How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
AOL really did them a disservice.
The thing that fascinated me more, though, were the people setting up there own talk shows. I was kind of one of those irritating edgy-atheist teenagers, and so I remember listening to the "The Infidel Guy Show" every week, and I thought it was so cool that he was able to make his own call-in talk show for fun. It felt like the internet was able to un-gatekeep stuff so that regular consumers could finally be in charge of their own entertainment.
The early broadband internet before YouTube was pretty weird. Internet video was very obviously possible (and there were sites like iFilm that showed that, as well as Shoutcast), and everyone kind of knew it was the "future", but it was also kind of unclear where the hell it was actually going to go and what the "future" actually meant.
I remember before YouTube, I was playing around with Screenblast Movie Studio as a twelve year old, hacking together music videos from pirated episodes of The Simpsons and Spongebob, or recording and editing together little skits I would me, and all I would ever be able to do was burn a DVD and show it to friends. One of my first internet purchases was a PCI capture card, actually, so I could plug in my 8mm video camera into my computer. Even in 2003 I knew it was possible to share videos online, but I didn't really have money to host it myself because they would eat an enormous amount of bandwidth.
It sucks that everything became centralized, but at the same time it is pretty cool that pretty much anyone can upload and share videos now. I upload unlisted videos to YouTube all the time whenever I edit something I want to share with friends.
I had built a portable live-streaming setup with an Asus Eee PC 901 with a Logitech USB webcam, and would record to the internal SD card. It was surprisingly capable and shock-proof due to the early internal SSD. I had the Linux variant because it had faster flash storage, but was weirdly partitioned between a fast 4GB and slow 16GB dual-SSD setup. I somehow managed to trim my Windows XP Pro install down to fit in the 4GB partition with nLite and used no swap file but switched to a fixed size swap on a RAM drive from system memory. I was able to get modded BIOS and system tray utilities that allowed for dynamic under- and overclocking and formatted my SD card to appear as internal storage to workaround some issues.
In the end I didn’t reach my goal of a fully mobile livestream setup due to the lack of fast enough mobile data, but it worked serviceably on WiFi of the time.
I had a lot of niche interests and strong opinions loosely held, and desired to use such tools to find my tribe online, as I had not yet moved to SF, and my world travels had so far been to relatively out of the way areas.
Its almost quaint to look back on that project, as all of that and more is now table stakes for even the lowest-end Android phone, and shortly after I moved to SF in 2009, I would get an HTC G1 and would root and stock ROM it with an expanded battery to essentially redo that entire build all over again with a single standalone mobile phone, though the camera quality and app support was lacking. By the time Periscope came around, I had already moved on to some other “current thing” boondoggle tech hobby projects.
I now personally believe that seeking meaning through external acknowledgement and validation is putting the cart before the horse and also neglects both my own expression for its own sake and appreciating others as ends unto themselves rather than means to my own self-actualization and generally am content to keep to myself to the degree that I do, while deepening my appreciation of others as individuals who are largely also just trying to connect, to be seen.
I’ve mellowed out a lot in most ways, and going through all those experiences made me realize I was at the time a kind of misanthropic pick-me who was good enough, good looking and lucky enough, and smart enough to set myself up to fail by optimizing for the wrong outcomes. I knew what I wanted but lacked a long enough view to actually achieve what I wanted in my life, relationships, friendships, or goals. I didn’t do the work, and I felt a misplaced sense of entitlement to rewards I likely deserved but didn’t earn, so even my humble achievements felt hollow. Once I realized that I was the problem and my project was to work on myself first, a lot of my desire to hack tech things together for its own sake took on a more personal focus.
To quote Halt and Catch Fire, computers aren’t the thing; they’re the thing that gets us to the thing. That thing was always true human connection and community. Once I realized that community is the end itself and not just the means to distract myself from my own thoughts, I had a much better understanding of myself and what I needed to do to be my best self. It all began with me.
Wherever you go, there you are, and it’s better to be comfortable being alone and better still to not be alone, so that experiences shared can multiply the concurrent rewards for all involved.
Sorry for the wall of text lol, hopefully that resonates with somebody.
