Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code | Hacker News Reader

Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

about.winamp.com

344 pointscaptbaritone163 comments

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO.

https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-site-design/46...

Still waiting on KaZaA open source. Kids these days don't know what it's like trying to download a music video and end up watching someone getting beheaded.

I’m pretty sure kids these days do know exactly what that’s like (although they wouldn’t be downloading the music video and it wouldn’t have taken over an hour for a shitty 2.3mb file)

I realize this is a joke, but can’t resist mentioning that LimeWire was (is?) open source (or at least used an open network in GnuTella)

And funnily enough, gnutella being a creation of Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp as well.

Or downloading Windows XP.ISO and booting up Ubuntu. 15 year old me was confused and enraged.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, l33tness.

So br00tal

There are open source clients for FastTrack protocol based on giFT (https://sourceforge.net/projects/gift/): Apollon (https://apollon.sourceforge.net) and KCeasy (http://www.kceasy.com).

I really appreciate them doing this. I wish more companies would release their source - even as is - if they are dissolving the corporation anyway.

Why does a company has to go bankrupt to open source? It’s like something that owners want to do in order to be able to fork, not something that is being done for the community or open side of it.

Well, their business model was selling the software… it is harder to do that if it is open source.

Once you are going bankrupt, you are going to lose the asset anyway, so there is no incentive to keep it closed source.

Is it really that hard to figure out why a company open sources when going bankrupt?

Wouldn't the lenders be pissed you essentially gave away one of the valuable assets they could have sold off to someone else?

Source code is not the main asset that makes the final product. Doom is also open source but if you compile the source you won't get the game that's on the self. You still need the game assets for that and those are not open source, you need to buy the game to get those.

I understand this part, what I really meant is that it is a pity so much opens source is born as a Phoenix coming out of burned companies…

I just got here from the “DoJ moves to legalize weed” comment section, and I have the same thing to say: I don’t care why people do a good thing, I’m uncomplicatedly happy it happened.

that explains why i had such a terrible fucking time with their “creator” side, was supposed to have a rep, help setting up, promotion, etc and they didn’t do fuck all for a year and then tried to charge me for it a year later

Winamp has (/had) a creator side? I thought it was just a media player.

Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it's still nice to see.

Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.

I use the community update of Winamp, WACUP, and it's excellent. I've tried other media players but always come back here.

I'm not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.

https://getwacup.com/

It's windows-only? Weird.

Weird? It's Winamp lol

With the source code someone can port it to make Linamp.

don't forget Macamp.

Remember that before Winamp, there was DOSamp! I used to use version 0.8. Playback was jerky on a 486DX2/66 but once I upgraded to a Pentium, it was smooth sailing.

Actually yeah I had forgotten about that alpha version awkwardly called “Winamp:Mac” because “MacAMP” was already taken by not-Nullsoft https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/winampmac https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macamp-10-preview-edition

And the Android version which I used briefly around 2010 before getting into Subsonic/D-Sub https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-for-android/29...

There once was xmms

Before that it was called x11amp, and after that it's been succeeded by a fork that ended up being Audacious, apparently.

Qmmp is still being developed: https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/

Who's gonna build TempleAmp?

Music does not sound good on a PC speaker.

There are DOS-based MOD and MP3 players that output to the PC speaker.

Yeah, if you want something similar for other systems, try x11amp.

(Yes I know it's not called that anymore and I'm showing my age).

It's Windows only for now.

The architecture of Winamp is made of various plugins. WACUP is replacing them bit by bit.

Once everything is replaced then porting could be possible, though it's been only built for Windows so there must be a lot of Windows-isms in there.

There have been Linux-based clones of Winamp for a long time, such as XMMS (which directly supports Winamp skins).

XMMS is the O.G. but audacious and Qmmp now also support classic winamp skins.

5.666 installed and is running well under wine for me.

They seem to be just as cagey about the licensing. Not that there's any obligation for people to be FOSS if they want to give software away, but the intentional avoidance of the question is always instructive. Just say that it's not FOSS, it's fine.

> Will it be free ?

> Yes WACUP will be free to download & to use.

> This is an independent project & due to the amount of time & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where the future will take me & this project.

Have you checked out foobar2000? To me, it always felt like the true successor to Winamp.

foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata all at once.

A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.

I find it amusing that modern foobar2k theming is based around Javascript.

