Winamp
winamp.com
winamp.com
This really DOESN'T whip the llamma's ass.
Here's the original website in 1998 for reference.
https://web.archive.org/web/19981205015145/http://winamp.com...
The more I look at it, the more I hate the modern web. It's madness.
But the new one is indeed a horror. I cannot wait to hate the way they ruin winamp, one of the all-time great programs.
Other designs are more convenient if you want a very easy-to-write responsive layout, and some sites do actually need something different, but that was as good as we've seen, in general, for desktop. You can't do it now because it "looks old" and people will assume your site is defunct, but it's the best.
Sometimes I'd get some bootstrappy looking website.. I assume not even half the buttons on that page work, don't even bother trying anymore, and move on..
I assume most modern web is defunct.
In fact, the first time I looked at it, I didn't even realize there was anything there, because it was just some random graphic that filled the whole window with no indication that I could scroll down for more non-content. If you ask me that website fails in pretty much every way it can fail.
Windows Media Player, meanwhile... https://www.theskinsfactory.com/wmpdesign
There's also https://skins.webamp.org/, which, while looking at first glance like an image gallery, actually loads each skin into the fully-interactive WebAmp client as a way of previewing the skin.
I have to scroll my scroll-wheel way too many times just to get to the next section, I couldn't even drag their little scroll indicator to move between them.
1) Explains nothing: "something big is happening."
2) Hides the scrollbar
3) Spikes the CPU usage
I closed the tab after this but I'm sure there is more :/
The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.
For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.
https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.
Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.
If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.
There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.
MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.
I much prefer simple text/css websites, but here we are in 2021, where the web browser is the most ubiquitous software delivery platform on the planet.
What am I accepting or declining? Does it even matter at this point?
Furthermore, the original Winamp was Windows-only. For anything like this to be successful today it needs to be a webapp and/or a mobile app, which more than likely means starting from scratch.
We'll see
Can't wait for the new "app" requiring a few gigs of ram and the latest OS...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/329258-winamp-prepares...
And:
According to AudioValley, which is the parent company of Winamp and Shoutcast, the new app is going to "become the one-stop platform for audio enthusiasts, which connects creators and consumers of music, podcasts, radio stations, audiobooks, and any other peripheral content."
I have a bad feeling about this.
Winamp is for people who want to own their music. Those people no longer exist.
Sad. Well, I am here for one.
And yeah, I remember Winamp from my childhood. I had badass skins! :D
Sure they do, why else would bandcamp.com still be in business?
That said, I grew up with Winamp but never understood the adoration for it. As soon as I wasn’t quite so young anymore, I preferred functional and not whimsy.
- streaming Twitch-style DJ sets using ShoutCast
- streaming to other systems in a point to point style (used this isn’t parties to keep the music running in different rooms/zones where I couldn’t run audio cable)
- real time audio visualisations (Projectm is based off Winamp in that regard). Also used these at parties over massive 3 meter projections.
The plug-in system for Winamp was brilliant.
I was still using Winamp to organise parties long after the music player had been abandoned.
Another thing which makes a lot of sense but that I don't see in other music players is equalization. I want to believe that people nowadays handle that in another part of their audio chain, but realistically people are just forgoing it.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
Anyone remember Sonique? It competed with Winamp at the time, and its distinguishing feature were freeform and interactive skins, things Winamp couldn't do until years later (v3 IIRC). It was a great player in its own right, but sadly couldn't compete based on looks alone.
Foobar was almost certainly better for audio, but needed the user to drive the entirety of the esthetics themselves. VLC played anything but the interface at that point didn't feel cohesive, and I don't remember any kind of third-party plug-in ecosystem worth mentioning at the time. I don't remember a lot else mainstream, Windows Media Player? iTunes? I vaguely remember MPlayer classic being strongly associated with DivX et al, but not used in a general-purpose manner.
What does Spotify have? Half the time I can't even find the repeat button, or somehow it decides it should shuffle. And don't get me started on that mess called iTunes, and VLC crashes constantly and has lots of irritating quirks.
Though I'm using Clementine now. Winamp does not have builds for my OS, and they didn't manage to go open source unfortunately. Anyway, Clementine, if less charming and less appealing than Winamp, is actually a bit more ergonomic and powerful.
Another complaint is that the iPod sync plugin often doesn’t quite work correctly. I actually duplicated my playlists on an old version of iTunes to sidestep the issue. Rockbox on my iPod caused songs to skip, so that was a non starter. A modded iPod is the perfect compliment to Foobar.
But anyway, get Foobar2000 it’s great overall :)
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/foobar2000/comments/nn57ov/georgiar...