I guess they have other products now but I haven't heard of anyone using those either...
In 2021, I bought a soundbar from Creative. The quality of the soundbar was actually pretty good, but it had a really awful noisegate issue where if the scene was too quiet, it would just cut to zero. For some movies this wasn't a big deal, but for most movies it made them unwatchable.
We put up with it for a year, but we got sick of it and I was about to buy a replacement. I tried the updated firmware on Creative's website, and it didn't help, but then I found some YouTube video with like 10 views that claimed to have a fixed firmware from Creative that wasn't publicly available, and they had a link to some shady mega.co.nz download for it. Stuff like that screams "malware!", but I figured that I was about to throw the soundbar into the Goodwill pile anyway, so if I break it no big deal, and it's not like the soundbar was connected to the internet, just optical audio, and I don't think anyone could install a crypto minor on there, so against my better judgement I installed the firmware and...
It worked! It fixed the noisegate problems entirely, and now the soundbar is actually excellent. For some reason, Creative still hasn't bothered uploading the fixed firmware on their website though.
So it's weird, Creative is still around, and making theoretically-decent products, but they lack a lot of polish. Kind of a sad fall from grace.
I sometimes think it’s engineers bypassing QA that will never come.
Aureal made 3D audio for the first time - real 3D audio, ray-traced sound - and it was absolutely staggeringly amazing. I played the first Half-Life using this. It was incredible - unforgettable.
Creative destroyed them, to destroy the competition, and that technology far as I know has since then been lost - the 3D stuff I know of after that is not ray-traced.
Loads of music I discovered, which I wouldn't have through Spotify.
I'm reminded of listening to the Dr Demento radio show and discovering a lot of niche acts that way too, and realizing my dad was actually a cool guy for recommending it to me, and being surprised that it was still around as was he, at least at the time.
I just looked him up, and he's STILL at it, the madlad. Brings a smile to my face. Music really is universal.
Thanks for the reminder, happymellon!
The historical record is fairly clear about why the two stations came under the SomaFM banner, and the fact that they’re both based in SF probably didn’t hurt, but after looking into why they went their separate ways, I still don’t know why BAGeL Radio went independent again in 2021 or 2022 beyond a statement from the operator of BAGeL Radio on a Reddit post asking the same thing. I’m glad they both exist, obviously, and apparently the live nature of the BAGeL Radio broadcast was a factor in integrating it to SomaFM’s more passive playlist-based streaming setup, but that’s all I know.
Now, there are plenty of individual players for these files, HOWEVER, if i want to play ALL of the music from ALL of the consoles on one playlist, there is no valid substitute for the Winamp plugin system. So yes, valid use cases still exist, and i will be whipping the llamas ass for the foreseeable future.
The player also sports excellent demoscene tracked music support (the reason for its name - XM is the file extension for FastTracker II tracked music), but really it's a fantastic media player for a lot of formats in its own right.
It supports a lot of formats natively. For anything else you need to download plugins for it separately[1], but even today it's by far my preferred player on Windows. I'd heartily recommend it for your use case as well.
It is in exactly the same position as far as I can tell – i.e. replaced by streaming services like Apple Music.
To me the design seemed like a copy of the earlier MOD players that were popular on the Amiga platform.
If it had had a standard windows GUI we would have used it all the same - it could load a 13,000 song playlist off a network share without trying to load each file, so time to first sound was incredibly short.
I've not found a media player I like as much as the original Winamp - especially the ability to use plugins, and how devs and users could easily change the look/feel. I've never understood how literally the worst media app I've encountered (especially on Windows) - iTunes - took over, aside from the fact that it made it easy to buy music and load it onto your iDevices.
It didn't kill a pc to run either. Low overhead and low screen real estate.
I don't listen to it. I stream from YT Music these days. It's just easier and more convenient. Plus my musical tastes and preferences are really, really, really strange. Streaming ticks all the right boxes.
I fought going this route for the longest time, mostly on principle. I lost that fight.
Its extremely rare that I want to play an mp3 on my pc, thus no need to use something like winamp.
Can anyone recommend a good music player (preferably open source)? I rely currently on vlc and the default apple music player on macOS.