> A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case,

I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy to customize almost any way you want. There's even a scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current layout.

As for the functionality they find it lacks, well, there's probably a component for that.

Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of functionality out of the box that other media players don't have, like the very robust features found in the "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.

to be fair, it's a lot easier to tell if you do or do not like something than it is to design something you do like. I run into that with vim colorschemes all the time

you'd have a hard time replicating this UI [1] or other winamp skins in foobar2000, so i'm not sure i'd call it a successor except in the sense that it can play anything you throw at it.

[1] https://getwacup.com/screenshots/

I consider it a successor in that it's compact with an emphasis on user customization and community-designed plugins/components. Like Winamp, most functionality you get out of the box is provided by bundled plugins, and they can be replaced with alternatives.

Out of the box, you could certainly customize it to have a similar layout to winamp even if none of the dressing looks at all the same.

My layout[1] is certainly very different than Winamp, but still conforms a lot more to the basic shape of Winamp than the usual giant screen-filling squares that are iTunes, Windows Media Player or the Spotify desktop client.

1. https://i.postimg.cc/R0JzVTK8/image.png

musicbee is my favorite

I'm working on my own cross platform music player that I think has a more polished interface than foobar. I have mac builds now and will start doing windows builds soon:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

It's made in Flutter, well done!

Thanks!

Overall I’ve had a great experience with Flutter. I tried a few cross platform stacks before settling on it and it feels like the most polished and mature choice.

foobar2000 is great! I love the minimal (default) UI. Never even bothered to customize.

I love QMMP ( https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/ ). It is compatible with Winamp Skins, supports network playing (shoutcast) and works pretty well in my Linux Mint installations. I may be old fashioned, but man my brain has got so much "muscle memory" on years and years of Winamp use during the 90s ...

I cannot live without stuff like equalizers, visualization plugins, Last.FM scrobbing and even automated track "ripping" of radio stations.

It makes me so sad the state of current audio players like YouTube Music, Spotify, Tidal and the likes. featurewise they are so... bland. Millenials and GenZs just don't enjoy music the same way I used to enjoy it. Maybe it is because there so much of it now that it doesn't matter so much

I was surprised to find how many people still use Winamp now.

took them 20 years to figure out that they can't monetize their media player

Literally just yesterday I was staring at Winamp's basic visualizer because I was trying to make something similar in my Godot game.

I'm still not sure exactly what I'm missing, as I have the "gist" of the visualizer working, but it just doesn't look as smooth as Winamp's. I think I need slight persistence and the little effect with the 'caps' that slowly fall down for each column (right now mine looks too jittery).

have you looked at the ProjectM: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

Those might be called peaks or peak indicators: common in audio interfaces to indicate the maximal decibels in each frequency bucket over the last second or so, so that you don't miss seeing a split-second super loud sound.

It may carry downstream license obligations of its own, that prohibit/complicate public release.

Relatedly, they might be hoping that one of the people looking at it might be willing to buy out or take over contractual responsibility for any components that can't be relicensed to traditional open source. Basically, parading the source around like a debutante because other channels to find buyers haven't panned out.

Or it's just real-world commercial code and is kind of embarassing by the standards of public open source projects.

I still use it for all of my locally stored MP3s. I haven't seen a music player in a long time that focused on playing music rather than being a media library.

They tried to shove that in at the end but it's easy to one click it away the first time you turn it on

Foobar2000?

Foobar2K still has an active low key community, it has plugins and a framework that allows tech users to add features and share them, but the main release has the approach I prefer - good display capabilities for media library meta data with flexible layout options .. and it's on the user to populate that meta data with third party tools (or plugins).

Primarily it's just a player, potentially it's a lot.

No, it's not. We still don't have a decent not-bloatware not-crippleware music player in Linux.

XMMS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS

A search for "music player" gives a ton of results many of which are not bloated

https://flathub.org/apps/search?q=Music%20player

I remember as a hobbyist Windows programmer (Borland C++ Builder) I was really envious of the skills required to build something like Winamp - especially the UI. Back then, advanced learning resources and examples were effectively non-existent or at least, hard to find and stitch together.

The fact that you can re-skin it at runtime with such a wide variety of skins and load such a variety of plugins puts modern software to shame.

Dockable UI, fast, stable, form and function. Really a masterclass in software design to this day.

