
Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself - scommab
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/
======
thought_alarm
Back in the day I used WinAMP (and X11amp) as a simple front end to my web-
based Linux jukebox server that I had ripped all of my CDs on to. Those were
the days of AudioGalaxy and Red Hat 6 and WindowMaker. It was a marvelous
time, for a couple of years anyway.

Then WinAMP 3.0 happened, and it was buggy garbage.

Then I discovered what iTunes could do for me as far as organizing my music.
It put WinAMP 3.0 in a new light, and I decided to give it another shot. Nope,
still garbage. Then I tried the newly-released WMP 9. That was garbage too.

So I retired my Linux Jukebox and migrated to iTunes. Then I got an iPod. Then
I got a PowerBook. Later I threw out my beige boxes, learned Cocoa and iOS
development, and now that's what I do for a living.

So if WinAMP 3.0 wasn't such a mess then I might still be a Windows developer.
Thanks, WinAMP, for inadvertently putting me on a new path.

~~~
nostromo
You're not the only one.

I moved to iTunes from WinAmp when I got tired of meticulously organizing my
mp3s into folders. That was the feature that sold me on Windows iTunes.

Then came iPods, MacBook Pros, iPhones, iPads and now maybe $10k+ later I'm
hook line and sinker into the Mac Eco system.

~~~
jimhart3000
Unfortunately, WinAmp so indoctrinated me into manually managing my mp3
folders that even after I switched to iTunes, it was still years until I
finally let it manage the library structure for me.

~~~
rkudeshi
You're not the only one.

I finally gave in and let iTunes start managing my files for me about 2 years
ago - it's one of the best computing decisions I've ever made.

If you're still manually managing your music files' folder structure, I
strongly encourage you to let iTunes start doing it. What you lose in fine-
grained control (I never liked 'Artist/Album/songs' subfolders, I preferred a
big list of 'Artist - Album/songs' folders) you make up in a much better
listening experience.

------
tatsuke95
> _“There's no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is
> in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started
> immediately upon acquisition,” Rob Lord"_

Then why did you sell it for <$100MM?

This is nothing against the software. In fact, I _still_ use WinAMP on my PCs
(no lie).

But it annoys me when people pile on about what happens to their companies
after they are acquired. If the legacy of your company is important to you
(and no one says it has to be) why are you selling out? AOL isn't to blame for
WinAMP going down hill, Nullsoft is for _selling_ to them.

I'd have taken the money too, but I wouldn't sit around and say "Look what
they did to my company!" We seem to get that a lot around here. Big Tech Corp
always takes the blame, never the entrepreneur. Well, big companies ruining
acquisitions is practically a meme...what did you expect?

~~~
bradwestness
Did Winamp ever have a built-in music store? I was under the impression that
people basically stopped caring about Winamp mostly because the newer versions
of Windows Media Player (7 and up) were "good enough" that mainstream users
didn't see any need to go hunting down an alternative player.

Nobody really likes iTunes as a player, it's only notable because of the store
and the device lock-in.

~~~
sjs382
I like it.

~~~
fromhet
Well, few do then.

To be honest, iTunes a kind of bloated, it is a memory hog and it could be
easier to use. But they have the store and the connection with the i-devices
and are shipped with the macintoshes, and I believe that is their greatest
feature.

~~~
sjs382
I don't use the store (except a few promotional tracks I downloaded for free)
and I don't own an iDevice (though I used to). I use iTunes _because it's easy
to use_ and offers features that make listening to music more enjoyable (smart
playlists, etc).

------
polyfractal
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who never liked Winamp. I always found
it awful. Why do I need fancy skins for a media player?

I found Foobar2000 and never looked back. I know you can customize the hell
out of Foobar...but I personally loved the default "giant list of searchable
songs" format.

~~~
MBCook
Winamp had tons of skins, but I only ever used two. One was the default, the
other looked like an old wooden jukebox.

But that wasn't the reason to use Winamp. I started using it when it was
basically the only game in town, but for a long time there was no reason to
switch. Winamp had a few things going for it:

1\. It was amazingly small, and consequently it was terrifically fast. The
tiny window also gave you all the information and controls you needed, hogging
preciously little of your 800x600 or 1024x768 display.

