
Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004) - diggan
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/webhead/2004/11/nullsoft_19972004.html
======
nikcub
Despite the "change the world.. break the rules, etc." rhetoric, Silicon
Valley couldn't be more different today.

I find it hard to imagine a Google employee releasing an ad blocker[0], or
Popcorn Time raising a Series A round, or startups shipping crypto that breaks
the law, or a startup selling offensive security software (there's a reason
that business has been pushed overseas)

Today, startups that push the boundaries on bad laws and regulations are more
likely to be roundly criticized than praised.

DMCA notices are automatically complied with without question via automated
systems. The tech companies have _become_ the media companies. Founders in
file sharing or media make a point in investment pitches that they'll be
conformist. YouTube's ContentID system means thousands of legal satire and
parody videos are removed every day.

Not to mention _whatever_ is/was happening between SV and the intelligence
agencies.

It's pretty hard today to find projects or communities that have similar
levels of energy and disregard for rules. When you do find them it's no
coincidence that they're usually on the periphery of what SV touches.

[0] Brian Kennish quit Google and released Disconnect, a privacy plugin for
browsers.

~~~
sametmax
I often read stuff like that. "Now you couldn't do it like they did it
before".

"You wouldn't be able to get away with the same jokes today."

Or

"You wouldn't be able to publish the same story today."

I agree that time changes, but this is discarding the merits of those who did
it then.

Believe it or not, at that time it was not easy either. The people that did it
had huge balls.

Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. The working world didn't
trust them, believe in them or value them. They were basically rejected, as
something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. My father
actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a
boring field.

Technology didn't exist. You couldn't google your way out of anything like
today (now if you google, SO answer everything!). Networks and computer where
slow and expensive (we now got unmetered VPS for 3€/month, come on!). Less
libraries, less frameworks, no crazy powerful API (can you believe making uber
before google map ?) and no proof whatsoever that what you wanted to do was
achievable.

The market was unproven (the 2000 bubble killed so much). We had no experience
in it. Not tools to recruit, sell, build...

It's was not easier to do anything. The constraints were just different.

The constraints of tomorrow will be also different.

Let's not use the change as an excuse.

Doing something that matters is ALWAYS HARD.

~~~
watwut
"Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. The working world didn't
trust them, believe in them or value them. They were basically rejected, as
something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. My father
actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a
boring field."

Exaggerating a bit? By a bit I mean a lot? I know that some geeks had hard
childhood and were bullied, but way more others were not. Plenty of fathers
were disappointed over children choosing various professions.

The way you people talk about it makes it sound as if all people who ever went
into tech were bullied outcasts and that is simply not true.

~~~
sametmax
I'm not exaggerating by one bit.

At best you had an "ok" situation. Nothing like the "rock star" attitude you
get today.

Not only geeks where the less popular in school, but the media mocked them.
And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like the
IT department was the accounting one.

The pay was not nearly in the same area. Nobody would consider buying a dual
screen for their IT dev a minimum requirement.

I can recall people dreading to call the sysadmin to deal with anything.
Talking to them was considered a chore.

The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever
say "I'm such a geek". Today somebody playing too much on iphone would say
that. We call girls with cute glasses "geeks".

~~~
watwut
"At best you had an "ok" situation. Nothing like the "rock star" attitude you
get today."

Not being rock star is not an oppression. The ok treatment is what majority of
people have. I mean, not being treated as something super special is not
"considered less that nothing by society". It is being considered normal.

"And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like
the IT department was the accounting one."

There is nothing wrong with the accounting department. In pretty much all
workplaces I have been at, they have been treated with respect. In any case,
if that workplace treated accountants badly too, the workplace was shitty for
more then one group.

"I can recall people dreading to call the sysadmin to deal with anything.
Talking to them was considered a chore."

I have seen such behavior towards admin, but then again I did not liked
talking with that particular admin either. I dont doubt that there were groups
of great admins that were not treated fairly despite acting all polite and all
that. Bad workplaces happen.

However, admin I considered chore to talk with was condescending too often and
it was hard to get what I needed from him. He was good in tech, but talking
with him was a chore.

"The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever
say "I'm such a geek"."

Yeah, I find everybody is a geek culture annoying too.

"We call girls with cute glasses "geeks"."