I think those of us who use the REAPER DAW and its customizable themes are the main beneficiaries of that functionality.

It was really cool.

Skinning was pretty easy to do. The packaging format was a zip archive with a renamed extension. You could do a lot with a little photoshop skills and trial and error.

So many people used it that skins would get a lot of distribution, too.

You can reskin a lot of modern software, it just went out of fashion.

Modern software won't run on a 30 year-old Win95 computer like Winamp did. CSS inside browser-based applications does not count as skinning; that's just an abomination.

That's one of the biggest reasons I still use it. Other music players have strictly fixed UIs that often focus on organizing a music library rather than actually playing your music. I'm quite happy organizing my music using the file system.

I owe my entire career to the fact that Winamp added the ability to re-skin.

I had just graduated graduate school for international economics, and was working for a government contractor who only hired me because I had a masters (they could charge the government more). Because of this, I literally had nothing to do and would just sit in the office.

I eventually figured out an excuse to get my employer to buy Photoshop for me and I started learning it on company time. When Winamp came out with the update to add skins, I ended up making one of the very first skins (meshAMP) which became really popularly.

https://archive.org/details/winampskins_meshAmp

(I am cringing looking at it now)

This led to contract job with STB (to design interfaces for a TV Tuner card they had) and eventually 3DFX (paid in 3d video cards), and eventually a career change and a job as a graphic designer.

Except, I was not a good designer, so I quickly learned to program (ASP.net and then JAVA), which led to Macromedia Flash, which led to Macromedia Generator, which eventually led to a job offer from Macromedia (now Adobe), where I still am (sadly, sans Flash).

Anyways, thank your WinAMP!

Did you create Macromedia Flash? Or otherwise worked on it

Anyway your winamp skin is cool

I worked with the team and had input on the Player, but my job was in community / evangelism.

I've felt for a long time that hacker News was dead, then I read your post and it made me warm inside

(Borland) Delphi also made creating non standard form shapes; the secret was in leveraging the win32 api, which was really easy to do in Delphi.

Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm

Strange that they didn't include a single screenshot on that page.

Very common for older projects

Screenshots might take 10’s of kibibytes. Not very baud efficient. Use the webring links at the bottom of the page to find another website that has pictures. Sign their guestbook as thanks.

I found the secret to C++ programming for Windows was using the C API.

It was a long time ago, but IIRC I was using Visual C++ (a very nice compiler that was the first to implement the STL as written) having abandoned Borland Foundation Classes (? name ?) which was dreadful. Woeful.

MFC, the MS C++ offering for writing Windows apps was impossible to use and undocumented at the time. We subscribed to those piles of CDs that MS would send out regularly and I could only find decent documentation for the C API, not the MFC one. Weird.

I used an explicit event loop (simple for a Computer Science graduate like I was) and the C API inside my C++ programme and it worked a treat

Those were (not) the days....

I remember fondly writing a winamp clone in school with a team project. We scraped together a rough plugin based player, input and output plugins (a super limited network streaming variant), etc.. good times grinding on a neat project. Yikes, that was like 25 years ago.

Justin Frank used to hang out on IRC in #winprog or something, and I can remember when he was showing us how he made the UI skinnable. Asking for ideas and input etc.

This was back in 96-97?

Good. Love the reimplementation in HTML https://webamp.org/

This satisfied whatever cravings I still had. Thank you!

It's fantastic. I can easily spend hours on the skins website. https://skins.webamp.org/

wow, I even found the skin I used way back when... very cool

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/d77a144cdb775a0937617389b6e0e4...

Anime girls and the Borg lady from Voyager, checks out.

Major Tom was the one with the most impressive artwork to me.

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/dd9931b75c11c570ff8ceabee499e7...

Hey! That's my side project. So glad to hear people enjoy it.

I just checked it out. Good stuff! I may deploy it.

Whoa! How did you get what looks like the real Milkdrop visualizer working??

About 20 years ago, I almost got hired on the Winamp team. They were busy working on Winamp 3, which, from what I gathered, was a pretty much total rewrite using modern C++.

The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I wonder which source code they'll open up. Maybe both.

I had to re-read your comment because first time round I thought you were suggesting it was JF's codebase they hated. Everything else he's ever worked on has been phenomenal (especially Reaper, from the very start).