2\. I could use it efficiently. My favorite feature (which I still miss
sometimes) was you could bring up a box and start typing a song name and jump
straight to playing it. I think it was the J key. When you got in your mind
"Hey, I'd like to hear X", you could do it in a second or two.

3\. The ecosystem was huge. There were thousands of skins (most terrible, some
looked pretty amazing) and tons of plugins. People made visualizers, ways to
control the software with external interfaces, all sorts of neat stuff.

It still amazes me how small Winamp was. I didn't like Winamp 3. I tried it
for a while but it felt bloated and the jump feature was gone. Despite the
near universal unhappiness, the developers defended version 3, making them
seem out of touch. After a while I downloaded the previous release again
(2.95?) and used it for years. I eventually moved to iTunes shortly before I
got an iPod.

The last I heard about Winamp was a few years ago when Winamp 5 came out. My
reaction then was amazement that it was still around. I'm amazed it's still
around now.

~~~
ghshephard
No substitute, but in iTunes on OS X, cmd+option+F with the song/artist/album
you are looking for, and then, [Tab][Space] accomplishes the "Select a song /
album / play list and the PLay" - it takes about a second as well
(particularly as the [tab][space] gets ingrained in your finger DNA.)

With all that said - iTunes has grown into a bloated beast that I hope Apple
gets around to fixing ASAP.

PS: If anybody knows how to remap something other than the awkward cmd+option
F to "Search Music" - and for mega-bonus points, do so globally, I would be
forever be in your debt - unfortunately "Search Music" doesn't appear to be
one of Spark's (<http://www.shadowlab.org/Software/spark.php>) actions.

~~~
Someone
You will want to do something like:

    
    
        defaults write com.apple.iTunes NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Target Search Field" "@F"
    

(more info at [http://lifehacker.com/5822633/add-a-search-keyboard-
shortcut...](http://lifehacker.com/5822633/add-a-search-keyboard-shortcut-to-
itunes) and/or [http://www.mactipper.com/2008/02/add-keyboard-shortcuts-
from...](http://www.mactipper.com/2008/02/add-keyboard-shortcuts-from-
command.html) and/or <http://www.google.com/search?q=NSUserKeyEquivalents>)

And aside: I do not find command-option-F that bad. I move my left thumb or
middle finger to the left command, left ring finger to the left option key and
press F with my left index finger.

~~~
Someone
Did I write only half that line, or did it get silently chopped of? Here is
another attempt:

    
    
        defaults write com.apple.iTunes NSUserKeyEquivalents \
            -dict-add "Target Search Field" "@F"

------
nikcub
I will always remember Winamp as providing one of the 'wow' moments in my tech
life - the first time I downloaded an MP3 from a BBS and played it (only 4MB a
song!)

Also remembered for one of the greatest release slogans after the mess with
the later versions:

> "ALMOST AS NEW AS WINAMP 2 Nullsoft Winamp3" [1]

[1] Archive version:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20030920142516/http://winamp.com/>

------
viraptor
The greatest thing I remember from winamp was the visualisation plugin. It was
a high performance graphics processor really. You could draw a couple of lines
oscilloscope-style (plot based on volume in each band), throw in some blur,
surface transformation, etc. and you could get amazing 3d-looking "textured"
models moving around. It was an amazing framework for playing around with
generated graphics. There were some great authors too who could make really
nice visualisations effortlessly (or at least it looked like that) - I saw a
"rendered" insides of menger sponge done in just a couple of lines of Dynamic
Distance Modifier layer. Mind-blowing experience trying to figure out how it
worked (like watching demo scene stuff).

I remember actually that once AVS got keyboard control, we tried to use it for
a presentation in maths class. That's right - a music visualiser was easier to
use for some high-school guys than other frameworks to do a 3d graphics
presentation!

------
bguthrie
The original, lean Winamp was a fabulous piece of software--I can't think of
many other products I've used that made me so happy, or seemed so much like
magic. I still remember feeling awed by the idea that your computer could
play, and Winamp was the face of the revolution, managing somehow to seem both
nerdy and hip.

I stopped using Winamp a bit after the acquisition, so I really enjoyed the
article - it filled in a lot of gaps for me. I guess now I know why it started
sucking, eventually. Thanks to Frankel and the rest of the team for their hard
work - what a cool time and place to be alive.

------
jcr
The most often overlooked, but technically best, music player of the late 90's
was Kojofol. It's a shame it was never released as open source, but I'm fairly
sure it couldn't be. The author had no license for the patented audio
compression codecs it used, and it even contained an mostly unknown variant
called "Astrid AAC". It's the last bit that has always had me fascinated, and
no, it's not AAC as you know it. It was actually a variant of the VQF format
with some MPEG-ish bits thrown in there for fun. It always sounded just
gorgeous compared to other codecs at equivalent bit rates/sizes.

I have a copy of Kojofol around here somewhere along with some old "Astrid
AAC" formatted files. I've always thought about reverse engineering it, but
there's really no point when you'd just end up in a lawsuit.

