Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

winamp.com

957 pointsbulibuta500 comments

Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95, which is allegedly the best version out there.

Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple.

I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.

  Me: Can't I pause that song by hitting space?  
  WMP: No, there are no keyboard shortcuts!
  Me: I wanna play all the songs of this folder!
  WMP: Ok, but I'll mess up the order! By the way, are you interested in purchasing
  more songs from this artist? Cause I got a VirginMega link just right here!
  Me: No thanks...
  WMP: Why not? I mean, iTunes gets away with it, why can't I?
  Me: I just want to play some music.
  WMP: Really?? JUST that??
  Me: I wish.

Did you ever try Foobar 2k - its arguably a better replacement for Winamp on windows

I think foobar2000 was created by a (the?) developer who worked on Winamp many years ago, before it was bought.

Yes, Peter Pawlowski. According to Wikipedia, he is "a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft."

EDIT: He's also been working on an audio player called Boom: http://perkele.cc/software/boom

Peter was notable for maintaining a lot of the audio output backends for Winamp. People who had problems with their Creative Labs sound cards (read: basically anyone who owned one) causing playback glitches in Winamp would post about it on the Winamp forums and peter would get really cranky and eventually figure out how to fix it. (:

TheSOB88, you're hellbanned so barely anyone can see your comments.

What's this about? Parent's unsername is not TheSOB88.

You have to enable a setting to see [dead] posts, and you can't reply to them. That's why people post as siblings, hoping that the banned person will come back to the thread and see their name.

HN has an amusingly childish policy of hellbanning individuals it deems inappropriate or otherwise objectionable--hellbanning hides the banned account's comments to everyone unless you set "showdead" to true in your account preferences.

Some users have started kindly informing the hellbanned posters that, for whatever reasons, don't seem to notice that no one ever responds or upvotes their comments.

If I may get on my soapbox (if I wasn't already), I find the whole thing symptomatic of Silicon Valley's culture of networking hell and reputation management. It's a policy of elitism; a policy that disenfranchises in the name of some fictional notion of quality; a policy that demonstrates just how rotten the tech industry is at heart.

Why do I go that far? Because community culture is indicative of so many things. This is the community and atmosphere that pg set up, that pg creates, moderates, and maintains.

pg may not be formally 'responsible,' but he's certainly at the head.

Because I'm an asshole, but not enough of one to get hellbanned (at least on this account), I am in some state of suspension: an artificial delay imposed on every request.

(That's what I don't get about HN's moderation: what, did you think I wouldn't notice that you're essentially trying to herd me like chattel? I stubbornly keep this account kicking out of simple contrariness.)

That's all well and good, but let's take a look at what the trigger was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5615120 . If you ran a community -- and realistically there's nothing stopping you from doing so -- would you tolerate that kind of nonsense? I know I wouldn't want to hang around there if you did.

You're right (to continue going slightly meta), it's a policy of elitism, but in the same vein as Wikipedia. They too are still around as a result.

Side note: Quality is quantifiable to a degree and is by no means a fictional notion.

If the mountains of downvotes don't do the trick you can ban accounts directly. Hellbanning is cowardly and ineffective.

This isn't Wikipedia, it's a discussion forum--and the discussion pages on Wikipedia are moderated fairly and openly.

I didn't mean that quality as a whole was fictional, I meant that the notion of quality this policy is attempting to enact was fictional/unattainable.

Flame wars still happen. People still complain about the nastiness of HN comments. It's a discussion forum: angry conversation is what it's for.

Hellbanning does absolutely nothing to improve 'quality of discourse,' it just makes this place nastier.

Discussion forums are for discussion. Angry conversation is an emergent property of some discussions, on the net or off, but not the sole response to anything you may disagree with.

My own opinion on hell-banning or any other forms of account "punishment" is that it is, as you say, cowardly and ineffective, as long as the user has no idea that it has occurred. Either inform the user, or completely ban the account. Otherwise you're leaving people screaming into the wind when you could just tell them no-one is listening.

The whole point is that it's not about punishment, it's about preserving the tone.

