Webamp: Winamp 2 in the browser
webamp.org
webamp.org
This project is open source and the code, and instructions to use it on your site, can be found here: https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp
Webamp's ability to render classic Winamp skins led to a collaboration with the Internet Archive where we preserved ~70k (and counting) classic Winamp skins.
I also built the Winamp Skin Museum (https://skins.webamp.org/) where you can infinite scroll through those 70k skins and try them out in your browser with one click.
Most recently I've been experimenting with improving the visualizer's performance with an in-browser Eel-Wasm compiler. Blog post here: https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-winamps-music-vi...
The project has given me lots of enjoyment over the years, and I'm glad to see that others are enjoying it as well.
https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn
If you want to visualize audio coming from the browser (Spotify etc) check out his browser extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butterchurn-music-...
Really impressive project, I was surprised how well it worked on my phone.
I wrote a post about the design of the site here: https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/winamp-skin-musuem/
And then gave a meetup talk based on that post which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEUr_NzP6xg&t=2s
Say what you want about the skeuomorphic design, but it really felt great to slide the volume a bit higher when at your favorite part of the song. It really felt like a piece of hardware in your hands.
Just today, I was reading comments praising Coinbase UI. It is just cliches piled on top of cliches by designers. Everything that happened between 2010-2020 made UI worse in many ways.
Winamp UI was whimsical, functional and successful.
It's not far off from 90s UIs but with more circular elements and less gray. Those UIs are viewed as very functional in retrospective.
However, I thought then and still think now that it's a bit ugly.
Hrm, I wonder if you can activate a phones rumbler from the UI for tactile feedback.
Safari iOS does not support it sadly.
Is something very wrong with modern interfaces? Quite interesting..
I look at it and remember those days, and the system was quite usable with a high resolution mouse to be the primary interface. While I can use it on mobile, I would hate to try to do so under any kind of degraded condition. Cold fingers, inclement weather, driving in a card/bus/train.
The other big one is accessibility. People with poor eyesight can struggle when the system has low contrast.
3d buttons or adding depth to controls and the like are pretty simple and don't have any major impediments that I'm aware of. I often will accent my GUI designs with a light touch of depth.
I can't tell you for sure as to the evolution of the systems, I design modern systems and while I did toy with GUIs back in that day I didn't do major systems then - I was a kid. Aesthetics takes a major backseat to usability in my work.
Though I'd say that some of today's look and style is much like clothing. It's a style of the day.
WebAmp: WinAmp 2 in Your Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17583997 - July 2018 (41 comments)
A Reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16333550 - Feb 2018 (208 comments)
A free, infinitely-customizable piece of software, playing a simple and open-ish format (open for everyone who wanted to use it by figuring out how to use liblame), sharing files of dubious origins, ...
I guess basically I liked the internet better when it was just a bunch of shady pirates running amok.
Except, I'll keep my fiber internet.
I haven't used a media player since Winamp that I like as much as I liked Winamp. I really miss it.
I loved the old Winamp where you could set it to be always on top, and then simply Alt-Shift-Tab on Windows and know that it'd focus Winamp, then use B, C, V whatever.
I used to use xmms on Linux for a while I think but I couldn't seem to find anything like what I remember in the repos.
Anyway, interesting project and like the milkdrop implementation! I seem to remember Goom as some plugin?
The use case is a little different. IDJC has a lot of features for live DJs who are doing stuff. If you just want to run a playlist, winamp is actually a little more usable, and the shoutcast plugin also streams your audio input device. Our live DJs just press pause and do their thing with records and CDs, then they kick the playlist back on when they finish. For remote broadcasting, we just use BUTT. IMO, both BUTT and Winamp are easier than IDJC for most volunteer DJs
I'm a tech volunteer for our local LP-FM station.
this is 50% of the winamp2 experience. glad to see it again.
It looks different but I always found it to be very similar.
Haven't used it for long though.
I want to ask, did you notice any performance hits when wrapping each character in its own <span> with background-image? Do you think that would scale for a page with up to ~2 screens of text at one time?
I'm not sure how it would scale. In general, if you employ windowing all UI rendering issues are bounded by the number of items visible at a time which can let you get away with a lot of craziness, but if the number of items on the screen is as much as the number of characters on the screen... that could end up being a bit much.
I know a lot of things like that end up using shaders to render text, but that is a lot of added complexity.
They got bought by a company who said they were working on another version, and then nothing.
Is it one of these? https://skins.webamp.org/?query=Yaxay3
Sorry for suggesting electron but it could be the ultimate multi-platform winamp clone.
Cons: you are literally running a web app in a browser and not a native app.
For example, IRC was doing most of the things Slack (desktop client in Electron) does, but 20+ years ago when computers were a thousandth (or less) as powerful. IRC clients were snappy to load and interact with, didn't use a gigabyte of RAM, and didn't eat a CPU core.
From https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/:
> Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has a userland driver for the Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3D graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera.
The reason a bunch of people use it anyway is because they have to be cross platform, and target the web.
Teams, Slack, VsCode, Adobe products, Vscode, Signal, The normal chrome browser, Microsoft edge browser
Providing a better user experience than "normal" desktop apps ? Really?
That however would defeat best Winamp's feature: being light and fast, which is the number one reason why I kept using the classic one ignoring all following versions until my last day on Windows. Today I use qmmp under Linux, which is close enough (has been ported to Windows too).
I've been using Nulloy for a while, also pretty nice and minimal https://github.com/nulloy/nulloy/
The source code shows it's pretty much just a react app, but slick!
Note: Nobody thinks this is actually a good idea, but it's kidna fun.
This app might harm your device Microsoft Defender SmartScreen reported that this app is not commonly downloaded; you should only open files you trust.
Name: webamp-desktop-web-setup-0.3.0.exe Publisher: Unknown