So was that at AOL?

For anyone looking for a slightly more modern alternative, I recommend foobar2000[1].

It's not quite as pretty out of the box, but it makes up for it with some insane customizability. It also has a very robust ecosystem of components, and works very well in Wine.

1. https://www.foobar2000.org/

I'm skeptical this will be a fully free license based on the cagey language in the announcement :/

Very weird. They provide a very specific future date for this, and avoided using the term "open source". I can't recall any other company doing this. Most of the time, companies provide a github repository at the same time they make such announcements. Even for twitter, Elon Musk promised the algorithm would be opened, and then some time later it was just there. While generally it is a positive thing to see code being available, I wouldn't think too much into it until I can see the license and the code.

> I can't recall any other company doing this

Years ago Microsoft used to do stuff like this, notably releasing .NET Framework under its Reference Source License (you're allowed to look at the code, but that's about it).

It’s still happening. Bad companies are swapping between using ‘open source’ inaccurately (to get grants and funding) and saying ‘source available’ (when people call them on their bullshit) now.

TIL: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...

They might not be in a position to relicense all of it, or might not be sure of exactly how to do so appropriately.

Large, living companies like Microsoft can work with their lawyers to confidently understand what they're releasing when opening up old code and indemnify theythemselves appropriately, but a troubled company on its last legs can't nexessarily budget for all that.

Commercial software of that vintage was not built from dependencies that were all open source themselves, nor were there necessarily contributor/contractor agreements that kept copyright in a suitable place for open source relicencing. They might have been prepared for explicit rights transfer to another party, and maybe disclosure as they're suggesting here, but relicensing is a different thing.

This leaked a couple years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29379346

It really whips the llama's ass.

Certainly whipped my ass after hearing that intro again 20 years later.

it’s Wesley Willis, all the way down…

Hope it’s the source for Winamp 2.x (not 3 or 5)

The most impressive feature of classic winamp were it's skins. You can effortlessly watch them in all their classic glory on WebAmp.org [0].

(There is also some nice music there)

[0]: https://webamp.org/

I've been using WACUP, it's really good: https://getwacup.com/

Kinda late. Maybe it would've been cool in 2006 when I still used Windows.

But what I really want to know is: will it really kick the LLaMAs ass now with AI features?

I'm surprised they haven't announced any AI features yet.

It seems like every 5 years ago there's a big "Winamp is BACK" announcement paired with some new nonsense related to whatever the big tech buzzword of the day is. Last time it was blockchains.

It's what's left of AOL. Give them another 20 years.

It's amazing… how WinAmp and the other softwares and websites that were so crucial in the rise of the internet AND computers in general, just..faded away like they did, and we got stuck with the Facebook and TikTok and Twitter and Netflix etc bs we have left today..

Note their careful wording..."opened up source", not "open source".

I knew those quotation marks were going to ruin my elation when I clicked the headline.

AIMP3 is still in regular development for windows and Android and for me at least seems to nicely emulate winamp in UI, skins, plugins and extra features. I have fond memories of Winamp, but I don't miss it.

I just remembered I used to hangout in an IRC chat with the creator of Sonique as a pre-teen when I first started to teach myself to code - Sonique being the main competitor to Winamp way back when.

Strange how memory works.

sonique was interesting because most skins ditched 'square-rectangle' all together. Sometimes it was really wacky, like raindrops on your screen. The visulization engine was very milkdrop-y, too.

I still use the old Winamp on all my devices. Winamp: old or new is being open sourced? If it's the old one, wonderful! WACUP team are now able to develop a ARM version.

Currently dating myself by playing Portishead's Dummy in Winamp 5.66...

Looking forward to this code being lightly maintained for minimal compatibility with future OSes. I dislike change!

Heh, I wish Justin had some time to lay his hands on it again after so many years. (On a second thought, I’m happier with him being busy with Reaper).

The dozen people still using Winamp rejoice...

I'm one of those 12 people apparently. I don't know, I still listen to mp3 music on my PC almost every day... And I have yet to find another player that is as fast and lightweight as WinAMP

foobar is great

It's great until you move your music and the notice that the carefully sorted playlist you kept updating over 10 years doesn't use relative paths and you can't do search and replace because it's binary.