Telling somebody "you've been banned" will make them upset. Some people get severely offended and they want to fight. So they go and create new accounts and start over, or they seek revenge in other ways. It can be very time consuming to deal with. Granted, this will still happen because some people will realize that they've been hellbanned, but the ones that simply get the impression that people aren't responding to their trolling will get bored with it and go away. Which is a win.

It's to let him know that he triggered hell banning somehow. it's super annoying, because you don't know if you are hell banned.

That's the point of it.

TheSOB88, you've been hell banned for almost half a year by now.

I agree, I've used foobar2000 [1] for over ten years when Winamp (my previous goto music player) started to get all crashy and hangy for no good reason. It's pretty solid, can handle massive playlists and has nice clean and simple UI with no cruft. My only wish is that they did foobar2000 for Android.

[1]: http://www.foobar2000.org/

also nice: http://www.aimp.ru

Does it fade out songs when you pause them?

If so, where can I download it and where can I donate to whoever wrote it?

Yes, preferences > playback > output and select output method DirectSound http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Pre... http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/foobar/foobar-5_files/image00... ; http://www.foobar2000.org/ ; http://flattr.com/thing/51681/foobar2000-freeware-audio-play...

Agree about Foobar. It's about the only app from Windows that I miss when using OS X.

Anyone have a Mac player they use with similar philosophy/featureset to Foobar?

cog http://cogx.org ; less features IIRC

Heh, I'm listening to the album in their first screenshot. Gotta be a good sign.

You just weren't meant for each other!

Ctrl+P was the shortcut for Pause, if I remember correctly. WMP wasn't that bad, but Foobar fits my needs much better.

For a ten-year old Winamp I'd have my doubts about Unicode support at the very least.

You should check out aimp[1]. It looks and performs like winamp and has similar functionality.

[1] http://www.aimp.ru/

Unfortunately, recently they started messing with the design and the result is much worse than transition from Winamp 5.3x to better versions.

Multiple playlist tabs, though, are great. Fortunately Audacious has them too.

Give AIMP a shot. Same as winamp2 but with built in flac and cue support.

I used Winamp heavily until the version where they added video support. That version was extremely buggy for me and I used the previous version for several years until I found Foobar2000.

It looks like 2.90 was when they added video support:

"added integrated full featured video support (NSV and DirectShow (AVI,ASf,MPEG,etc))" -- http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=130748

The nice thing about old, simple software is that the attack vectors are often known publicly and are easy to work around. In the instance of Winamp, older versions of 2.x have a buffer overflow exploit in the playlist parsing. So.. don't load playlists from untrusted sources, something most people never do anyway.

There's Winamp Lite for you. I don't miss anything from the pre-3 times.

I use Windows 7 WMP every day because the media keys on my laptop only work with that and I have never ever encountered any of those problems you are talking about.

- I can pause/unpause with space.

- The song order remains after I drag in the folder.

- Right after the very first start (i.e. on clean win7), it asks you if you want to see ads of songs of similar artists you listen to.

I always preferred 2.89, but that's mostly just me being picky.

WMP is why I bought an iPod. As a Microsft employee at the time, I struggled longer than any mortal should to get WMP to sync music to my 2003-era Windows Phone. I eventually realized that any kind of synchronization and general usefulness in using WMP with a Windows Phone was nothing but marketing lies. So one day I said, "get in the car, honey, we're going to buy iPods."

iPods led to iPhones, which led to iOS development and Macs, to the point that there are no more Windows machines in the house and I haven't done Windows development in about five years.

All kicked off by the fact that MSFT couldn't make a software music player that didn't suck.

I have also an old version of winamp because a melomane of my friends told me the transitions between songs was better in old winamp than in recent one.

I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes.

At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported.

This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me.

Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world.

Why winamp? my understanding is that it's long been surpassed by other apps, i.e. foobar, even VLC

foobar is a bit... bare bones imho... and neither it or VLC have the shoutcast stream listing services... which will be an issue without winamp. :-(

foobar is very lightweight and barebones, but it's also easily extensible

and heavily extensible. You can basically clone Winamp 2, 3 and 5 with it. The community is really strong, as well.

