

Ask HN: What happened to Winamp? - vkdelta

I was avid user of Winamp 12 years back when I was in high school. I am trying to figure why people really stopped using it? Shifted to different Mp3 players? or online audio/video?
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chaosmachine
AOL bought Nullsoft. After that, it was pretty much all downhill. It went from
an mp3 player to a mp3 player / video player / web browser / digital media
library / online radio / toolbar / etc...

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dryicerx
This.

Along with no innovation on what it was suppose to do, which is play music
easier/better. Instead of doing one thing simply and better, it tried to be
the jack of all things multimedia and related. It bloated it's way to failure.

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jrockway
Its interface did not really scale with peoples' music collections. Software
with better library management eventually replaced it.

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noonespecial
I still used winamp classic/lite right up until I accidentally switched over
to vlc. I installed vlc to play videos and noticed that it was playing mp3's
and rtsp's as well, and it was good enough that I didn't bother to switch it
back.

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YuriNiyazov
Same here. I think the reason why we used Winamp was because it was the
fucking cool edgy underdog. After it was sold to AOL (which is as uncool as
can possibly get) and got loaded up on corporate features, we moved on.

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stan_rogers
Bloated, yeah, but I still use it. Straightforward, categorized, text-based
music library management and the ability to play cut/continuous tracks without
a hiccup even with other disk IO going on(which is why I rejected the other
simple players I've tried) keep it on my machine. (I should mention that I use
FLAC almost exclusively, so the seamless prefetch makes more of a difference
to me than it would to somebody playing MP3s.)

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ctingom
I think Napster happened, and frankly had a great music player interface (for
it's day). Then iTunes came later and (at least back then) it was light and
fast.

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keefe
Zinf ne Freeamp <http://www.zinf.org/> also showed up as an open source player
after all the degradation others already discuss, I'm using Rhythmbox right
now just out of laziness basically. I dunno what is going on in the lands of
windows these days.

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po
I heard that llamas everywhere joined into a class action lawsuit and filed
suit for being whipped repeatedly. AOL, having newly acquired the company,
decided to remove the llama whipping features, instead opting for non-llama-
whipping ones.

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nokya
Most colleagues at work listen to music from their iPod, not their
workstation.

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sidmitra
Switched to Foobar2000. Easier to manage your library if it has more than 10K
songs, and really light on memory.

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mrphoebs
Still use winamp with the enhancer DSP plugin.

~~~
vkdelta
DFX?

------
vkdelta
Thanks for input guys!