~~~
yoasif_
Looks kinda like Audion for Mac:

<https://panic.com/audion/>

(at least in terms of skinning).

Also, looks like Winamp hired the K-Jofol team and released a skin aping it:

<http://www.winamp.com/skin/k-jofol-v5/142308>

------
jorleif
"the company insisted on using its own indigenous billing system"

This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always
seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full
framework? I mean, sure efficiency on paper (and only on paper as we see in
this case), and probably a certain kind of clarity to the organization, but
still. The right way to do this would be to have the support functions, such
as billing be services that business units use if they think they are
beneficial, and otherwise not. It would force support functions to be
efficient in a whole different way, market driven, rather than "make executive
happy"-driven.

~~~
kahawe
> _This is something I have a hard time understanding. Why do companies always
> seem to insist that everything in their operations is within their full
> framework?_

There might be actual reasons of efficiency and using synergies and if you
ever have to comply with regulations, you have one central unit to work on.
But I think usually these decisions stem from either a positive will of
organizing - because if you have two billing units or systems, things might
get out of hand or control and having one just seems more neat and organized
and people fear that chaos. Or they stem from nothing but cold, cut-neck,
selfish political reasons. Evil-business-guy doesn't want another fish
handling money in his pond because just imagine if that little fish turns out
to be bigger than evil-business-guy's own billing system? On top of that, even
smart-business-guy VERY likely gets a bonus on how much his billing system
billed and how well it performed... you think he will let that bonus slip just
because it MIGHT be the right thing for winamp? And as a unit helping to bring
in the cash, billing typically has a lot of natural influence.

And of course we have a lot of 20/20 hindsight in this case.

This is a typical example of how difficult it can be to set really good,
beneficial goals in an organization and how many natural conflicting interests
there can be - and all that in a humongous giant like aol on top of that.

~~~
jorleif
I understand that this "positive will of organizing" is related to legibility
in the sense of James C. Scott (see e.g
[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-
calle...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-
legibility/)). But this failure mode is so common, that one would think that
it would be in mergers and acquisitions textbooks already!

As you say incentives may play a role as well, but I think it is very common
that large organisations never actually consider the option of not organizing
something, in this case, letting Nullsoft do their billing whatever way they
wanted at first, and integrating it later once it is stable enough to allow a
complex development project.

To lead an organisation, one has to know what is happening in it - This has a
complexity cost, which should be explicitly managed. New acquisitions would
need to be treated differently, and full assimilations into the acquirer may
not be a good result at all.

~~~
kahawe
> _To lead an organisation, one has to know what is happening in it_

I agree with you but reality shows us different a thousand times over and
still these companies exist... even AOL is still around.

------
sp332
Here's an interview/behind-the-scenes piece that Rolling Stone did with the
creators of WinAmp in 2004
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou8YIbH0j_3qSpepPy1VruHe...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou8YIbH0j_3qSpepPy1VruHeyliYWI2zvjbZk_pn8W8/edit)
I thought it was funny how the Rolling Stone author comes across as a drooling
fanboy :)

------
alan_cx
I must have missed something huge because I've been using Winamp for as long
as I can remember and never ever seen a need to change. I don't see what's
been undone. Missed opportunities to expand and become some big evil money
scraper, sure, but what I see today is still a product that does what its
supposed to do, and that's that.

What's the problem here?

~~~
DanBC
> _What's the problem here?_

The tiny US userbase means most people disagree with you. That's the problem.