Not lightweight, but I've fallen in love with MusicBee (https://getmusicbee.com/) and it's been my only music player for at least the last 10 years. Love everything about it.

i'm with you my brother

Oh my God. My favorite piece of software of all time. Would love to read it's source.

"Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version," explains Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp."

Which license will be used? "Opening up" is not exactly GPL.

I also don't know what license will be used, but nothing in the GPL prevents [eg] the owners of Winamp continuing to own Winamp, or from deciding what innovations will (or will not) make it to their own official version.

I'm not sure that "opening up" actually means what you may appear to think that it means.

The entirety of present-day Winamp could be released, with code, under the GPL tomorrow and nothing says the org that owns Winamp will somehow cease to own Winamp, or that they must accept others' changes into their own source tree.

(And that's perfectly OK, even under the restrictions of the GPL.)

Also someone has rewritten Winamp in Swift as well. Few days ago it was on Product hunt and got 4 likes.

Check it out https://re-amp.ru

I hope for the code to read the library database. Perhaps I'll be able to debug what's broken in mine and fix it so I can use it again.

https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/ already exists, though.

The site is not reachable.

No one would ever believe me but last night I had a dream about exactly this.

I was shocked to wake up and read about this in the news.

Wow, for me Winamp was one of the first "enshittified" pieces of software.

I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

I remember I used to use http://oldversion.com [1] to download the previous one

Ever since then I have been wary of "improvements" that make software worse, which has been happening a lot recently.

I'd be really interested in seeing the source code to the original. I didn't know much about programming then, and to me that would be similar to reading the original source code of Doom (which I've done a bit)

[1] this site still seems alive? But doesn't even have https?

> I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

Winamp 3 was a major regression that sparked a backlash (in particular it had a new skin engine that probably was a priori better, but broke compatibility all existing skins, which wasn't popular; also performance, which had been a major selling point, was worse), but I don't remember there being any change of ownership or monetization effort. I think it was just a genuine well-intentioned rewrite that ended up worse than the original, like Netscape 4 or KDE4.

WA3 was an AOL production so of course it sucked. Buggy out of the box and introduced the media library feature. Version 5 fixed it. Also best part is the media library and extra features were themselves written as plugins so if you didn't want the feature you could disable it and use it just as a simple player.

To me the gold version was winamp-v2.94 ... ~1.2MB of magic. I still use it today.

Notable mention on BEOS ... CL-Amp

The weaselly wording doesn't make me optimistic, but I hope it's an open source license.

Questions for the experts: should anyone use this, compared eg to something more modern like VLC?

I used to love Winamp for internet radio/tv.

Maybe plug-in NewPipe or similar instead and fork it?

I can't remember the last time I thought of winamp, I moved on to foobar2000 and then to streaming services. Even with this announcement, there's no mention of a licence... Too little too late, maybe if foobar2000 became open source but I'd doubt it.

why wait this long (until Sept 2024) to opensource the code?

Note that they don't actually say "open source" anywhere.

Winamp has a ton of proprietary licensed library code (codecs, Gracenote API, etc) that all has to be replaced with open source equivalents before the code can be released. I believe the skeleton crew that they had working on maintaining Winamp a few years ago started on some of this work, but I'm assuming that the whole codebase needs to be audited to make sure that they're legally in the clear.

It's also weird that the timestamp on the press release is "Dec 16, 1".

There are 5 press releases total on that site, 2 from 2023, 2 from 2024, and this one from year "1". It just seems very strange.

I want to see a wasm version of winamp.

It's no skin off my nose either way, but I don't understand why you would want to take a nice slim desktop application and turn it into another web application that runs in a bloated browser. Seems to defeat the purpose of winamp at that point.

Blech.

til: Winamp is still alive and kicking

Linux Winamp?

is there a good Mac port that supports newer, especially loss less, codecs?

The closest I've seen is https://re-amp.ru. Not sure about codecs

Someone mentioned macamp. I have no idea though

winamp should release an LLM and claim that it really beats the Llamas....

didn't it leak some time ago? did AOL ever spin nullsoft back out?

do people still use winamp over foobar?

I do.

Maybe now we can finally add RealVideo support to it.

Let's all take this moment to celebrate 22 years and 230 days of RealNetwork's strong commitment to fucking ugly clunky software.

https://www.bonequest.com/1099

llama

Can we get a Godot port for winamp on all the systems? Kthnx. ^>^

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