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 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.
- 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.
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')
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
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] d0m|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nolok|5 years ago|reply
Well AOL bought it ... Milking something as long as possible instead of innovating is kind of their thing.
[+] [-] superasn|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ssharp|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] llampx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Peckingjay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|5 years ago|reply
I use this all the time. It sits in a tiny corner of my unscaled 4k display.
https://getwacup.com/
[+] [-] ubercow13|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astronautjones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|5 years ago|reply
Foobar fans may disagree, but I stand my ground.
[+] [-] Y-bar|5 years ago|reply
But I always had a few major gripes with it:
- The tiny interface was hard to navigate.
- 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.
[+] [-] codeulike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modzu|5 years ago|reply
lack of cross platform options inspired me to start reAMP:
https://github.com/conceptualspace/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')
- logarithmic volume control
[+] [-] Sharlin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|5 years ago|reply
Why do you feel the need to taunt ?
[+] [-] mlok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wl|5 years ago|reply
It lives on in a heavily bastardized form as iTunes and now the macOS Music app.
[+] [-] sp332|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richbradshaw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14689280
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616323
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154421
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samdung|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crtasm|5 years ago|reply
A friend recently played a set at an online party using two instances of VLC, went down great!
[+] [-] 6c696e7578|5 years ago|reply
Those were the days though.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dls2016|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel
[+] [-] anon102010|5 years ago|reply
Then BOOM - ads everywhere, bundled installers, crazy redesign. I didn't know this history.
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
Version 3 was pretty shitty. I think they used new tech to build it and also replaced the UI.
Later they released v5, which was v2 UI + v3 tech, which was good again.
At least that's how I remember it.
[+] [-] stan_rogers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GiorgioG|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlkuester7|5 years ago|reply
These days my go-to music player on Windows is https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine-windows
It is open source, super clean and polished. At 33mb it is not quite as compact as Winamp, but not bad for today's standards....
[+] [-] remote_phone|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kazinator|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mercer|5 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] audiometry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Quequau|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jp0d|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6c696e7578|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
It's smoothness and performance at the time of couple-hundred-MHz CPUs was outstanding.
[+] [-] archived22|5 years ago|reply
Damn. How many good product died or stagnated, because of stupid politics.
[+] [-] addicted|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woranl|5 years ago|reply