Its the mutt of media players (mutt as in the email client)

I have used it for all these years because it "just works". I have 2 needs in a music player - play whatever I have locally, and stream me something different when I want to. Winamp did both of those, and I never had an issue with it.

It is hard to "surpass" something that meets my needs perfectly and has given me no issues for over 10 years.

The main reason I use Winamp is because it has global keyboard shortcuts for controlling playback. I'm not sure if any other media players have that, if anyone knows of one that does I would love to know.

try foobar

TheSOB88, you are dead, my friend. Another casualty of a poor policy.

AHK (http://www.autohotkey.com/) -- Global keybindings for any app you want.

Wow I'd forgotten about AHK. Thanks for reminding me!

Out of curiosity: I use AHK to do basic testing automation for a windows application that I have literally zero ability to control programatically (to achieve actually good automated testing). Anyone have a better option for this kind of use case?

AutoIt is a popular choice:

http://www.autoitscript.com/

AHK is based on AutoIt v2.

I've used AHK for the same things - it's about the best free/open source thing I've found, besides just adding a scripting language to your program.

I wrote some software (http://www.mute.fm/) that controls playback for you automatically when you watch a video (it will pause/mute it and resume it afterward.) It also lets you set up global hotkeys.

foobar2000, Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Add/select appropriate entry and check "Global hotkey".

I have Ctrl-Pause bound to Play/Pause, Ctrl-PgUp to Previous and Ctrl-PgDn to Next.

NB if you have a media keyboard with the play/pause buttons etc then this is no necessary.

In my experience VLC eats a lot more CPU for just playing the same songs. While I like VLC for movie-files, Winamp is nicer when it comes to music.

Yeah, I used to use VLC for playing video files, but man it takes a lot of memory and when it decides to "cache fonts" (or something like that) it takes literally hours to start.

Now I prefer smplayer for videos and foobar for music. Although I've been a heavy Rdio user for some time.

VLC can do many neat things but you can you easily rate an MP3 file nowadays?

VLC can do many neat things, but I never, ever saw it as a replacement for Winamp. It's more like a toolkit, or at least the multi-tool you fall back on to do a variety of things.

Who rates MP3 files?

I don't have any demographic information to share. But I personally attempt to rate my files. It gives a nice way to categorize by quality. That way I can have abjectly terrible music in my collection, but filter it out for the purposes of not ever wanting to listen to it.

Because it really whips the llama's ass.

Ah, Wesley Willis...

Rock over London! Rock on Chicago!

Winamp was better than Burger King.

Why is this not the top comment?

Foobar is OK but because it tries to give so many power user options it can become a pain to do simple things like play list management.

My strategy is to install Columns UI (http://yuo.be/columns.php) and ignore the power options to the best of my ability. So far it's working.

I tried this, but it was never quite great. I'm very happy with Clementine which is cross-platform for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Because Winamp.

foobar still can't do sound level balancing (ReplayGain) properly. Does winamp?

What do you mean? FB2K has had excellent ReplayGain support for as long as I can remember.

I think it's just for good-old-day's memory. Just like Super Mario.

Try running obscure file formats, like chiptune. Winamp reliably supports all of these with a very low barrier to entry.

Try running less obscure (standard) file formats, like ogg/opus. Now you need to look for a plugin...

MilkDrop

> This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud

Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud. You can have a consistent music library and can use any player client-side. Personally I prefer the spotify "all-you-can-listen" model, but I have a bunch of MP3s that aren't on spotify that I seamlessly stream from dropbox (either to winamp or the spotify client, which allows you to sync local files).

>Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud.

Yes, but ideally, when it's your cloud. Just because all these major cloud players can just stop their service on their whim.

>all these major cloud player can just stop their service on their whim

If you are concerned with minimizing monetary loss rather than preserving working copies of your media [1] you can treat that as an argument for choosing a media provider that allows you to pay a monthly fee. If (when) their service gets discontinued you switch to another one; the only problem you would face is migrating your favorites, bookmark, playlists and the like [2].

[1] Which makes sense when the specific things you want to access (watch, listen to, read, play, etc.) are not rare and can be found elsewhere.

