Vivendi Buys Majority Stake In Winamp, Shoutcast Owner Radionomy | Hacker News Reader

Vivendi Buys Majority Stake In Winamp, Shoutcast Owner Radionomy

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50 pointsprostoalex66 comments

A few years back Ars did a nice longform piece on what happened to Winamp after the AOL acquisition. I think HN would like it:

"Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself"

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-...

I think one of the big takeaways from that article is that Winamp could have been Spotify, but AOL unintentionally/intentionally sand bagged it.

My first thought on this purchase is it's to jumpstart a studio owned Spotify replacement.

Spotify is ~20% label-owned, as is probably any startup in music space that's cash-light.

Winamp is still installed on all of my Windows boxes. I've never, ever been the kind of person to use shuffle. I prefer to just listen to an album at a time. And so my default method of playing music is still right-clicking on the album's folder in Explorer and clicking "Play in Winamp".

It still whips the llama's ass.

Even for someone that uses shuffle it's still brill.

My default method is "shuffle by album"; it boggles my mind that so few music players support it.

Back when I used iTunes, I used "party shuffle" mode configured to enqueue an album at a time, which worked pretty well. Now that I use Linux, Quod Libet has a plugin that makes it automatically switch to a randomly-selected album when the current one is finished playing, which is close enough. Most of the other music players I've looked at just don't understand the concept at all.

The whole concept of an "album" is dying...

Did they go through some kind of time-warp to decide on what new hot properties they were going to invest in?

WinAmp definitely has name recognition but that name recognition is solidly associated with AOL, MS windows and the dark gray past.

I regularly use winamp to tune into internet radio stations from my android

It really whips the llama's ass. <3

Here's hoping that it whips it again!

Winamp is one of the few pieces of software I miss from my Windows days. Every time I open iTunes or any audio player (from VLC to Spotify) I fondly remember Winamp.

If you're looking for a new audio player on Windows, you may want to try out foobar2000. I've been using it for several years and have really enjoyed it.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

I really love foobar's minimal approach, but I've had serious crash problems that lose my playlists rather frequently (and it doesn't automatically save them).

The foobar2000 library is a great example of why I and others still use Winamp. I haven't seen a single "modern" player whose library layout is anywhere near as useful as Winamp's.

I didn't use Winamps library feature much, at least I can't remember anything notable about it. What's special about it?

It was one of the main reasons I liked it. It was just really well laid out, and could do ID3 tag updates before it was a common feature.

I like it because it has clear separation from the Playlist. Something that most other players seem to lack. You start playing one song they go on playing everything else in your library. Other than that it had a nicely customizable display and as a sibling commenter said it had built-in tag editing.

foobar's layout is entirely customizable if you use the columns UI plugin[0] which I think should just be included in the default distribution. Everybody I've ever known who's stuck with foobar uses it. The plugin ecosystem is decent for foobar; I suggest checking them out and seeing what you might use. They have plugins for caching, transcoding, tagging, the works. In the past they tried to raise money to port to Android and iOS, but I wish they would raise money to port to OSX and Linux.

[0]: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_ui_columns

I still use foobar but stopped updating it. The developers went out of their way to discourage plugin development.

Without foobar2000 I would probably have switched to Linux quite a bit earlier. Linux had nothing even close, and I did try quite a few -- Amarok, Songbird, gmusicbrowser, can't even remember any more.

I've found my peace with Clementine, but sometimes I still miss foobar's superb collection management, vibrant community, and endless avenues for customisation.

Foobar runs great for me in Wine on OS X and Linux.

If I could access my online music subscription service via a Winamp-like interface, I would be very happy.

This is what's lost as everyone trips over themselves to race headlong into the cloud. The next Winamp may never be built because the easy interoperability files used to afford to every application by default isn't built into hosted services unless they invest in an API, something they may not do for ROI reasons or competitive reasons.

http://spotiamb.com/

Agreed. I posted a couple years ago:

  1999, WinAmp: type a couple characters of a song title and play it.
  2013, iTunes 11: Try finding a song forever, go "forget it", hit shuffle.

iTunes search bar is pretty good for that. However the search bar is in a silly location.

What is strange about the top right corner of the window? Almost all search bars are located there in OS X applications.

Winamp was primarily a Windows application. OS X GUI paradigms don't necessarily translate to Windows world.

Yeah the search works well now. When iTunes 11 just launched it was a disaster. (If I remember correctly it kept trying to 'group' searches by album instead of showing individual songs.)