Guys with pretty much zero technical skills used to be called geeks just for
liking a tv show or play videogame.

~~~
cr0sh
Regarding the IT department thing:

From my first job to my current one, I always made sure I was in good stead
with the IT department (whatever its size) - it was where I could get cast-off
hardware for my computer junk pile!

------
SwellJoe
For what it's worth, Justin Frankel continues to produce great software. He
founded Cockos Incorporated, which produces REAPER; I think it's pretty widely
accepted in the audio recording community that REAPER is the best value in the
multitrack recording DAW market, and among the best overall tools for the
purpose.

He's obviously wealthy enough to never need to work again. It's clear Frankel
just loves music, and wants to make meaningful contributions in the field. So,
I think that's pretty cool. (I've also been a very happy REAPER user/customer
for many years.)

~~~
abecedarius
He was a regular in #c on IRC back in the 90s. Pleasant, fun guy. I kind of
miss those days.

~~~
bluedino
He used to come on #winprog - I think Winamp was his first windows app, he was
always asking about GUI elements how he was planning on making it skinnable.
Everyone was trading mp3's and I couldn't figure out why you would want to
spend 15 minutes downloading a song...

------
anjc
I don't know if this is how Winamp was meant to be used (I suspect it wasn't)
but its default behaviour from its launch - with all of your music in a big
giant list which you could muddle around, and a randomize play-order button -
almost invited me to explore music in a way that I haven't seen since. It
seems like ever since then the UIs try their best to force you to dig down
into a specific album. If a track's id3 tags are incorrect then they're
effectively lost in that UI because you don't know where to look for them.

Yeah you can randomize play in iTunes or Zune, but you have to make arbitrary
playlists explicitly. You can drag tracks around in VLC but the UI isn't
helpful.

I would say I knew 90% of the songs in my music collection then and probably
know 10% now despite it being about the same size, purely because of a few
'helpful' UI constraints.

People sort of suggest that music changed when MP3s and Napster bloomed, but
the 'end of an era' in my mind, the time when my experience of music
definitely changed, is when I was obligated to stop using Winamp and start
using iTunes etc in the mid 2000s.

~~~
acidburnNSA
What a glorious time it was with that master playlist and the excellent
keyboard shortcuts. I used to put it on shuffle and play a game where I'd
press Next and then Pause immediately and try to impress friends by knowing
what song it was within the first half-second.

You could also just conjure up any song with the "J" keyboard shortcut that
would search the entire path as well as the ID3 tags. It was so good that one
weekend night in high-school, my friend and I decided to put an old desktop in
the back of my Jeep on foam and power it with an inverter. We ran aux wires to
the stereo and I literally just had a full-on keyboard that I could pull up
while driving and get any song in my library with a few slaps of one hand
without looking down even once (I knew one-handed typing skills would be
useful someday). (I even tried voice command with Dragon Naturally Speaking
but it only worked when the engine was off.) To this day, I haven't had such
an agile interface to my music. I just use a phone now but it has a fraction
of my old library and searching for things while driving is dangerous,
illegal, slow, and miserable.

~~~
anjc
Ha wow, now that's dedication.

At least now your car can have bluetooth and Siri integration...which lets you
play music from Spotify...when you have reception...or tracks from your $500
16gb iPhone which can store a few albums...ugh.

You could probably re-make that project pretty handy these days, with
Raspberry Pi's and hard-drives being cheap and so on

~~~
aidenn0
If you reencode to lower bitrates you can likely store just as much on the
iPhone as you did in the winamp days; when I was using winamp, I bought the
largest drive I could afford for video encoding; it was 6GB.

~~~
anjc
Good point. 128kbps was more than enough for me in those days. 160 was
hedonistic.

~~~
aidenn0
Half my original MP3 collection was 96kbps 128kbps was "high quality".

------
jojohack
NSIS (created also by Nullsoft) was particularly awesome, made it a breeze to
build a Windows installer. There was also a photo gallery script Justin
created which I thought was ahead of its time back then.

~~~
dchest
It's still alive — latest release December 11, 2016!

Two years ago I worked on an Electron-based app for Windows. I tested* it
right on my dev machine in Electron for Linux _and_ the whole build process,
including the NSIS-based installed also ran on Linux via makensis utility, so
I didn't even have to touch Windows until the final QA phase. This was very
nice.

~~~
sigil
NSIS is more than alive for Electron apps -- it's about to become the default
windows installer in electron-builder! Squirrel.windows will be deprecated
soon.

------
ereyes01

      What kind of snot-nosed brat takes millions from AOL and
      then publishes software perfect for ripping off Time 
      Warner's entire catalog? Frankel, a grunge-dressing slacker
      from Sedona, Ariz., was a teenage college dropout in 1997
      when he wrote Winamp, the first program that made playing
      MP3s on a PC point-and-click simple.
    

