Unofficial Winamp Web Site
mywinamp.com
mywinamp.com
- https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/14/5263086/winamp-radionomy-...
So since this site was launched, it looks like you can now download Winamp from the Official Winamp website:
For those asking for old versions of Winamp, you can get them here:
- http://www.oldversion.com/windows/winamp/
For those asking for alternatives, there are some:
- https://alternativeto.net/software/winamp/
For other Nullsoft magic, including Gnutella and WASTE, see:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft
Also worth checking out founder Justin Frankel and his new company see:
LICEcap is great.
Mind blown. Reaper in particular is fantastic, even if I could never get my head around it long enough to stick with something other than FL Studio.
So I'd recommend avoiding oldversion.com.
//edit: Sorry, I just realized that I loaded my copy from https://winampheritage.com
See, Winamp wasn't "just another player" for some of us. It was the first thing we fired up when we turned on the computer. So, seeing it go down the drain for the last 10 years or so, really hurt . Bloath, bloath and more bloath... damn, I would've opted for RealPlayer if it wasn't for the terrible UI. On the other hand, important features, like plugin playback compatibility was getting worse (for example, there wasn't a single version of Winamp after 5.24 that played back MP3Pro files correctly with the Fraunhoffer MP3Pro plugin, until now ).
And removing all traces of Windows Media Player was one of the first steps after installing Windows.
A more recent habit, until recently (if I had to use Windows), I would also try to install most apps through Chocolatey to help keeping up to date.
Indeed, open winamp and press play. Let it shuffle through my library while I fired up AIM/mIRC/zMUD/etc and would keep playing until I was done with the computer for that session.
Was? Winamp is still the first program I launch after booting up.
Winamp 2.95 didn't need to connect to the internet, there is no background service, no application manager bloatware, no ads or music recommendations, and it loads in 1/10 of a second without any startup service or preloader. It really whipped the llama's ass.
Straight up win32 software back then just was simpler, and the programmers back then like Justin Frankel, Ludvig Strigeus, etc. cared about program efficiency. A single programmer could write several popular applications within the decade, and now every application needs a giant team. What happened?
Expectations, I guess? You need to have a shiny UI, smooth animations and cross-platform.
I wrote a small media player back in 2009 called "SmallTune", using Delphi and only Win32 calls. It didn't have the VCL and SysUtils and all that stuff. It utilized BASS.dll and the exe was 230kb in size. It used ~3 MB of RAM. Some screenshots can be found using archive.org [1][2]. It featured a simple library and internet radio.
But boy, was that one hell of maintenance. I dropped the project some months later, because of my girlfriend (I was another person back then). Recently, when I found the source by accident, I started building a Win32 application using .NET Core 3.1 and CoreRT out of curiousity. To my surprise, it worked quite well. I don't know, maybe I'll revive Smalltune some day. I miss it sometimes.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110827113809im_/http://smalltu...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110827113915im_/http://smalltu...
Acceleration of the following:
- commodification of information on the internet
- the subscription model
- incentives for tracking users' every move
Nothing like fragging your friends while playing loud music but able to skip a song if it doesn't fit the moment, all without even flipping active window. Never looked at another player because of this function.
Just had to adapt with ctrl+shift+B for next song since S was hard bound in some game.
Capitalism.
You can't make money out of shareware, so now everything is SaaS. This makes software way harder to write since now you're responsible for a distributed platform, including devops.
Competition is fierce now. There are very low barriers to entry, which made hobbyist projects (which is what Winamp would be considered now) mostly free.
If there's any money left in those low-barrier markets monopolies expanded into them. The only way to compete with them is with added value like a huge library of music (Spotify). Good luck trying to strike deals with record labels as a lone developer. VCs will devour any corner of opportunity in a blink, demanding growth, which will turn a perfectly fine piece of software into a feature-crept SaaS privacy-invading social platform.
TL;DR: money isn't in software anymore for self-employed people.