[2] Incidentally, this is something you could offer as SaaS. Edit: See http://resp.in/, http://www.getunify.com/, the FOSS project https://github.com/mauimauer/portify, etc.

If (when) their service gets discontinued you switch to another one; the only problem you would face is migrating your favorites, bookmark, playlists and the like [2].

I don't think this is a good strategy, you are putting yourself at the mercy of content license negotiations that are done by a bunch of idiots with their heads up their asses that you have absolutely no control over. There is no guarantee that the music you "rent" from one service will be available for you to "rent" on another service.

Thanks for reminding me to set up OwnCloud [1]. :)

[1] http://owncloud.org

I prefer Seafile, owncloud didn't work properly. As in, failed at syncing files.

Noted, I'll try that too. Thank you!

Server. Cloud. If it's your personal music it's not going to matter whether you have a cluster of servers or your single VPS with a service running on it. This cloud buzz is like ajax of 5 years ago. Can we use the terms 'online' and 'hosted' rather than this vague cloud buzzwordry? It's a plague upon tech sites and tech marketing.

I think they complement each other rather than directly compete with each other. I have all my files stored locally, but I also have them all uploaded to Google Music so I can listen to them on my phone. Even if Google Music shuts down, I have local copies.

This is the smart strategy. If you're that concerned about the hands you're putting your music in, then all or nothing isn't a good plan.

Instead, diversify and maintain. I use iTunes Match, Google Music and keep everything locally as well as a backup on my server. It all happens automatically when music is added to the local library. Nothing is lost, and redundant access is gained.

For those who are shaking their heads at the idea of their collection fitting on dropbox, or listening to single tracks of whatever is on Spotify, I recommend Subsonic. I stream my whole collection from my home connection to my phone.

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

There is so much lost when moving to the cloud.

Off the top of my head: You tie your data to one provider instead of simply physical media, you lose discoverability (will your kids browse your album choices 30 years from now?), exporting/importing quality is at the mercy of the provider (for example Amazon dropped several dozen mp3s when I migrated a few gigs to Google), and of course you place your data at the mercy of a business, (is any tech company eternal and/or always interested in providing cloud services?)

The cloud is way overdone, after giving a variety of services a go over the last few years, I'm actually pulling back.

That's why you run your own "cloud" music service. Personally I use Subsonic, and it is amazing.

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

Sounded really good until I got to the part about needing to pay a subscription fee.

We all need to eat.

But it seems those music listeners in this thread are the type that prefer a single up-front cost over a recurring subscription.

You don't need to. It's a freemium model - paying a subscription gets you some extra features, like apps for mobile.

You don't need to. Since subsonic is Open Source, there's naturally multiple forks with the licensing code removed. The best fork, which also adds features, is madsonic[0]. I recommend it. In addition, if you already have subsonic, the license code is simply a check if your password = the md5 of your email. So using "example@example.com" and "23463b99b62a72f26ed677cc556c44e8" will make it think you're a valid subscriber and give you all features.

[0]: http://www.madsonic.org/

> the license code is simply a check if your password = the md5 of your email

That used to be the case, but the newer versions actually phone home and verify the license.

Thanks for the information. It was true the last time I used subsonic, but that isn't all that recently. Still, I have no doubt it wouldn't be hard to remove it from the code.

echo "127.0.0.1 subsonic.org" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Sorry but the front of that page made me throw up a bit in my mouth and just close it back down again...

I like how they used a massive picture and then scaled it down in the IMG tag instead of just resizing the picture and putting it on the page. Very entertaining...!

It's ONE DOLLAR per month. ONE DOLLAR! And it's only if you want the extra features. Would you rather have ads be inserted between your songs or something? The development of the app needs to be paid for one way or the other.

One dollar is too much for something that was a solved problem (media sync).

How is that a solved problem?

How is it not?

Plug shit into PC, two way sync. WinPhone and iOS do this fine.

Ah yes, the old "sync 600GB of MP3s onto a 32GB device" trick.

Which has to be reason #2 or #3 why I hate iTunes with passion.