How times have changed. There's now so many snot-nosed grungy slackers who
could buy the author's house in cash, just to make a point :-)

~~~
hardwaresofton
While it's certainly true that there are many more 20-somethings/30-somethings
with lots of money in tech these days, I think the attitude he had is pretty
rare.

Most people wouldn't dare to release software that might get them fired
because they just wanted to make it, and thought it should exist. Of course,
it's well within the rights of a company to fire an employee for doing so, but
pretty sure most tech workers these days just stay in line, relegate open
source work to when they're told they can do it (nights and weekends), and
gnash teeth but ultimately submit when a company shoves something they don't
like down their throat.

Then again, he did have "fuck you" money after the acquisition so...

------
eli
There's a really excellent long piece in Ars from 2012 about Nullsoft/Winamp
that has the advantage of nearly a decade more perspective:
[https://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-
greatest...](https://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-
mp3-player-undid-itself/)

The following year, AOL officially killed the Winamp product.

~~~
LeoPanthera
WinAmp is back. [http://www.winamp.com/](http://www.winamp.com/)

~~~
mizaru
It's been 'back' since... around 2013?

~~~
Sunset
It's "back" as much as a zombie is "back". Yeah it works on the latest OS, but
several features are broken.

Shoutcast still working is a little miracle. Though I am quite pleased with
the Podcast Downloading feature w/ RSS. ( for example you can pull stuff from
soundcloud )

------
bricss
Small guide on How to use WASTE ->
[http://www.cs.montana.edu/~huff/waste/howto/Waste.html](http://www.cs.montana.edu/~huff/waste/howto/Waste.html)

~~~
foxhop
I was just thinking about WASTE recently in the last 2 weeks since Trump took
office.

WASTE was written in Java and was sort of tricky to setup / understand. At one
point about 10 years ago, I had a small 8 person "dark net" running with
WASTE, shit was so 1337 for its time.

Bit torrent was just making waves around this time and made downloading WAY
faster, but was more risky then sharing directly over WASTE.

~~~
bricss
WASTE was written on entire C++, you can find sources here
[http://slackerbitch.free.fr/waste/download.html](http://slackerbitch.free.fr/waste/download.html)
or somewhere here
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/waste/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/waste/)

~~~
foxhop
Hmmm, maybe I found an "open source" client that was written in Java then. I
remember having to mess with JAR files.

------
pfarnsworth
I still use winamp as my mp3 player, one of the first things I install when I
reinstall my Windows. It's everything that I need without the BS.

~~~
scott_karana
I'm also a fan of Foobar2000: not as pretty, but surpremely small and
functional :)

~~~
guitarbill
There's no accounting for taste. I found Winamp gaudy, and actually preferred
Foobar. The black theme was quite nice once the font colour was changed to
off-white.

I cannot recommend Foobar enough, the tools for fixing up dodgy mp3s are very
useful. It isn't so hot with mp4 tags though.

~~~
gcp
_It isn 't so hot with mp4 tags though._

What do you mean exactly? mp4 tags in all variations, including various iTunes
oddities, are fully supported.

~~~
guitarbill
Way back in 2009/2010, I remember there being some issues. But that's
coincidentally when I switched to a Mac, and started doing all my tagging in
iTunes instead. Come to think of it, it's likely they've fixed it by now. I
have used foobar since, but mainly for playback.

------
myrandomcomment
For me I stopped using Winamp when I went full OSX and iPod. There was no
reason to use anything else. Now, I hate iTunes but it is not easy to change.
Right now I only use it for managing the library as a source of truth. The
files are on a network share and played in Kodi on the compute stick plugged
into the TV thought an external DAC to a tube amp. ;)

------
neotek
Man I would kill for an ultra-simple, ultra-lightweight, robust music player
for macOS that was just like Winamp 2.81, the last good version. No, not
foobar.

~~~
derefr
"Ultra-lightweight" can mean two very different (and nearly opposite) things:
some people want a player that has _no external dependencies_ (and thus must
do everything itself, like VLC); while others want a player with _minimal
binary size_ (which thus will then rely on the OS's AV frameworks as much as
possible for media support.)

Personally, I prefer the second definition, but it's the harder of the two to
satisfy. I don't really understand why the approach Perian undertook was
abandoned when Perian itself was. It'd be very nice to just have macOS
"natively" support every media format+codec under the sun, and then just play
media files in Quicktime or iTunes or any other player GUI you prefer.

~~~
majkinetor
VLC is great, but UI sux tbh. Also, SMplayer is great, but UI sux even more
for audio.

The level of 'it just works' for those 2 products is just not comparable to
anything else. Plus they are cross platform, works on pretty much anything in
existence.

That is the reason I tollerate UI and use them every day. Also, while it lacks
audio management, SMPlayer is the best video player, period.

