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Media Open Source

Winamp Is 'Opening Up' Its Source Code 85

Posted by BeauHD from the preserving-its-legacy dept.
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."
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Winamp Is 'Opening Up' Its Source Code More

Winamp Is 'Opening Up' Its Source Code

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  • Yea? (Score:5, Funny)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Thursday May 16, 2024 @07:54PM (#64478059)

    In other news: "We are also opening up our source code!" announces RealPlayer.

    • Re:Yea? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Thursday May 16, 2024 @08:02PM (#64478067)

      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.

    • Re:Yea? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 16, 2024 @08:41PM (#64478133)
      Winamp still works. I still use it every day for listening to audio files. If you want a small, simple program, that doesn't have any bloat and just works, Winamp is still a good choice.

      • 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:Yea? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by nicubunu ( 242346 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @12:47AM (#64478399) Homepage

        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.

        • 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.

          • VLC works fine as a simple music player.

            • Is it dedicated to being a music player?

              • 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.

                • No but is it that important?

                  It's important to whether your comment was relevant.

                  • 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.

        • 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

          • Foobar has a music library, which I find to be bloat.

            Winamp has a music library. Your point is moot.

          • 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.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by unrtst ( 777550 )

              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?
              * 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
              * ... 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
              * portability/lock-in: if I decide to switch music players, I don't want to lose all the metadata it added

        • 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)

        by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @03:26AM (#64478527)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

          by quonset ( 4839537 )

          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.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by leptons ( 891340 )
          Winamp never "went away". Lots of people still use it every single day - I am one of those people. So far there's been no software that does what Winamp does better. I just need it to play mp3 files, and shoutcast streams, which is most of what I listen to every day. It still works great for that.

      • Yeah, of all the different players I've tried, always come back to WinAmp....

      • I may be ignorant, but the thing that Winamp and similar have that I don't see on other players is the ability to quickly sort by artist, and/or album, and quickly add to a play queue. I guess as most people are probably streaming online these days that facility is not as desirable as before, but I still love the slickness of it.

        Still rocking the "bento" skin here!

        • I may be ignorant, but the thing that Winamp and similar have that I don't see on other players is the ability to quickly sort by artist, and/or album, and quickly add to a play queue

          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)

      by jamesjw ( 213986 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @05:06AM (#64478593) Homepage

      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....

  • I still use it, and milkdrop too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      The postprocessor DSP plugins for Winamp, especially Stereo Tool, really whip the llama's ass.

      • 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 :)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kriston ( 7886 )

          The Winamp DSP plugins are awesome. You will thank me for bringing them to your attention.

    • And the LineIn input and a couple of projectors to create the lightshow for the band I play in.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leptons ( 891340 )
      I still use Winamp every day, and have since the 1990s. All of my 6 computers have it installed.

      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.

  • VLC says 'Hello'.

  • Great move (Score:3, Insightful)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Thursday May 16, 2024 @08:15PM (#64478093) Homepage

    Just about 25 years too late to matter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      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)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday May 16, 2024 @09:51PM (#64478205)

    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.

    • 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.

    • 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)

    by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Thursday May 16, 2024 @09:59PM (#64478215)

    That really whips the llama's ass!

  • Audacious (Score:5, Informative)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Thursday May 16, 2024 @10:15PM (#64478249)

    >"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]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by etrusco ( 576870 )

      I'm sorry, Audacious is/was great, but the second best music player after WinAmp was Amarok.

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      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.

  • 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.

  • Memories (Score:4, Informative)

    by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:33AM (#64478479)
    My old copy was eventually displaced by the boringly functional ITunes but the skinnable interface and trippy visuals of Winamp was peak millennium-era software

  • 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]

  • 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,

  • 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

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