------
Codhisattva
Winamp is a great start up success story that's for sure. Homegrown, self
taught developer learns Windows programming just because he wants to play mp3
files. Amazing success follows. Three cheers to Justin for that.

------
blcArmadillo
All I can say is winamp is open on my computer playing my music as I write
this. Are there really other players out there that do a better job? Seems
like a lot of people use iTunes but I've always found it to be a very slow
media player. But maybe things have changed I need to reevaluate the current
offerings?

~~~
swdunlop
I find Quod Libet to be my tool of choice, now. The query language is a bit
ridiculous, but Mutagen is great for cleaning up crappy tags from my mp3
purchases. Despite being a PyGTK app, it has been fairly responsive and snappy
despite my ridiculous media-hoarding habits.

<http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/>

------
reiichiroh
What ever happened to Sonique?

~~~
bane
For years it was the only player that could also handle digital tracker (.mod,
.s3m, .xm, .it, etc.) files more or less correctly. In those days, downloading
a 100k .mod file over my dial-up or a 5MB mp3 was a big deal and being able to
find lots of cheap music that was also light on the bandwidth was invaluable.

I _loved_ Sonique.

~~~
AJ007
In addition to trackers, didn't Sonique sound better than Winamp?

In my very hazy memory, Winamp used less memory, but Sonique sounded a lot
better.

~~~
gala8y
_In addition to trackers, didn't Sonique sound better than Winamp?_

Same thing with XMPlay [0]. Much better sound (me thinks).

[0] <http://www.un4seen.com/xmplay.html>

------
tzury
One word, AOL.

There are many more in this startup's cemetery, see:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL>

Let alone the total acquisitions value which is grater than AOL current
valuation in order of magnitude.

------
gonzo
Not mentioned, Dimitry Bolyrev, author of MacAMP and one-time roommate of
Justin Frankel, who got cut out of the deal by Frankel's lawyer-scum father.

------
josiahq
First time I launched visualizations via Winamp in my dorm room was a very
happy moment. Some serious app nostalgia there. And, Wesley Willis:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM>

~~~
fish2000
+1 for Wesley and his personal zoomorphic hellscape.

------
clintboxe
Back around 2000 I took an old full-tower PC I had laying around and built a
MP3 jukebox for my 1993 Volkswagen Fox. It ran Winamp with a plugin for a X10
Mouse Remote. I had a power inverter in the glove box and a fancy new stereo
that had a 1/8" jack on the front. With a few bungee cords I secured the tower
in the truck and the PC would boot every-time the car started. I skipped
school for two days to build it. Without Winamp, I probably wouldn't have been
able to do it. Kind of crazy that I can now hop in my car and play pretty much
whatever I want using my iPhone & Bluetooth.

------
HCIdivision17
Is there any other music player with a media library organizer as excellent as
Winamp's? I don't mean that contentiously, but rather I just haven't enjoyed
any other. Enter text into the search box, and it will filter simply massive
playlists as you type. The instant feedback is great in filtering, especially
if I forgot what an album was called but knew some other esoteric detail.

But I don't use it as a Swiss-Army chainsaw anymore. I just use it for
listening to music in Windows. It's pretty good at that. (And version 5 isn't
that bad - it's just version 2 plus 3 after all!)

~~~
gcp
As other people have pointed out here, foobar2000 pretty much embodies the
feel people had about Winamp in 2000. Though there's some large philosophical
differences, like the total lack of skinning, and a much better API.

~~~
raverbashing
well, when on linux I use: mplayer

mplayer /path/to/folder/*

can't beat that for simplicity

------
kprobst
That was a shame. I'm still using Winamp 2.81 (from 2002, 10 years ago). As
long as it continues to work on Windows, I'll never let it go. Never could get
used to the later versions.

~~~
barrkel
I'm using v5.623. With the lite install and classic skin, there's almost no
difference (for my use cases).

~~~
StavrosK
Same here. I don't think there's any difference for _any_ use case, it's
pretty much the same player. I do remove all the bloatware, though.

~~~
iamben
Yeah, same here. Used it everyday from the late 90s until I moved to Spotify
(and then not at all when I moved to Macs last year).

The classic player was/is such a wonderfully designed piece of software. Just
minimise it and stick it to the top of the screen. Uncomplicated, unobtrusive.