Managing levels is very important if you're listening on headphones. Otherwise some songs that are too loud will really hurt the ears.
You could try DeaDBeeF. It's Linux first but there are Mac OS builds. I've tried it, may be a little buggy on Macs but could be worth a check to see if it works for you.
I also want albums to be sorted by (original) release year but don't want to put the year in the folder or file names. Similarly, I want to be able to search, and with classical music it is nice to be able to show by composer or conductor or soloist, etc. Tagging and a robust music library make these things easy. Using the file system does not.
I guarantee you, people with local libraries still exist. Another fun fact: streaming services and local libraries can coexist.
I do so with Apple Music. The desktop apps UI is hot garbage, I miss iTunes.
That's a bold claim, and I'm young enough to barely remember the Winamp era.
Jellyfin is the open source counterpart.
In the meantime, Plex is doing great work. Plexamp has been a joy to use.
But honestly, streaming services allow discovery and exploration. I listen to hundreds of artists now that I didn't even know existed when I bought CDs and ripped them myself.
Cheeky shoutout for my side project https://www.musictaco.co.uk/ which lets you find where to buy a digital album the cheapest online. You can track your favourite artists and it will email you when they release a new album too. Feedback welcome!
Originally, I built it so all access was programmatic, it never stored anything but rather just triggered API calls, a bit of scraping and a matching algorithm.
But it does have database backed models now so you could technically add releases directly. Although deduping might be a bit of a nightmare.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...
[1] - https://github.com/ampache/ampache
[2] - https://ampache.org/
This data is from the past 5 years or so, not sure to be honest.
1 YouTube 14,244,087
2 Spotify desktop 2,751,012
3 Monstercat 1,171,321
4 Pandora 895,765
5 VLC media player 892,006
6 iTunes 854,311
7 SoundCloud 724,019
8 YouTube Music 640,801
9 Deezer 501,474
10 Winamp 289,216
11 Foobar2000 251,726
12 Vk.com music 134,319
13 Aimp3 123,306
14 Musicbee 113,652
15 Google play music 89,827
16 Epidemicsound 87,573
17 Spotify web player 81,590
18 Media monkey 70,611
19 Amazon Music 55,691
20 Clementine 29,750
21 Tunein radio 24,413
22 Google play music desktop (community) 22,910
23 Media Player Classic Home Cinema 15,654
24 Pot player 11,348
25 Plug.dj 8,144
26 Tidal web player 7,770
27 Jriver media center 5,200
28 Digitally Imported di.fm 4,636
29 SiriusXM 2,397
30 Dubtrack.fm 1,031Great app, and I used it a lot because it had seamless last.fm scrobbling (Man, those were the days!). I was one of the early users of it back a decade ago, and funnily found out about the "clementine" fruit after googling why my music player has an "orange slice" as it's icon. :D
The most notable request is... windows media player! I still don't know how to get real-time 'now playing' data from WMP! I'd imagine WMP being very high up on this list as well otherwise.
Two others are the Amazon desktop app and the pandora fm desktop.
I'd imagine my application could theoretically be used to scrobble to last.fm too for alllll music players you have on your desktop, but it'd be a bit of development work to add that
There are many people coming from WMP asking me what music player they should use, my most common recommendations are Foobar2000, AIMP3 and clementine, by the way! There's a lot of really great music software out there that's just being ignored by the mainstream.
It was kind of surprising to me though that YouTube (not even YouTube music, mind you) is the most popular "music player", although relating it to my own experience this makes a lot of sense. It's not even a real music player, playlist randomisation is broken, and there's a whole lot of other stuff missing and broken when it comes to playing music (no seamless transitions, ads, GEMA/DMCA/whatever based on your location, uploads removing videos etc)
Accessibility is by far the most important thing here. Even Spotify doesn't even come close despite being second place
If you can provide better data or evidence where this is incorrect that help.
Yes and this very same data shows that the top 4 most popular options are streaming platforms.
What evidence do you have for this?
> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally.
Agreed. The above data has around 90% streaming. Why are you claiming it is wrong when it says what you claim is the truth?
My software is meant for twitch streamers, and monstercat is especially well-suited for streamers due to how they license their music to be safe for streaming under the DMCA.
I'm sure some of these people use MPD, but given what I've read after googling it seems like you need to be a technical person to set it up.
But it is really mighty and still simple. A very large number of (good) clients for every platform due to its simple protocol. I really like the client-server approach.
Very recently I used an icecast [1] output (mpd can have multiple audio outputs you can switch or use parallel on demand) on my headless server to automatically cast the stream to the inbuild chromecast of my onkyo receiver to listen to audiobooks.