Yes because you really need 600GB of mp3s which on the back of an envelope calculation is over 1000 days of listening for 8 hours a day at a reasonable bitrate with no repeats...

I'm sure, at amazon prices which is a fair approximation including CDs, you didn't spend $100,000 on them either.

This is really not a problem. Well it is but only greed created it.

You don't understand: All music must be in FLAC because MP3/AAC/WMP just "doesn't sound right".

You miss the point. The idea is not to be able to listen to all music, but any music from one's collection.

Putting this down to greed? What an incredibly short sighted, ignorant thing to say. Perhaps we should have stopped at black & white feature phones because only greed could mean we wanted to access the whole internet on the move?

It isn't a "solved problem" because there are still issues with the solution.

I just copy it all over the internet. I can't countenance making multiple trips with a usb key, or even worse lugging around an external hard drive.

I also use subsonic and love it. It's unfortunate that the author moved to a monthly/yearly subscription model. Luckily, I am grandfathered into a lifetime premium membership with a free dynamic DNS address, which is really nice.

Or you can use Supersonic or Madsonic, which are forks without the "forced donation for open source software" problem.

i liked http://www.pancake.org/zina too...

I used to run Subsonic, now I'm loving http://plexapp.com and the (paid) iOS app.

I'm also an Rdio and Netflix subscriber, but running Plex on my server allows me to 'roll my own Netflix' and stream movies and music to my iPad or other computers, or even from my server to any computer in the web browser. I'm happy.

so, all that gets you is a interface and some search?

i just have an apache serving all my videos and a bookmark on any device browser. click and play. for android i use mx player.

Plex is the only solution that I have found that seamlessly plays video on my flatscreen through my mobile with the content being served from my laptop.

Before you ask - yes I used to be running xbmc, minidlna, etc. previously. No, they are nowhere as good (actually, to rephrase, the client-server model is not xbmc's focus, which is completely wrong IMHO).

So you can set up apache to host movies on a home network, then stream them with VLC? That sounds like a fantastic solution. Is there a solution for playing music this way on something resembling a stereo that supports playlists?

Man, I can't get Plex to run. It looks so excellent but whenever I try and play anything I get "Media player error! Resetting" and then nothing happens.

Edit: Rebooted phone and it works now. Holy shit this is cool, and I can even share my media library with friends!

MPD ftw

From the site: Based on Java technology

Ugh.. lost me. I don't run Java anything anymore.

Thanks for the worthless comment!

I think he has a tiny point actually: I saw a number of people around me removing Java (or not installing it on new computers) after the numerous vulnerabilities reported recently. Just a data point but well - I wonder if this could affect sales of java-based product etc.

This is why. The never ending stream of security issues. The installer hijacking my browser search bar. The never ending nags about new versions, which hijack my browser all over again. It's just not worth it. I have removed Java from all my computers and will never install it again.

I fully realize many web sites and services are implemented in Java, that's not what I was talking about. I will not install or run anything that needs Java. Period.

You can run Java applications and secure them from the web. Just disable Java applets from your browser (most have an option in the browser itself; those that don't will have extensions to do the same - like you would to block Flash plugins)

Just don't install a java plugin for the browser. Simple.

I've never ever had this problem, but I also run OpenJDK, so...

Well then, I guess you're going to miss out on some great technology for a pretty dumb reason.

Java may not be amazing, but it's hardly "so bad I literally won't ever use it."

not really... there are better alternatives that don't use java.

I hear a lot of people claim that, but the reality is that many people run applications they don't realize are Java, and a lot of the infrastructure you rely on runs Java behind it.

As a JavaEE architect/developer, I whole-heartedly agree that you shouldn't run Applets in your browser anymore. In fact, unsigned applets will no longer run after January of 2014, which will break a lot of the banking infrastructure and a couple important client applications at my day job.

This isn't even a java applet. It's java server side code. There is absolutely no reason for the former poster to boycott this aside from ignorant pig-headedness (and this is coming from someone who isn't exactly a fan of java himself)

what is that?

right, you don't run Java. Java is everywhere so unless you live in the jungle I'm quite sure you use it everyday.

One can very easily not run any desktop Java apps, and not run any applets. That's what he meant, and that's what matters.