Granted it requires a server, but is easy to use on any client as a web app.
How does it make this money? What's the source of revenue? Are there ads in Winamp?
And we'd be getting articles about how Winamp "used" to be simple, but is now "bloated", and all the internet greybeard nerds (hi, it's me) would be talking about how they just want to play the tens of thousands of local MP3s they have not pay for a subscription to stream from the web, which is why they're "still on Winamp 5".
So, while I do think there's an alternate future where "Winamp" became as big and as ubiquitous as iTunes or Spotify, or both combined, I don't think there's a future where it does any better than those and there is no 2024 (or 2017) nostalgia for what it once was.
I know some OSS players that became worse over time. The usablity hero that was amaroK became so bad after an overhaul that it was forked as Clementine. For example, if you had shuffle on, and double-clicked a song in your playlist, a different random one will start.
Then Clementine now sometimes hangs when you rewind an MP3. It understands where the new position is and that it is supposed to be playing, just can't. They also unlearned a tiny UI improvement that I've contributed a decade ago. Indeed they would be a much better product if they did nothing other than fixing bit rot.
I remember there was a Gnome option, wonder if it is alive. Can't remember the name though.
I mean, I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but I use Winamp to stream music all day at work, and I have for 20 years. I've been a paid subscriber at Digitally Imported [1] off and on (mostly on) since 2008. But I've been streaming from them with winamp and sometimes other players since probably 1999. Audio streaming existed before Winamp and Shoutcast, but a lot of early streaming was built around Shoutcast.
I've used other players, but came back to Winamp. I could stream in a browser window, but winamp uses 18 mb of memory, and I don't think I can have a browser tab open for less than that. Plus, having it in a dedicated application means I don't have to worry about my browser freaking out and ruining my audio experience.
Does di.fm have much mainstream music? What is the selection like compared to a Spotify our Youtube Music?
I wouldn't even care that much honestly if they have mainstream music, as long as they have music I would like and can discover without extreme effort.
If you want mainstream music, di.fm has a sister site https://www.radiotunes.com/ with more mainstream genres; but listen for a while with the free browser based streams to see if you like it; sometimes I want to listen to dad rock and it's not exactly what I'm looking for. If you enjoy picking specific songs, this isn't the service for you.
They've also got some other affiliated sites for classical, jazz, and rock, which I haven't used in quite some time. It looks like they all share accounts now, but classical used to require separate membership for ad free streams.
Are you talking about Rhythmbox? If so, yes it is still alive! And pretty good. Not as great as things used to be back in the glory days of Amarok, but still pretty good. The important thing is that it hasn't regressed. It is mostly bug free, and still has that really badass power-user shell/scripting API that you can use. It has a lot of features now that cater to self-hosters but still enable social (such as Scrobbling). I use it quite a bit to play FLACs I bought/buy on Bandcamp.
Strawberry is another one that some people really love, but felt a little heavy to me.
I think Navidrome is my future honestly. I have it set up but most of my music collection is disorganized so I usually return to youtube music. If more bands would sell their stuff on Bandcamp or anywhere DRM-free (besides Amazon, who I used to buy music from until one day they decided to make it really difficult to download. Now I don't trust them), I suspect I'd be all self-hosted before long.
> But during the last 15 years or so, that wasn't always the case. Today, we resurface our look at the greatest MP3 player that was—Winamp. This piece originally ran on June 24, 2012 (and Winamp finally called it quits in November 2013).
Does anyone else remember layer3.org? Or VQF? Kjofol? The Xing encoder 16mhz scandal?
I also remember using mpg321 on a 486, because integer based decoding was just faster enough that I could play almost all my mp3s on that.
So for many this was the only useful way to play mp3s on windows.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all that but it seemed likely that AOL and Nullsoft were not the best culture fit and taking Spinner out of the equation, I still don't think it would have worked out well.
That being said, Winamp was and is one of the best media players ever created. It's the prime example of how good software can be when the creator is fully aligned with his/her users.
Based on core that was open sourced around Winamp 3 DrO one of the ex devs is gradually re-implementing all the other parts.