------
user49598
Winamp 3, as an application, got it all right. Software developers even today
struggle to get applications to be so usable.

    
    
      Dead simple interface
      Super fast start up
      Super fast search
      Easy playlist creation and management
      Simple keyboard shortcuts
      Simple configuration
      Huge library of plugins
      Zero distractions
      Stable
    

I still miss winamp. To this day there hasn't been another media player that
just got completely out of my way and let me listen to music.

~~~
spectre256
It sounds like you are describing Winamp 2. As I recall (and the article seems
to confirm) Winamp 3 added no useful features while killing stability and
speed. I do remember liking winamp 5 (there was no 4) though.

~~~
masklinn
> As I recall (and the article seems to confirm) Winamp 3 added no useful
> features while killing stability and speed.

Aye. It added deeper skinning support, but was slow, crash-prone and
incompatible with everything built for winamp 2.

Winamp 5 was built on the Winamp 2 codebase with some Winamp 3 techs in (such
as "modern skins")

------
sabret00the
I actually wrote an article about WinAMP and where it's failing a little while
back: [http://s00techified.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/soo-what-
happen...](http://s00techified.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/soo-what-happened-to-
winamp/)

WinAMP like so many projects ultimately needs a steroid shot. It was never
supposed to be an iTunes. But it was supposed to be the go-to player for
Windows Users. It's a shame it's just stifled. AOL should open source it.

------
kamaal
The problem is most of us think Winamp doesn't even exist anymore.

Couple of days back, a close relative of mine bought a used laptop from his
friend. I and my cousin generally do technical stuff like OS installation for
most of my family members. While browsing through the installed software we
noticed Winamp, And we were like 'Does Winamp even exist anymore'!!! And it
just came out spontaneously out of our mouths.

Winamp isn't in trouble, it is just not relevant anymore.

------
creamyhorror
Weirdly, I used Winamp from '97 all the way through 2008. I don't remember
whether it was v2 or v3 but I was happy with it and never tried anything else.
I used VLC only for videos, and switched to MPC(-HomeCinema) later. I heard
inklings about the iTunes revolution in the US but I had no iPod nor any need
to use iTunes. It was only when I switched to a new desktop PC that I decided
to try another music player for fun, which was foobar2000. I like fb2k, but
still don't find it as subjectively nice as Winamp was - perhaps because of
the default look. (I only use fb2k now, though.)

"The llama's ass" will always remain with me, as a vivid and irreverent
memento of the first surging waves of the mass Internet crashing upon the
shore of my community. Downloading and swapping MP3s in the early days, from
websites and via IRC, before AudioGalaxy and Napster...those were exciting
times. Thank you for the memories, Winamp.

------
bane
For a while AOL support winamp pretty well. I remember watching hundreds of
hours of streaming TV (and streaming radio) over Shoutcast and in2tv when AOL
was trying to become a media company.

Now that all seems to be dead...fortunately some of it live on...VLC supports
shoutcast TV and there are still dozens of stations still broadcasting.

------
latch
Maybe it's just me, but every other quote in that article has been changed
with square brackets.

    
    
      every [company] I thought was doing interesting things.
    
      I was being helpful by [looking at] product features [on a] business level
    

On and on...I've never seen so much of that _ever_ before.

~~~
hexagonal
What browser/user-agent are you using? They might be doing something wacky
with non en-US traffic.

------
K2h
This article brought back some great memories for me.

As a result of reading this, I also looked around for more history on Winamp
and enjoyed the post on oldversion [1] that walks through the build history
all the way from the DOS version, and a trip to the waybacktime machine [2] to
learn about the Fraunhofer winplay3, the only real predecessor to Winamp
(packaged with pirated material as a player in the 90's) and now something
Fraunhofer wants to deny existed.

[1] <http://www.oldversion.com/blog/the-history-of-winamp/>

[2]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080619002511/www.sonicspot.com/winplay/winplay.html)

------
madrona
Interesting to compare this to the tales of AOL's mismanagement in this
comment thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4120136>

------
stratos2
Used to love winamp, it was the only think used to play media. Until it got so
bloated. Imagine it had a simple, clean interface and loaded lightning fast. I
would never use anything else.

------
maybird
VLC happened?