Do we know how sales of Reaper are doing? That's Justin Frankel's latest project, and it's shareware in the truest sense (downloadable, 5 second nag screen & no other limitations - "you are on day 329 of your 30 day trial period").
Of course, Justin probably doesn't need the income because he has Winamp/AOL money, but I was under the impression that Reaper was at least providing a full time income. And it's certainly supported by most of the music hardware/software industry.
Just look at Bitwarden. It started out as a free and truly secure answer to password managers that were cross-platform and web/browser-based, but had issues with trust and privacy. A lone developer put his money where his mouth was, and built the product up into a SaaS that is now a small but profitable company. It’s now the fastest growing password manager out there, and certainly one of the more popular among techs.
That counts towards the parent comment's thesis, not against it. If it wasn't a SaaS charging would be much harder.
This is mixing two concerns: Selling stand-alone applications and the specific shareware distribution model.
The SaaS world is struggling with the "freemium" model, too. Nothing pretty much changed there, you get your nag-screens, limited features etc.
Selling apps still works for a lot of people. Sure, it's harder when there's a popular free version available, but the same is true for SaaS again.
One major issue is the pernicious "growth" mindset: Today it's often not enough to earn some decent money, you have to "found" something. And sure, it's friggin' hard to grow a company out of a shareware product.
Marketing. It has become extremely difficult to be found by a large audience on the internet. There are many gatekeepers who want their share before they allow you to become visible to the audience they control.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...
I use the GTK interface of Audacious Media Player now, because it works better with higher resolution screens, but the old Winamp-style interface is still supported, and Audacious Media Player still has all the speed and simplicity that made me love Winamp when I first tried it.
Highly intuitive, beautiful and always "just working", with an elegant plugin system.
It is no coincidence that the authors went on to create Gnutella, which could be considered the starting point of decentralized networking.
Winamp 2 & 3 were my sweet spot. I want to say versions 2.53 through 2.56(?) are the versions indelibly burned in my memory. Such a breath of fresh air from the Real garbage of the day. Hope Frankel and Lord are well.
Building heirloom :-) GTK and glib isn't a big deal, but Audacious is packaged by pretty much all distros.
But nothing has come anywhere close to improving or replacing Milkdrop
We need to start maintaining winamp and the clones again.
When you are watching video, it's usually where your attention goes, whereas listening to audio is something done "in the background", while your attention is elsewhere (reading, writing, playing a game, or even cleaning the house).
Therefore to me it is obvious that an audio playing application should behave like a good butler - readily available when you need to e.g. change the playlist, but invisible otherwise - and I would compare a video playing application to a live entertainer.
A video playing application should of course also get out of your way so you can focus on the actual video, but there is a subtle difference nevertheless.
Also, foobar2000 is very well maintained, and implying it's not a good audio player is simply sacrilege!
I put lots of custom tags in all of the tracks I've ripped, downloaded, or recorded live, and I have yet to come across a Linux music player that allows me to search them or sort by them.
Clementine comes close, but not quite close enough. Maybe I need to get some Copious Free Time and rip into its sources.
Or maybe it's just nostalgia?
- https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectM
There's even pulseaudio/JACK versions of projectM that allow you to pipe any audio source into projectM to visualize. Enjoy!
Unfortunately, Last.fm as a social network was completely dead, either by user abandonment or by bot infestation. After a couple of years of dead message boards and comments sections, it didn't make sense to keep the scrobbling going.
Almost certainly but there will be an alternative company with some migration path for your playlists. Unless omnipresent network connectivity stops being a thing, in which case there would be bigger problems than music.
To me, that gives my collection much greater personal and sentimental value than a Spotify retrospective playlist that doesn't align as well with my memories of those days.
https://winampplugins.co.uk/jtfe.html
https://old.reddit.com/r/winamp/comments/9rw9fb/winamp_58_se...
(Bonus points of anyone knows of an MPD client that can make it appear like MPD has this feature? ;)
In Clementine, that's Ctrl+D.
