
Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012) - artsandsci
https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/07/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/
======
devindotcom
I still use it every day!

Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical
album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard
to move to other ways of managing my music.

My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no
one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my
computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it is no longer possible to run
on Windows, probably.

~~~
soylentcola
While I've surely "pirated" plenty of audio files in my day, I wouldn't say
the majority of mine are like that. Most are ripped from the hundreds (no
exaggeration) of CDs I bought new and used all through high school and college
or purchased from Amazon, etc.

Still, pirated or not, I like having a space on my NAS for my traditional
Music/Artist/Album/[track]_[title].mp3 folder structure. Pointing Winamp at it
works fine for the majority of my listening at home.

Of course I've come a long way from running an unlicensed Shoutcast station in
the early 2000's (it was nice having a friend who worked at a small hosting
company who gave me the space to host the server and all the bandwidth I could
need to stream to my massive audience of maybe 5 or 6 people at once ;)) but I
still love listening to streaming "radio" in the car without any need for
subscriptions or any hardware other than my phone. I've been doing it since I
had a Palm Treo, but the move from a max data rate of ~256k/sec to LTE has
certainly helped.

Only thing I really miss these days in Winamp is a way to cast to
Chromecast/Chromecast audio in other parts of the house. Not sure if anyone's
hacked together a plugin but I haven't really looked.

~~~
ue_
> for my traditional Music/Artist/Album/[track]_[title].mp3

For anyone wondering what a good tool to organise your music like this is, for
example if you use Winamp or something like MOC, it's a Python tool called
"beets"[0] which will rename (or copy, if you choose) your files to a
directory structure you specify. It will also talk to Musicbrainz to fill in
missing metadata, and has plugins to fetch album art.

[0] [http://beets.io/](http://beets.io/)

------
cyberjunkie
Foobar is a better player today, but Winamp was so much fun till 2.xx. They
had colour and great interfaces. They were the rock stars at the time of
boring sotware UI. Then Winamp 3 and then 5, and AOL and UuUUUgghhhgh!

Nullsoft made some neat software, like NSIS...
[http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/](http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/)
[http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nscopy/](http://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nscopy/)

Does anyone remember Sonique?

~~~
lnx01
I used Sonique for a bit but I went back to Winamp because Sonique was too
sluggish on my PII233/64MB/3GB laptop.

------
anindha
“When you think about what AOL had in early 2000,” he told Ars, “the only
thing that they were missing that [would be] essential to today’s media system
is a hardware device. They had the number one software for playing [in
Winamp], and in theory, although not in practice, the [Time Warner] content
library that could have been a pioneer in streaming. And a radio service. It
had all the elements. AOL could have been Spotify, it could have been
Pandora.”

Winamp was one of my favorite programs. It was really fast, took very little
memory and was really easy to use.

------
racl101
Fun fact: the catchphrase "Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass!" was
inspired by Wesley Willis.

~~~
sailfast
RIP. A true visionary in the vocal vamp arena and a gem of Chicago's North
Side sidewalk synthesizer music scene.

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logfromblammo
Don't let the byline fool you, this is a rerun from [2012].

------
kubakuba
Winamp was the only app that kept working after windows crashed:)

------
coldtea
On the Mac, if you long for a Winamp-style player, try Vox.

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qarioz
It's simple. They sold themselves to AOL.

------
w4rh4wk5
Can't people just move on and use AIMP?

~~~
pnopnopno
Or xmplay. From the guys who made BASS

------
crb
What's going on at Ars Technica? Between this (a straight-up repeat from 2012
with no obvious reason to bring it back now), and reblogging Jimmy Maher's
Digital Antiquarian articles from the same time frame (see
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-
part-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/) and
[http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-
part-1/](http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/)), have they cut
their budget for new writing?

~~~
kartD
Their comment section since last year has devolved into Reddit style one-
liners (especially political articles). The articles are really average these
days.

The one I'm really worried about is Anandtech, the articles are still
excellent but they're so understaffed(A10 chip deep dive was canceled, behind
on Mac reviews)

~~~
sureste
Yes. Ars Technica has changed. I do find their articles are not as good as
they used to be. Although, articles from Peter Bright and Kyle Orland are
still high quality.

I like their occasional (weekly?) articles on board games. I do not like their
movies/series articles that much. Mixed bag on their Cars Technica stuff.
However, I find there's too many articles which are only tangentially related
to tech or science. Example: the story of the woman that shot her boyfriend
while recording a video for their Youtube channel.

Your observation about their comment section is spot on. Comments beyond page
1 are buried.

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FussyZeus
So basically, a corporation bought a company they had no idea how to run, ran
it into the ground pursuing monetization that worked elsewhere (kind of). This
sounds like every acquisition between 97 and 05.

I wonder how many great products were destroyed by the big corporations
attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole, and failing every time?

------
ionised
As soon as I became aware of Foobar2000 WinAmp dropped off the radar
completely for me.