~~~
rcfox
Do people use VLC as their main music player? I've always found its
organization pretty primitive.

------
bradpineau
Winamp... now THAT reminds me of the 1990s.

~~~
tatsuke95
Not for me!

Still using it daily. People laugh every time they see it. But it does what I
want, it's lightweight, and has some great commercial plugins.

~~~
mtgx
What are they using? Besides iTunes.

~~~
For_Iconoclasm
Most people that I know use foobar2000.

~~~
mariusmg
Yeap, foobar2000 is basically the "standard" now.

------
michaelpinto
To me Winamp was always more of an accessory to Napster than anything else.
Don't get me wrong, it was a solid program -- but it was really not much more
of a utility through my eyes. On the other hand Napster really stands out in
my mind as something revolutionary (ethics aside).

~~~
TheGateKeeper
That's how you should view all software, frankly. As a utility to get the job
done.

------
ilitirit
I still use Winamp 2.97. Anything beyond that I wouldn't really classify as
good software. I _think_ Justin Frankel was learning C++ at the time and tried
to bite off a bit more than he could chew. This was just what I read off their
own tech forums and in IRC.

------
maurits
Ah, winamp 2.2-something nostalgia. What a lovely brilliant little player it
was. Reminds me of my other favorite player when I switched platform.

The story of Audion:

<http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/>

------
philipbroadway
Winamp 3 was the only thing I missed about windows. The visualizer plugins and
skins still pass anything available now. Had no idea there was a mac version,
so I tried downloading it. Mac version plays mp3, no radio, visualizers, or
plugins.

~~~
StavrosK
Do you mean that interstitial version that used XML and had a whole new
interface and everything?

~~~
shrikant
IIRC, the Nullsoft team admitted they rushed out that release because they
really wanted a version that had "mp3" in the name.

Also, that interface was called Wasabi.

------
dakrisht
Nice read to make you remember the good 'ole days of MP3 ripping when it
actually took some work. I'm not sure if Winamp could have ever reach iTunes
level but it was a major piece of software in the 90s. Nostalgia!

------
mcdowall
Winamp was great back in the day, suffered with iTunes for a while and now
have deleted all my mp3s and living solely with a Spotify premium account. But
I loved those skins on winamp!

------
BadassFractal
Still using Winamp lite to this day, and I also greatly enjoyed the creator's
other great product: Reaper. Nostalgia for simpler times.

------
chris123
Sucking the life out of companies, products, and people is AOL's function in
life. And it's damn good at it.

------
slig
Anyone using the OS X version? All I need is playlists and start/stop using
the special keyboard keys.

~~~
Volpe
iTunes does all those things. :)

~~~
slig
All those things and much more that I don't need/care. Too much bloat.

~~~
acous
You might be interested in "Enqueue", it's another player for mac.

~~~
alanh
Or Cog, which handles FLAC just fine.

------
apa-sl
I'm still using winamp - love it's easily searchable music library and android
integration!

------
pdeuchler
I do miss my Star Trek theme. I've never been able to find a replacement for
iTunes.

------
carry_bit
Winamp is the only media player I have found adequate so far because of the
Nullsoft Signal Processing Studio.

------
molecule
XMMS.

------
pitdesi
I still haven't found a solution better than winamp with advanced crossfading
output (which was last updated in 2002) to DJ a party... I usually bust out my
5-year old PC because nothing beats the crossfader of winamp (coupled with the
awesome keyboard shortcuts - the ability to search for anything in the ID3
tags and enqueue the song via keyboard is so useful for a DJ)

Anyone have a better solution?

Amazing reading here how many people still use the old versions of winamp...
It's pretty much the only thing I use my PC's for.

------
hastur
I still use Winamp (with an old-skool theme).

There's no better mp3 player for Windows.

It's light, has just the right amount of interface, no media library bull crap
(doesn't force you to use one, anyways).

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aluhut
I still use winamp 2.9. It is minimal and it still plays mp3s. I don't need it
for anything else.

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shasty
Winamp was always a piece of crap.

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zobzu
One day WinAMP (nullsoft) was bought by AOL. Anyone remembers? That's when
WinAMP started being worse.

And that's about what the article says.

