
Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012) - CaptainZapp
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/
======
d0m
From my memory as a kid.. I remember winamp was amazing. I had many skins and
it was all beautifully hooked up in my IRC client.

And then, at some points, the UX completely changed. It also started being
spammy. Almost like the project was sold to some incompetent people. Then I
felt like it lost its magic. It also happened to be the time when streaming
from Napster became possible and I completely switched to it.. and then to
grooveshark/deezer/all-the-others.

Winamp could have been Spotify but went in a completely different directions.
Saying that may sound crazy, but that's what Netflix did. It was
selling/renting dvd, saw streaming coming and did a full 180.

~~~
superasn
> Winamp could have been Spotify but went in a completely different directions

Yes I remember that the first time I used streaming music it was shoutcast.

It was really fantastic with hundreds of different music channels and
podcasts. One radio station I was particularly fond off was called Atlantic
sound factory. They had a goldmine on their hands and it's a shame they let it
all go to waste.

~~~
doublerabbit
And video streaming too. It was uncommon but they had the nsv (nullsoft video)
format.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft_Streaming_Video](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft_Streaming_Video)

------
dleslie
One of the ex-developers is running the Winamp Community Update Project, or
WACUP. It's got new features, bugfixes and so forth.

I use this all the time. It sits in a tiny corner of my unscaled 4k display.

[https://getwacup.com/](https://getwacup.com/)

~~~
ubercow13
Thank you for this! I didn't know this existed

------
StavrosK
I contend that Winamp is the best MP3 player to have ever existed. Nothing
comes close to its speed, usability or extensibility, even 20 years later.

Foobar fans may disagree, but I stand my ground.

~~~
modzu
for windows yes it's still true!! but in that 20 years I've also moved on from
windows: nothing comes close on macos and on Linux I've been using audacious
which i must say does sound amazing.

lack of cross platform options inspired me to start reAMP:

[https://github.com/conceptualspace/reAMP](https://github.com/conceptualspace/reAMP)

it's still very much an experiment but the end goal is an open source player
made with the same love of music that inspired the original winamp. some of
the features im working on:

\- smart shuffle algorithm: no repeats until playlist exhausted; randomized
between artists so artists with many songs do not monopolize the playlist

\- studio quality audio analysis (VU meter, oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer,
full track waveform, displays for bitrate, samplerate, channels, format,
encoder)

\- controls to loop, change tempo

\- remote control via mobile with queuing and adding youtube URLs ('party
mode')

\- logarithmic volume control

~~~
stelonix
I was amazed to find out foobar2000 works great under Wine, including input &
output plugins, so I just use it. Best ML management IMO. Can't recall if I
ever got the Winamp AVS plugin to work though.

~~~
ubercow13
AVS works pretty well in Wine

~~~
stelonix
I meant it on foobar2000 with its foo_vis_shpeck plugin, which is a wrapper
for Winamp visualization plugins. I have run it successfully under Windows but
I recall having trouble on Wine some 5 years ago.

~~~
ubercow13
Yes that's how I use it, shpeck is a little funky under Wine but it basically
works correctly. I think it will crash in some cases if you stop the
visualisation when it's attached to the main window or something, I forget. I
run it in a separate f2k install that just has a single shpeck instance
filling the whole window, and receives audio input from pulseaudio's loopback.

Example: [https://streamable.com/nzy730](https://streamable.com/nzy730)

------
sp332
The Internet Archive has a Winamp skins collection.
[https://archive.org/details/winampskins](https://archive.org/details/winampskins)
If you open the page for a skin and click the llama way up in the right
corner, it will apply the skin to the music player site-wide.

~~~
richbradshaw
Sort of NSFW, blurred images with click throughs, but NSFW text in some skin
names.

------
dang
See also:

2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689280)

2013
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616323)

Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154421)

------
at_a_remove
This is like a post-mortem of watching high-ranking business people making
very important business-y decisions braying loud business noises, brimming
with confidence. It's like anything they see is shiny, they think, "How can I
get thingy? How can I use thingy to be more business-y?" then later "Thingy is
broken" and they wander off in search of another thingy. It's just so
frustrating to watch Pakleds in three-piece suits (Star Trek: The Next
Generation, episode "Samaritan Snare") asking if you can make us _go_. And the
people responsible for the terrible decisions probably thought they did a
great job, and then were paid as _if_ they did a great job, despite somehow
managing this thing into the ground.

------
samdung
I remember a dorm mate in college used to run multiple instances of Winamp to
do some rookie DJ mixes in parties.

~~~
crtasm
Did they experiment with the pitch adjust plugin that let you go +/\- 50% ...
but only in 1% steps? I used to have fun with that.

A friend recently played a set at an online party using two instances of VLC,
went down great!

------
dls2016
Same people are now making Reaper DAW which is the best DAW out there for $60
(and probably better than some more expensive DAWs).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel)

------
anon102010
Winamp was incredible - it even had a plugin for syncronized playback that I
couldn't replicate easily. You could get 5 friends to all play at the same
time - so fun.

Then BOOM - ads everywhere, bundled installers, crazy redesign. I didn't know
this history.

------
k__
Winamp was pretty nice until v3.

Version 3 was pretty shitty. I think they used new tech to build it and also
replaced the UI.