Homeassistant uses its own MPD integration to check the state is changing (play/stop), when it changes to play it sends the shoutcast url to the chromecast.
Also stuff like this on the terminal makes me happy:
# mpc search artist moloko | grep -i doctor | shuf | mpc add
Also, yes. Bad site, old Winamp was cool, etc.
Storage is cheap, nowadays.
I just want to be able to stream music, without using 1.5GB of memory to run a browser.
I exist, and I badly want a solid modern music app that's made for people who own music.
There's some evidence there's a critical mass of people who want to own their music. You can see it at the merch booths at concerts and the sudden surge in vinyl sales. Is it a majority of people? No, but they love music and they're willing to spend money on it.
There however are links to forums[3] and stable version download[4] and a nice picture of a llama[5].
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
[4] https://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/winamp58_3660_be...
Bad start in my humble opinion. Animated websites without real content are the bane of the Internetz existence.
I'm reluctant to enable any scripts on this site based on others' reports.
I've got NoScript to block all JS, including 1st party, by default. On this website the browser shows from top:
- white marketing-ish text on blue background, stating something about "totally remastered" "next-generation" WinAMP, followed by pictures of "artists".
- dark text on white background inviting to future (I presume) beta tests, links for "creators" who might want to release music on the future (I presume) platform and an invitation for "any type" of business partnerships
- links straight to last stable .exe download, social media accounts, legal notice, privacy policy and other usual footer stuff
Based on other comments, I presume that this is all there is to see apart from fireworks and increased electricity bill. The site has content like a typical startup site.
So it's a platform like Spotify and Apple Music now, not a media player.
As someone who grew up with Winamp on my secondhand Pentium II laptop in the 90's, I don't care. This doesn't appeal to me. The original Winamp died a long time ago.
Winamp, as it's intended to be, lives on in the WACUP project. It's compiled for modern systems and is just as configurable, if not moreso, than the original Winamp. This is what I use for my local needs and I'm completely satisfied with it. I run it on a 4K display in double (2x) scale mode and a modified classic theme. It's perfect. :)
1. Curious young people who missed out on the original, and will check it out because those poor souls have no pop culture of their own and have grown accustomed to remakes.
2. Crusty old farts who complain about everything, but a lot of time still check it out anyway out of nostalgia.
They usually DO make enough of a payday to justify the model.
I like the show so-so, but I feel like the non-humorous writing is a bit lazy.
Tangential: Have you noticed in the new Star Wars movies, where a character will quote a line from a previous movie in an attempted nod to fans who eat up that sort of stuff. For me, it elicits an eye-roll, like when my dad keeps recycling the same corny jokes.
Picard and Discovery are...pretty bad, but Lower Decks has a lot of people that truly love Star Trek on it and it shines through in the sheer attention to detail and jokes delivered in every episode
I will defend this hill to the death.
The trailers made it look terrible, but it's actually pretty OK.
The Orville's the second-best—holy crap, alien cultures with values that aren't what humans want to see and who don't immediately drop them when confronted with a starship captain! If only real Trek could be so bold, more often—but the mostly-bad attempts at humor drag it down and MacFarlane probably shouldn't have starred.
Someone will try to "Spotify" the brand, UX and the player.
And by the way, I hate to be "that" guy but this landing page is horrific. Starting with the sign/branding and ending with "colorful animated excitement" that is trying to kill my web-browser.
Such a refreshing modern^Wsober take on UI: http://forums.winamp.com
(Of course, it would be even better if we could use the same syntax - and reuse those of Winamp...)
--
Edit: I see that there exist a "ProjectM", reimplementation of MilkDrop (Ryan Geiss 2001, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilkDrop). The scripts ("presets") are as expected open and are ".milk" text files to be placed in a directory (/usr/share/projectM/presets). Large backward compatibility with the original scripts exist. I see at least a collection is found on archive.org ; another is at mywinamp.com ... I see the github repository also links to big collections ( https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectM ).
ProjectM does not need a player: it listens to the played audio for the beat etc. But I understand it is also embedded in Kodi, Helix, Silverjuke and Silent Radiance Distance Disco. ... It seems also VLC uses it (not on all platforms, they write).
I just want to:
* Go to desktop and select one of more folders full of music.
* Right-click -> Play, or drag into the player. Either add or replace to existing file set.
* Select or de-select shuffle
That's it. Why is this so hard??
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25181 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/549
Offers a WinAmp-style UI, with skin support. Screenshot:
https://community.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/audacious.pn...
It is actively maintained with the last release being this February.