And there's an Android app that works as a remote, and it can http stream, nice.
Thanks! So long (for now) mpd..
As I remember it, in Winamp you load a playlist from the media library (in my case usually all files), and then within that playlist you can use JTFE to select a file to play next. That file in the playlist gets a number [1] next to it and is played next, regardless of whether shuffle is on or not. Any number of tracks in the playlist can be queued like this, each getting a respective queue number next to that tracks entry in the playlist line, and afterward the queue is finished Winamp returns to the standard playback ordering.
So I can have a playlist of all files on shuffle, decide to queue up a specific album or two, and after that it goes back to random shuffle without me having to reset the playlist from scratch.
This ad-hoc playlist-within-a-playlist is also visible within it's own dialog box if so desired.
(I'm starting to wonder how different the abstractions ncmpcpp use compared to mpd, or if it's just a naming thing.)
Edit: or, IIRC, instead of the JTF queue method, you can just immediately jump to a file in a playlist, and after playing that, Winamp returns to the previous spot. I need to make a screencast of this because there's apparently no videos of the functionality around online..
Of course, the main "issue" with this is that after the end of the queue is reached, the playback stops. I don't actually mind this, because I can schedule my playback to stop by moving my current item + how many else to the end of the queue. I know that there's a deamon to automatically add random songs at the end of your queue once you run out of stuff in case that's a hurdle (https://github.com/joshkunz/ashuffle).
To be clear, because I've been searching years for this, the main differences are that you are using a shuffled playlist rather than an ordered playlist that is sometimes on shuffle mode, you have to move away from the playlist view to find the album to queue, if you have a shuffled playlist of all files available then you are duplicating files into that playlist to get an ordered selection at the end of the playlist (though you do say you have consume mode on which is a further step away in difference), and you will have to reset the playlist from scratch to get back to a state of having one copy of all files in the playlist.
(I am now wondering how to add files to the top of the playlist (rather than the bottom) in ncmpcpp though :)
Press a on selection, choose "Current playlist" and "At the beginning of playlist".
NestDrop allows you to perform with high-resolution high-fps visuals which react in realtime to the music and then broadcasts the video via Spout. Since the Milkdrop engine is at the core you can easily bring in your own presets. Use any audio source to drive the visuals, even live audio. http://www.nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.html
Windows is the only supported OS currently.
Basically any range of GPU is supported, according to the resolution you want to run the visuals at. But if you have a decent GPU then you can run up to 4 different video streams concurrently.
I made my own, too, mostly by taking something made by someone else and changing the code/numbers to see how it would react. I wish I could find those files again somewhere and just spend a moment immersing myself into that universe.
None of the other visualisations for WinAmp hypnotized me the way Geiss did.
Me, being an AVS guy, can only recommend https://visbot.net .
In the olden days there were: - https://customized.org and - https://deviantart.com/
DA is sadly almost unusable for finding AVS presets now (as I discovered today), so you may start with this page:
- https://www.deviantart.com/tobsiv/favourites/41261647/featur...
for finding some of the more famous packs.
https://www.deviantart.com/yboris/art/Lear-lite-YBoris-remix...
In fact, I find it easier to get non-drm music files than movies.
In or around 2010, when I finally shed the last shackles of MS, I switched from Winamp to Audacious (w/Winamp Classic interface plugin).
20 uninterrupted years of Bento Classified and whipping the llama's ass!
It's also pretty easy to replace all the standard Audacious icons with Winamp's (at least on Xubuntu). No disrespect intended to Audacious, simply for full effect.
Thanks to everyone behind Winamp and Audacious for building great software!
(Now to start up "The Matrix" on the media monitor and head on over to Slashdot.)
- early Internet - Homebrew Computer Club with a shared ethos of free software and free information for all
- 2000s Internet and later - Bill Gates joins the HCC, refuses to share code, and before long the only incentive to create stuff is to sell it by the truckload, by any means necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
I wonder if someone is using that thing.