~~~
DonHopkins
VLC's UI sucks so terribly, it's like they went WAY out of their way to make
it sucks on purpose, and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there are any
problems or ever consider fixing them.

One example of many [1]:

Type CMD-E (on Mac, or whatever the equivalent is on Windows) to get the video
effects window.

Select "Geometry". Now check "Magnification/Zoom".

Notice how you get a picture-in-picture in the upper left corner, with a white
rectangle showing the zoomed area, that you can move around by clicking. But
if you press and hold, it also drags the entire windows (on a Mac -- I haven't
tried on Windows -- VLC's UI and behavior on Mac and Windows diverges widely
so I won't try to predict what happens).

Now look underneath the picture-in-picture and notices some ugly upper case
pixelated text that says "VLC ZOOM HIDE". See how it's jaggy and rendered at
the resolution of the movie you're playing itself, not at screen in a full
resolution overlay with readable text?

Now look at the triangle with a jaggy curved hypotenuse below the jaggy words.
That is the zoom "slider" (which also drags the window when you drag the
mouse, so it's more like a clicker than a slider). See how it gets narrower
and narrower in a succession of jaggy stair-step chunks, until it's merely one
jaggy pixel wide? Well guess what: the TARGET AREA also gets narrow to match
the width of the slider, so it's almost impossible to click on the bottom of
the slider, to select the larger zoom sizes! Since the zoom slider is not very
tall and its pixels fat and jaggy, you don't have fine grained access to very
many zoom sizes at all, either. The zoom pixel steps are much bigger than
screen pixels, depending on the video resolution!

What possible purpose could that serve? Why would any user guess that the
lower narrow part of the slider represents a wider zoom showing a bigger
rectangle over the picture-in-picture, while the top wider part of the slider
represents a tighter zoom showing a smaller rectangle over the picture-in-
picture? And what slider have you ever used that gets narrower from top to
bottom, with a jaggy curve, and an impossibly narrow hard to click target area
at the bottom?

This single facet of VLC's terrible UI deserves to be front and center in the
User Interface Hall of Shame [2] -- it's even worse than Apple's infamous
schizophrenically skeuomorphic QuickTime 4.0 player [3], from 1999! The latest
version of VLC in 2017 is still much worse than the shameful QuickTime player
was 18 years ago!

Who could have possibly gone so far out of their way to design and implement
such a terrible user interface on purpose, then smugly brushed off and ignored
16 years of bug reports and cries for help on the VLC message boards, without
harboring a malicious contempt for their users?

That's not even the worst of it. Now check "Transform" and pick one of the
transforms like "Rotate by 90 degrees". Guess what? The magnification
interface itself is rotated 90 degrees, because it's drawn on the video before
it's rotated, so now it appears at the top right of the screen, rotated 90
degrees itself.

And guess what else? The mouse clicks are not even transformed properly, so
clicking on the magnification interfaces does NOTHING, rendering it completely
useless! Depending on the aspect ratio of the video, you can't even click in
the upper left corner where it USED to be and SHOULD still be to operate it,
because it is clipped off the right edge of the window.

Are those ugly cosmetic and impossible usability problems not bad enough for
you? Then make a playlist with one item. Select "Repeat" mode. Play the movie.
Now go to the finder and remove, rename or move the movie you're playing, or
just unplug the USB stick containing the video. Not an uncommon occurrence,
right? Now VLC will hang up, consuming 100% of the CPU time, often times
seizing up the entire Mac, turning on the fan, locking out all user input, and
forcing you to reboot! This happens to me all the time.

These bugs have been around for years. The more you fiddle around with it,
testing out the edge cases and trying to combine various poorly designed and
implemented features, the more bugs you find.

File a bug report, they say. People report these problems again and again. The
developers just ignore them and brush them off. I've tried reporting these and
other bugs, describing them in meticulous detail, which is frustrating because
once I start writing step-by-step instructions to reproduce one problem, I
keep finding more and more problems, each worse than the last, and then they
just brush me off and ignore my bug reports too.

VLC's user interface is maliciously terrible in so many ways, the developers
are careless and arrogant towards their users, and there's no hope of the
developers ever changing their ways, acknowledging the problems, and improving
it. Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in
adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV
cartoon porn [4] [5].

[1] [http://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV](http://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV)

[2]
[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php)

[3]
[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm)

[4]
[https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html](https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html)

FOR ANIME FANS

New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color
matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and
resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support
from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.

