.
Audacious has always been open-source, like XMMS it was based on, stretching back to 1997, and runs under Linux, MacOS, and MS-Windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://audacious-media-player... [audacious-...player.org]
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I'm sorry, Audacious is/was great, but the second best music player after WinAmp was Amarok.
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Oh, I loved Amarok too, until it was ruined, then moved on to Clementine. Those I use for DJ type stuff. But for just playing music daily, I still use Audacious.
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The Winamp plugin API gave us such DSP gems like Stereo Tool.
These can't be ignored because they really whipped the llama's ass.
We'll finally find out why it beats the Lama's ass (Score:2)
Maybe OpenAI can train an AI model with it so that we can make anything that can beat the lama's ass.
Now that would be great.
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LOL.
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So what? People all over the world would scream with delight should the source code of Unix SVR4 be made public, yet it's written in K&R C.
Memories (Score:4, Informative)
Finally (Score:2)
I can't wait to see how they incorporated NFTs into a music player. This source code should be enlightening.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
their shufle/queue system was the best (Score:2)
Winamp's queue management was great. Let's say you're at a party, and the host has the music playing at random on Winamp. A guest could play their song next, jump straight to their song, or politely tell the software to put their song in a queue. The guest's song(s) would play, then Winamp would go back to playing random track from the playlist. Hell, even if you *weren't* at a party, you could tell winamp to play that earworm that had been bugging you, then go back to normal ambient music.
It sounds simple,
That's convenient, Winamp was the last closed-src (Score:1)
program I was never able to find an adequate OSS replacement for!
Well, aside from Windows. What are the odds MS every open-sources it? :P