Hear, hear. My pandemic project was digitizing all the vinyl records I still wanted to listen to, and then selling them on Discogs [1]. I combined those with my CDs, and put it all on a 256GB microSD card for my phone! Even using FLAC instead of MP3, it's plenty of space.
Shuffle randomly and listen in the car. It's better than any radio station, and no subscription fees or commercials.
It's easy to find an Android app that just does this, which is basically the same thing Winamp did back in the day.
It's hard AF to find an app for the Mac that just does this. They all have zillions of other features that get in the way. And no, VLC does not JUST do this; it does a million other things that obscure simple play-my-music functionality. I settled on Elmedia, which is sorta tolerable.
[1] https://medium.com/@virgilhilts/vinyl-records-my-pandemic-pr...
update: Just found this, written in Swift with skins support, neat :) https://www.producthunt.com/posts/re-amp + https://skins.webamp.org
https://www.askvg.com/download-winamp-2-classic-skin-for-vlc...
This sounds dubious and/or outdated: https://www.hacktrix.com/how-to-apply-winamp-skins-on-vlc-me...
Perhaps images can be replaced in the skins that work, the oldschool way.
https://www.askjf.com/index.php?q=5935s
Question: Did you see the announcement about the winamp relaunch?
Answer: Yeah. I regret not buying Winamp back when I had the chance; it wouldn't have been expensive and it was out of a sort of selfishness not doing it (not feeling like dealing with the stress of it). While the new owners appear to have the best intentions, sadly at this point it's pretty obvious that they don't have the right skills/process to do it right. IMO they're looking at it from a top-down perspective, rather than bottom-up. I'd love for them to prove me wrong. :/
I have a vague fear that it's going to try and do something like Brave's "BAT" but for music that you have locally -- which I guess could work if you distribute your music for free (as I do for much of mine), but doesn't make sense if you purchase your music. I certainly can't see myself wanting to pay for the same music twice -- once for the physical or digital copy, and then again for "Winamp Attention Tokens".
Much more likely though that it's just another music streaming service.
If it was fair then they wouldn't have to label it as such... or if this is a classic PR language then you must ask fair to whom?
This doesn't compute. It is recognized that compensation to artists is a sticking point with several streaming platforms. If a new one comes along and says "we're different", what is wrong with advertising a competitive advantage?
And while it seems that's not the case, I'm still suspicious of the project since it sounds like it's just going to be the same as any other modern music player, just riding on the Winamp nostalgia.
In all seriousness though, Winamp took their slogan "It really whips the llama's ass!" from a song by an infamous, schizophrenic outsider-musician and visual artist named Wesley Willis[1].
https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/14/aol-sells-winamp-and-shout...
So whatever their plan is, I hope it's the opposite to this website.
Grab a working portable version of Winamp for Windows quickly from the internet before they ban those (portable means they don't need to be installed and hence you don't need administrative rights on your PC).
winamp likely stories it in appdata/roaming/winamp/plugins/ml
should be easy to just copy over the folder, should likely back it up before installing just to be safe.
found this for more info on the media library database: https://github.com/neuralys/nde
For so many years, I remember wishing I could learn how to make these visualisations (usually whilst absolutely hammered). Never acted on the impulse.
Why can't they just maintain the original Winamp? Making sure it's up to date, maybe improve the quality of equaliser etc.
I really don't want to "connect with the artist" nor I want artists to shove their content into my playlist. I also don't want any cloud garbage - I want to play files from my media only, without any tracking.
It seems to me what this will end up with is fake artists creating content optimised for conversions rather than art coming from their soul.
LE: It finished loaded after about 2 minutes.
I have a good (imo) tagline for this:
> Apropos of nothing, the webservice
Greeting users with delay and some lava lamp blobs is probably not the best way. But what do I know. I am down to business guy so others might have different idea.
luckily, old versions still function perfectly well with windows 10!
The intention was to get consent so that people cannot track you without consent.
Instead: Everyone puts up cookie dialogs instead of getting rid of cookies.
You hate the EU for this, but you should be asking why this site needs to have cookies.
That's exactly what happened. You really should read up about things you seem to have strong feelings about.
The EU declared the "EU Cookie Rule" (the ePrivacy Directive) a failure, due to malicious compliance, and was one of the reasons the GDPR became a thing. Ad companies really shot themselves in the foot there.[0][1]
> Something needs to be done about these cookie dialogs the EU imposes on the rest of the world. What a stupid rule.
This puts the blame on the EU, not on the Ad companies doing this, which is where I 'extrapolated' from; there's not another intepretation of this phrase that I'm aware of.
[0]: This is where they say the ePrivacy directive has failed: https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications...
[1]: This is where they detail exactly why the ePrivacy rules needed to be expanded: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/