Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself

I moved to iTunes from WinAmp when I got tired of meticulously organizing my mp3s into folders. That was the feature that sold me on Windows iTunes.

Then came iPods, MacBook Pros, iPhones, iPads and now maybe $10k+ later I'm hook line and sinker into the Mac Eco system.

However, I don't use any portable mp3 players any more and still use CDs when I actually want more than background music.

In an acquisition I was involved in, the acquirer made us all sorts of promises about how the new world order would be wonderful. They even made sure everyone was involved in training on their company "way" and values etc. Things didn't go that way - several of our people left early because they preferred small companies over large ones, and there was a need for a considerable amount of planning and integration with the acquirer. This left less manpower available for our products and things ended up worse off than if we had not been acquired. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for a year before leaving. The products were quietly shelved a few years later with the acquirer effectively having burnt $300 million. The irony is that at he beginning they said they had made mistakes with previous acquisitions, had learned from it and wouldn't do it this time.

One common thing about every acquisition in our little sample is that first lie they told us was "nothing will change"

Nobody really likes iTunes as a player, it's only notable because of the store and the device lock-in.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise when they become worth radically less due to mismanagement - not because mismanagement is unusual, but because mismanagement persists in spite of the large costs.

But that wasn't the reason to use Winamp. I started using it when it was basically the only game in town, but for a long time there was no reason to switch. Winamp had a few things going for it:

1. It was amazingly small, and consequently it was terrifically fast. The tiny window also gave you all the information and controls you needed, hogging preciously little of your 800x600 or 1024x768 display.

2. I could use it efficiently. My favorite feature (which I still miss sometimes) was you could bring up a box and start typing a song name and jump straight to playing it. I think it was the J key. When you got in your mind "Hey, I'd like to hear X", you could do it in a second or two.

3. The ecosystem was huge. There were thousands of skins (most terrible, some looked pretty amazing) and tons of plugins. People made visualizers, ways to control the software with external interfaces, all sorts of neat stuff.

It still amazes me how small Winamp was. I didn't like Winamp 3. I tried it for a while but it felt bloated and the jump feature was gone. Despite the near universal unhappiness, the developers defended version 3, making them seem out of touch. After a while I downloaded the previous release again (2.95?) and used it for years. I eventually moved to iTunes shortly before I got an iPod.

The last I heard about Winamp was a few years ago when Winamp 5 came out. My reaction then was amazement that it was still around. I'm amazed it's still around now.

You don't. Meaning you don't have to use them if you don't want them. I never used any theme for WinAMP. Although I know friends who did, and enjoyed more organic shapes for their mp3 player.

> I found Foobar2000 and never looked back.

Sounds like you were really late to the party, fb2k's very first public release came around 5 years after WinAMP's... and shortly after the Winamp 3 release which was universally panned.

Not only were Winamp 1 and 2 pretty much the only game in town, they were the only players which could 1. actually decode mp3s without skipping on a basic machine of the time and 2. offer the features now taken for granted like playlists and shuffle modes, as well as rapid metadata edition or efficient keyboard shortcut. It also provided a number of very good plugins.

Don't take me wrong, I'm currently an fb2k user, but fb2k was in many ways a response to the bungling of Winamp3 (Peter Pawlowski freelanced for NullSoft, and as noted earlier the first public release of fb2k shortly followed that of Winamp 3)

The skinning feature was overrated, and I never understood why there were so many skins. In the years I hung on to Winamp 2, I may have changed the skin one time. Most people picked one and forgot about it.

I think I heard somewhere that Foobar2000 only exists because Winamp 3 messed everything up so badly. I don't know if that's true, but Wikipedia says Winamp3 was release in August 2002, and the first release of Foobar2000 was December 2002, so the dates would be correct.

Anyway, Foobar came out 5 years after Winamp, and was in fact written by someone who worked for Nullsoft, so I wouldn't say they were competitors exactly, more like Winamp inspired Foobar.

So did you use Foobar then? Of course not, Foobar initial release was December 2002.

fb2k is way too far into the "customize your own player" territory for me. I just don't care (much less have the time) to apply all sorts of tweaks to make it look even halfway decent. It's like the Linux mentality applied to Windows. And then the plugins break at minor version upgrades.

https://panic.com/audion/

(at least in terms of skinning).

Also, looks like Winamp hired the K-Jofol team and released a skin aping it:

http://www.winamp.com/skin/k-jofol-v5/142308

I think the French developer went to work to Nullsoft and created Wasabi i.e skins in Winamp 3.

There might be actual reasons of efficiency and using synergies and if you ever have to comply with regulations, you have one central unit to work on. But I think usually these decisions stem from either a positive will of organizing - because if you have two billing units or systems, things might get out of hand or control and having one just seems more neat and organized and people fear that chaos. Or they stem from nothing but cold, cut-neck, selfish political reasons. Evil-business-guy doesn't want another fish handling money in his pond because just imagine if that little fish turns out to be bigger than evil-business-guy's own billing system? On top of that, even smart-business-guy VERY likely gets a bonus on how much his billing system billed and how well it performed... you think he will let that bonus slip just because it MIGHT be the right thing for winamp? And as a unit helping to bring in the cash, billing typically has a lot of natural influence.

And of course we have a lot of 20/20 hindsight in this case.

This is a typical example of how difficult it can be to set really good, beneficial goals in an organization and how many natural conflicting interests there can be - and all that in a humongous giant like aol on top of that.

The tiny US userbase means most people disagree with you. That's the problem.

They have missed some opportunities, sure, but it's not all lost.

http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/

http://mpd.wikia.com

I loved Sonique.

I thought about doing a clone of it and making it open source under the GPL but I'm still not quite as productive as I can be in C yet.

One thing I've always done is having a video player AND a music player. I don't like launching a video that mess up my playlist. I pause my music, watch video and resume audio afterward.

Back then, before WinAMP, I think the only player was the "official" Fraunhofer Institut player, which was very basic. It was a time where CPU consumption mattered, when encoding a mp3 would take up to an hour :)

I like the Media Library coupled with the playlist. I like the Bento Skin. I like controlling it from the taskbar. I like that it plays EVERY format out there. I doesn't come with stupid "sound enhancement" settings by default.

I listen to Shoutcast radios at work.

That said, there is annoying bugs that have not been fixed for ages, which is never a good sign for a software : - notification suddenly not showing and you have to refresh the skin (F5) - the media library artist list messed up and when you click one, another one is eventually displayed (some kind of sort with artists' name beginning with "The" I think).

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In 2008 we "worked" with AOL to have Shoutcast radios in a tablet (pre-iPad era). They were a pain in the ass just to display the Shoutcast logo, while absolutely not helpful in the technical side.

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And Justin Frankel develops Reaper these days, a DAW that I happily bought.

Still using it daily. People laugh every time they see it. But it does what I want, it's lightweight, and has some great commercial plugins.