Later they released v5, which was v2 UI + v3 tech, which was good again.

At least that's how I remember it.

~~~
stan_rogers
5 is _still_ good, and it's still what I use. There are newer things that are
shinier, but nothing that works nearly as well for an album listener.

~~~
mycall
Do any of the skins help it work on hi-DPI screens? That is it's main drawback
now for me.

~~~
stan_rogers
Wouldn't know. I have no use for hi-DPI screens. It's just extra processing
for no real benefit. (In fact, there's a net negative for my primary computing
activities, which mostly involve highly-magnified pixel pushing.)

------
squarefoot
I don't know if it still runs on modern Windows versions, however I always put
Winamp (later called Lite, ie the original without bloatware) on all Windows
machines I installed until the day I abandoned Windows. The original Winamp
was a wonderful piece of software that did the one thing everyone wanted it to
do, and did it wonderfully; a lesson on how to write optimized software a lot
of developers should learn from. Then they ruined it, but that's another
story.

~~~
GiorgioG
It still runs just fine!

------
jlkuester7
Winamp definitely had its appeal in the "small but packed with features"
category, but it always seemed to lack polish.

These days my go-to music player on Windows is
[https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine-
windows](https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine-windows)

It is open source, super clean and polished. At 33mb it is not quite as
compact as Winamp, but not bad for today's standards....

------
remote_phone
The reason why Winamp died wasn’t because of anything it did, but because more
and more people moved to their phones for playing music. And ultimately mp3s
lost out to streaming. That’s the only reason why Winamp died.

It’s just a relic of the past, but in its day it was amazing. As an old guy I
still use it. Asking a 10 year old to use Winamp to play an mp3 would be like
asking a 20 year old to figure out how to use a rotary phone now.

~~~
kazinator
> _more and more people moved to their phones for playing music. And
> ultimately mp3s lost out to streaming._

I listen to tunes with the Android version of Winamp.

> _Asking a 10 year old to use Winamp to play an mp3_

You still need an application of some sort to play media. Are you saying that
the pre-installed ones on mobile devices and desktop (e.g. Windows media
player) are so vastly better than Winamp that Winamp looks like a rotary
phone?

> _And ultimately mp3s lost out to streaming._

I'm sorry, but that's not a well-considered statement. Albums are still a
thing; people still collect music that they like.

Streaming allows people who want to casually listen to music to use their
device as one previously used a radio.

(Speaking of which, streaming has not even killed radio yet.)

A ten year old kid today can still understand that stream content won't always
be there, and is inaccessible whenever you are out of mobile networking
coverage, so you better capture your favorite material to your device.

~~~
remote_phone
> Albums are still a thing; people still collect music that they like.

Sorry but this is an ignorant statement about the current landscape. A tiny
minority of people still buy mp3s or CDs. Most music these days are consumed
via streaming. Just because you do it doesn’t mean that most other people do
it. Even I still use Winamp and listen to mp3s but that doesn’t mean that most
people still do.

~~~
kazinator
> A tiny minority of people still buy mp3s or CDs*

My comment doesn't have anything to do with buying. I haven't bought a CD in
some 25 years myself.

People still play content stored in their device.

~~~
remote_phone
Sadly, the world doesn’t revolve around you. There has been 25 years of new
music that had been created since you last bought a CD. You may pirate or
purchase your mp3s, but even piracy has plummeted.

And people who used to download mp3s found that they no longer needed to
maintain music anymore if they paid a small subscription fee.

Digital music sales are lower than physical CD sales, which is 5% of what it
used to be back in 2000. The numbers speak for themselves.

------
Quequau
The main thing I remember about Winamp is how Nullsoft release that P2P thing
and made corporate at AOL really angry, so they pulled it, in like a day or
so.

I also switched from Windows to MacOS just before that and transitioning from
Winamp (where a lot of meta data for my collection was stored in the
filesystem as directory hierarchy) to iTunes was sorta painful and trying.

------
jp0d
I remember trying to play it on Linux using Wine back in 2004/05! I don't
remember if I succeeded! It was the only one thing that I missed from the
Windows world.

~~~
6c696e7578
There /was/ x11amp. That became XMMS. There's qmmp though if you want a blast
from the past.

~~~
jp0d
You're right. I did use it. Thanks for the reminding. Then a bunch of others
from other open source projects. I've been mostly using Macs in the recent
years.

~~~
6c696e7578
They should (I've not looked) build on Macs - honestly I don't know what sound
system a Mac uses. There's always 'elementaryOS' if you like that style of
interface.

~~~
jp0d
I don't think it works on Macs. Besides, these days I listen to music only
while driving or on trains! I've given up on Linux due to many reasons, mostly
because I need a reliable Laptop with a UNIX based OS where all my dev tools
work! I recently downloaded Elementary OS for one of my old Thinkpads. I will
give it a go then. Thanks. :)

------
AtlasBarfed
Winamp was close to pure assembly coding, wasn't it?

It's smoothness and performance at the time of couple-hundred-MHz CPUs was
outstanding.

------
archived22
Huge fan of Winamp.

Damn. How many good product died or stagnated, because of stupid politics.

~~~
addicted
What did politics have to do with the creation of Winamp 3?

------
woranl
iTunes and iPod integration killed Winamp.