[5]
[https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=208770](https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=208770)

Now, if you are an AMV (Anime Music Video) creator and want to edit the video
directly, the MKV is your best friend since it's a lossless video-content
container due to the fact that you will find yourself adding effects to the
video frames/audio. In this case you will want to lose as little as possible
in your video, so MKV compression best suits.

TOPIC ANSWER: The reason why MKV is popular for anime is because of it's noted
lossless compression. Anime show creators most likely notice this fact and use
it to contain their video frames and audio tracks for maximum quality. - it
has nothing to do with HD.

~~~
derefr
> Instead of improving usability for everyone, they're more interested in
> adding yet another obscure anime decoder feature so they can watch their AMV
> cartoon porn

Mind you, FOSS is contributed to by people scratching their own itch. It's not
so much that VLC has a lot of otaku developers; it's that a lot of people who
watch (or subtitle) "AMV cartoon porn" see a problem with, or missing feature
in, VLC, and think "I'm a programmer; I can fix that", and dash off one-off
patches.

~~~
majkinetor
Its very hard to contribute patch to foss tool in general. There is no
substitution for agile development team.

~~~
DonHopkins
Oh I certainly wanted to contribute to the VLC project and integrate it into
my own projects, but after having my concerns that I wrote up in great detail
flippantly dismissed with such contempt, and seeing how the exact same thing
happened to other users reporting legitimate longstanding bugs who were
brushed off and ignored over so many years, I had no interest in contributing
after that. It's fortunate that not every open source project suffers from
such arrogant developers as VLC.

------
LeoPanthera
The Nullsoft brand was sold to Radionomy in 2014. nullsoft.com now redirects
to winamp.com, which astonishingly still exists.

~~~
symlinkk
I remember reading a few posts on the Winamp forums around a year ago that
they were revitalizing development on Winamp, not sure if that went anywhere
though.

~~~
Teever
I have a feeling it isn't.

I used to have winamp on my android phone and when I got a new phone a few
months ago I discovered that they had removed winamp from the store. Which is
unfortunate because winamp was surprisingly great on android too.

~~~
baobrain
Their site[0] says that they're revitalizing it, and the last dev tweet I
could find was from October 2016 [1]. So I'd bet it's going along at a
reasonable pace.

[0][http://www.winamp.com/index.html](http://www.winamp.com/index.html)

[1][https://twitter.com/Ed_Rich/status/788650603383754752](https://twitter.com/Ed_Rich/status/788650603383754752)

~~~
sp0rk
It looks like he actually replied to somebody else very recently to say
they're waiting on the legal department:

[https://twitter.com/ed_rich/status/817065613411713025](https://twitter.com/ed_rich/status/817065613411713025)

------
standardhuman
I recently encountered an episode of the Internet History Podcast that
featured a long interview with Frankel. It touches on many of the points in
the Slate article (working relationship at AOL, end of Nullsoft, etc.), and
was recorded in 2015. Might be a nice companion to the article for those
looking for a little more insight:
[http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/07/justin-
frankel...](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/07/justin-frankel-
creator-of-winamp/)

------
richev
Easter egg at [http://www.winamp.com](http://www.winamp.com)

Click the llama's ass.

------
nickpsecurity
Winamp was a great, music player back in my day that combined features with
great, skinnable appearance and visualizations that could leave you in a
trance. Plus it had a funnier opening than the competition at the time:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-
nRS_CWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS_CWM)

------
shaan7
Well NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is one thing that came out of
Nullsoft which continues to be very widely used even today. Makes it child's
play to write simple installers which are in mere KBs.

------
nstj
> Conventional wisdom says Frankel is more likely to join the millionaire has-
> beens who dot the hills in my San Francisco neighborhood or become a trophy
> hire at a tech startup, like contemporaries Fanning, Marc Andreessen, and
> Linus Torvalds.

Heh.

------
appleflaxen
Waste was released before my time...

Can anyone comment on what the scene was like when it was new?

------
kichik
This is from 2004. What's new?

~~~
gdulli
A whole generation of a potentially interested audience who was not yet aware
of Nullsoft in 2004.

~~~
ethbro
A generation who can't imagine the novelty of performing a first search on
Napster or Direct Connect. Magic!

~~~
joering2
Audiogalaxy. Was always impressed how easy it was to find 320kbit versions or
even some extremely rare songs...

~~~
riffraff
Audiogalaxy was insanely effective at finding related music, due to,
basically, human curation. I will always be grateful of having discovered lamb
and goldfrapp through it.

~~~
eltoozero
Up-voted for dragging Lamb into an HN thread. ;)

Somehow appropriate for a decade old article about 90's vintage desktop MP3
software.

Now go and try to locate rips of episodes of AMP from MTV and complete your
electronica collection.