Used to use Shoutcast for an internet radio thing I did. While it wasn't the most intuitive thing to set up, once it was working it never broke. Interesting to see that someone has found value in both WinAmp and Shoutcast when there are so many other solution that make it much easier to listen and/or broadcast music.

I still use it. Mpd has a shoutcast server built in and I use that to stream audio to various computers from my homebrew mp3 collection administration. Very useful.

Related aside: the original author of winamp still writes regularly at 1014.org; I use his licecap* software on a daily basis for making gifs

* https://github.com/lepht/licecap

Sighm I wish they would reanimate AVS (Advanced Visualization Studio) ...

MP3 players are obsolete ever since Spotify convinced everyone that managing a personal music library is too much of a pain. Maybe this is about Shoutcast.

I continue to maintain a local MP3 collection and use a local MP3 player. The main reason I haven't tried out more streaming services is that most of them require Adobe Flash which doesn't work well on Linux. The secondary reason is that streaming libraries often lack specific content I want.

The tertiary reason is that I have no internet in the subway.

The quaternary reason is that I still have the music I bought, even if the company provides the streaming services goes belly-up, decides it won't support my country any more or even just has a bad day or an outage.

Depending on which streaming service you use, possibly a non-issue when you can simply cache whatever music you want for offline access.

I didn't need much convincing.

I always liked that aspect, so I still haven't switched. I'm sure there are weirder hobbies out there.

There'll be always music which isn't on Spotify, actually quite a bit I listen to. And besides of that I also think really "owning" the files has ethical importants to it...

I still use WinAmp on Windows, although I have switched to using Sony Media Go to sync music to my Z1 compact. And while I used to use Winamp on my phone, Sony's Walkman music app blows away any other android music player I have come across.

Why not just convert to streaming service? This seems like a lot more work than the $8 is worth.

Or upload your music to Google Play.

Edit: Why is this an unpopular option?

Why is it unpopular? Because some people like to have control over our media and like it to be available when your ISP is being shitty.

If you need local music on the go, using a device makes sense. I suggested Google Play as an alternative to Spotify.

Then I don't understand. Isn't that some Google service which requires network access?

Also I didn't say "on the go". My home ISP is shit, especially during the day when I guess they think most people won't notice the dropped connections. IRC and occasionally SSH show me the hangups. If my music kept getting cut out I would be pissed.

This is why I hate the modern world. Everyone assumes you have a perfect internet connection.

It requires network access at some point, but once you've got thousands of songs downloaded to your device, then you don't have to have any connection at all to listen.

Google Music Play is not good if you a) can't afford $8/month, b) never have a network connection at all or c) don't have a device with 1GB-2GB of storage space available for your music.

I'm guessing not using Google Play music for you is more than just a technical thing.

I have a 1GB/month mobile plan, which is actually medium-large in Australia. I would burn through that pretty quick if I was streaming mp3s all day. Also we are a large, sparse country with poor (or zero) mobile reception outside cities and large towns (at all, let along 3g/4g), and I do a lot of country driving. I rarely listen to music in front of a computer, where streaming would make a lot more sense for me.

It's not actually streaming, if you don't use it like that. You can download thousands of songs directly to your device over WiFi.

Well I suppose if I listened to new music I would consider it then, but the majority of albums I listen to were released in the 70s, 80s and early 90s and I already have them.

I'm guessing this isn't actually a technical decision for you, is it?

Probably a force of habit plus the fact I am not constantly listening to newly released music.

I still use Winamp too (not Winamp 2, unfortunately), and actually just picked up a z3 compact. I'm looking forward to loading it up with music. Any tips?

Yes - always sync playlists, not folders of songs. Everything just seems to work better that way. I use Sony's Media Go on windows to load up my library, then create playlists from albums I want to play, then sync the playlist to the device. The app is smart enough to not upload a song twice if it is in 2 different playlists, and will not remove a song until all playlists it belongs too are removed. Media Go also has fairly good TrackID integration, so let it download album metadata before syncing to your device.

Ah, so they finally found a buyer for Winamp. They've been shopping that around for a buyer for quite awhile. I remember hearing back channel about it nearly a year ago.

Open source that bad boy!

WinAmp? The MP3 player? What next, RealPlayer?

Wasn't RealPlayer the fore-front of streaming technology at some point? And then they never innovated and just stayed there...?

Their installer had so much extra shit in it...

> Wasn't RealPlayer the fore-front of streaming technology at some point?

No, but they were very good at convincing others that they were.

They were at the forefront hiding their uninstallers.

Wait, Winamp's still alive?

Winamp is still around? Figures these idiots would buy obsolete software that they hated so much about 15 years ago.

Not good...

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