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.
Winamp went downhill with Winamp 3 which was well before AOL bought it. Winamp 3 was a heavy mess. It sounds crazy today, but my slow Windows computer at the time could barely run Winamp 3 which led me to downloading iTunes!
iTunes on Windows used to be really great if you just wanted music. It used to be that iTunes was considered a Trojan horse to show Windows users how good Mac software was.
Yep, I remember being very excited about WinAmp 3 and then just getting this massive letdown feeling immediately after trying it. Everyone I know went back to 2.
> 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.
> Winamp could have been Spotify but went in a completely different directions
I'm not so sure how successful that really would have been. There is a significant gap between Winamp falling out of favor and the rise of Spotify. The obvious winner in that gap wasn't any streaming service, it was Apple. The gap is basically defined as the period between when the iPod became ubiquitous and when the iPhone became ubiquitous. Granted, there is a few year period between when the iPhone was released and when streaming took over.
Spotify-like streaming services like Rhapsody existed during that gap but they weren't compatible with the iPod and even players they were compatible required a pretty cumbersome process in order to sync and listen offline. I think Rhapsody enjoyed a relatively brief period when smartphones became available and they could stream from there but it was a no-brainer to switch to Spotify once they launched in the U.S.
Not sure about that, Netflix began in 1997 but didn’t start streaming for 10 full years until 2007. Even then it was after Amazon had launched their streaming service. None of that makes them sound like visionaries in the streaming evolution they just executed well when it did happen, as opposed to Blockbuster’s competing service which failed to execute.
What I liked the most was the "reverse-playlist search". For instance, if you find a song you like, you can see all the public playlists containing it. I much prefer that to the "let me recommend you songs" approach.
- The queue was ephemeral and much too easy to clear. Any time there were more than one person controlling the music someone would by accident clear out all selected songs when all whey wanted to do was add their selection to the queue. With no way to restore it.
My personal vote is iTunes 4.5 with Winamp 2 a close second.
Yes, most of us had CRT:s back then. But it was still too small. Someone at my uni made a better skin to solve the problem (whose name and skin I have lost since).
Was that really possible with Winamp 2 back then? I remember _every single person_ on our local music irc channel griping about that problem. No one had found that setting in that case, we all would have loved it.
Shoutout for Foobar, which now installs from the Windows Store, so no faffing about with installers or finding the right download button that isn't an advert pretending to be a download button
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:
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')
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.
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.
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.
That looks great! I settled for foobar2000 after giving up on Winamp not long ago, but one thing I sorely miss is cue file support. That is, being able to add a cue file that points to a flac/mp3 file and have the songs show up in the playlist.
Though one thing from foobar2000 that I'd miss is Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP plugin, as I listen to music mostly via headphones. Does reAMP have something similar?
cue files definitely work fine in foobar2000. What doesn't work? You can even edit cue sheets as if they were normal tagged single-track files. There is also this plugin that makes them behave a bit more nicely:
Try XMPlay on for size. Plays absolutely everything (zipped iso of chiptunes? No problem! FLAC? Of course. Obscure forgotten video game format ? Definitely.)
Skinnable, lightweight, portable.. free.
Been my player for years.
When I was on Windows in the early 2000 I loved Coolplayer for the same reasons. (And cherry on top : no install needed ! You could ship its exe along with the mp3 files)
http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
I use Qmmp on Linux (ported on Windows too). Fast, light, extensiblle through plugins, skinnable and so far pretty close to what Winamp was in the old days.
https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index.php
Yeah; soundjam was like a slightly refined version of WinAmp, still had skins and visualizations, but it was limited to Mac only. iTunes original few SoundJam-based versions weren’t too bad, it started getting messy as tons of features besides music playback were jammed in.
The Internet Archive has a Winamp skins collection. 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I would've kept using Winamp if version 3 wasn't so bad, and I know many others like myself. So even if maybe eventually Winamp would've died for the reasons you mentioned, its initial problems were most definitely the result of what 'it did'.
I don’t remember that as true. Winamp started dying almost immediately after aol bought it and it was a long time before phones were storing or streaming music. There was a whole generation of iPods in between in fact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.