Who cares if he still uses some website that is build on servlets server side, or if his tv/car/fridge has a Java running CPU? That's totally besides the point.

Java is not "everywhere". In fact it's getting nowhere fast (including it's use on microcontrollers and devices). The only exception is server side, where it's also not what it used to be these days...

Java may be going nowhere fast as a language, but the JVM isn't going away anytime soon.

If you combine Scala, Clojure and Groovy, you still don't have enough momentum on the scape of what Java had or even Python.

Scala is more popular now than Python was at the same age, and it is used for much more serious stuff than currently Python is.

Do you happen to have a source for this (genuinely interested) :)

What does "serious" mean in this context? Is it another way of saying high load? Enterprise? Is scientific computing serious? How can you say that one platform is used for "much more serious stuff" when you almost certainly have no idea what 99.9% of all python (or Scala) installations are being used for.

Serious question: why?

Well, I wouldn't let Java stop me from using something, but to play devil's advocate :

"Because I have a resource limited platform in which I cannot handle many dependencies."

Subsonic on a Cubieboard is a dreary task.

That sounds reasonable enough, but doesn't really explain the statement "I don't run Java anything anymore."

Limited resource platforms can run java just fine - but large software with many dependencies, sure, that's a valid concern.

You're really missing out. Subsonic is amazing. You should at least look at it a little bit.

Also there's Ampache.

https://github.com/ampache/ampache

https://web.archive.org/web/20130302160313/http://ampache.or...

https://web.archive.org/web/20130306044144/http://ampache.or...

Within the last year the project ditched their website in favor of just using github. However, strangely they didn't migrate any the content from their website to it.

you're only making the case for improvements to cloud data providers, not making the case that physical media is still worth using.

physical media has enormous problems for anything besides long term archival use.

"physical media has enormous problems for anything besides long term archival use"

for those of us that consider music as art that is precisely the point, especially re: children browsing their parents collections

I glad my music collection was on physical media when tornadoes knocked power out to just about the entire county. I had something to cure the boredom besides drinking and rioting! (Well, once the weather stopped trying to kill us all.)

I'm also glad my music is on physical media every time I don't have to pay insane rates for a couple hours of wifi on a flight just to listen to my music, or when I'm killing time somewhere where cell service is spotty at best.

I don't yet live in the future where access to the cloud is a given, and I prefer my devices don't become completely useless without a data connection.

Edit: My primary physical media isn't a pile of CDs—I have plenty of those too, but stopped carrying them the moment I got an MP3 player. Now I carry almost my entire collection on my phone and a whole lot more than that on my laptop. I see nothing wrong with having copies of things in the cloud (remote backup FTW), but I'm not about to take a shotgun to my local disks.

You can check out our personal cloud software Tonido (http://www.tonido.com). It organizes all your music, video collection and makes it available from anywhere. We have very good mobile apps for iOS, Android and even for Windows 8. You don't need to take our word. Just check the app ratings and reviews in app stores.

Tonido sucks. Nothing but issues and problems with it and support is non-existent. Stay away!

you just created an account to say this :). Looks like we are getting popular. Please check our forum, our community and make an informed decision.

@team tonido: just tried the newer v4.* version and it totally rocks, like 10x better than previous one, good jobs !

I wanted a free TonidoPlug but no one read my mind and sent it to me for free, so they're just awful.

you don't even need tonidoplug for it. If you have an old PC or Linux box and you can mount your NAS containing your music, you can just install the free version of Tonido Desktop and stream all of it.

i agree. however i wouldn't worry about your kids wanting to browse your music choices

That's such a tired cliché. Plenty of us share some music tastes with our parents.

I use ownCloud[1] . A bit of a hassle to install, and not as streamlined as e.g. Dropbox to use, but well worth it if you wish to have your own, free and open source cloud solution.

[1]: http://owncloud.org

Try Mopidy [1], it's a version of mpd that plays all your music - local files, Spotify, Soundcloud, Rdio, etc. It's awesome.

[1]: http://www.mopidy.com/

Agree. I'm doing the same with everything related to "the cloud". The current international political climate doesn't support this model.

Also with music, I point blank refuse to let music turn into a subscription based service. I still buy CDs when something agrees with my ears and listen to them.

I also quite happily transcribe things to sheet music and play it breaking many a royalty and public performance law. Fuck 'em.

Hurray for the CD purchasers! I thought I was the only one left doing this! I too cannot abide a cloud based service for listening to music. I understand the merits of Google's music service but given the fleeting nature of cloud based services, I would rather have a physical copy of something that I can rerip if necessary (and look at the sleeve notes). Having to download music over my limited mobile connection whilst out and about doesn't sound like fun, particularly when the cost of an iPod Classic (with sufficient storage for all of my music, unlike the Touch) is negligible, and the dodgy nature of coverage in hilly areas in the UK. I am chuffed that CD buyers still exist!

I live in London and coverage here is pretty bad at times. My phone barely manages GPRS at times.

There are plenty of us CD buyers left :). We're just not as noisy.

All my iTunes Match content came from my computer, can be copied to my computer, and can be backed up independently.

There's no reason that The Cloud and Owning Your Files has to be a binary choice. The Cloud can be a great compliment to your local file storage, rather than a replacement for it.

Another example: store your music in Dropbox, which clones it to all your devices (where applicable), and then use Tunebox (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tunebox-dropbox-music-player...) as your frontend. Now you have a 'cloud' music service where you control the content, someone else handles the distribution, and everything is cloned locally on all your machines (for your other players to use). Then you can trivially back up your music files from Dropbox to a local backup (or a third-party backup service if all you want is some form of company-independent redundancy.

Or you could use the new free webapp I just launched (shameless plug) http://Streamboxr.com - responsive webapp that can play your dropbox music on any device.... no install needed, free.

Cool idea!

All my iTunes Match content came/comes from CDs. I still buy physical media from Amazon when it makes sense (most of the time).

Put your data in more than one cloud and keep a local backup.

Isn't this true of data in general. Not just specific to music. It's unfortunate that Amazon dropped some mp3s but that is more of an exception than the norm right ? If we are talking about data integrity, there are several ways in which this can be mitigated. I think it's worthwhile to have all your music stored in a location that is accessible from anywhere and from any player

No thanks to the cloud regarding my music. Even though I use the crap out of Google Music, it sucks at keeping track of diffs between locally and the cloud. I change album art and other metadata all the time. Real pain in the pass. And then there's always the case of where one won't have Internet access, especially when driving.

Can we just say online instead of 'the cloud'? That's what you mean, does it matter if it's only a single server or a virtualized XEN cluster? No.

> Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud

Since when? For start it drains battery much faster. Oh and you know, it does not work offline!

Plenty of cloud/online music services allow you to cache music offline to avoid those problems.

So to copy album into phone I have to upload to web, than download it to phone? I could also use USB 1.0 or serial port with similar speed.

Until network will be more reliable and faster than my hdd, there is not much to discus.

What's the USB speed when you're three miles from home?

20 MB/s, my phone has USB Host :-)

I strongly agree with this comment. I still wish there is an easy solution for hosting all my music in different original format without a high cost, but also playable through a cloud player. Music is something that I need it constantly but don't really mind if it is lost in a few years. I used to run Subsonic on beagleboard but it barely keeps up with converting flac to mp3 at stream time. I am looking at http://meetlima.com/ but I don't think that is what I want. iTune integration will become a huge issue unless it pops up as a Shared music.

I'm somewhere in between. I stream my music from a server that I own and control. Virtually unlimited storage + full control of the data = :)

No reason to use a proprietary music player.

One would be to play music.

Every music player is proprietary somewhere be it codec, physical IC, transistor technology, speakers, headphones.

Software is a teeny little bit of the whole thing.

And because some piece of the stack is proprietary means I shouldn't try use non-proprietary software where I can and it makes sense?

Software, while a "teeny little bit", is often the bit I find lacking and needing change.

Apparently VLC does the shoutcast stuff now if you download a pls file from shoutcast.com and feed it to VLC.

If you're a linux user then 'audacious' is a good/similar replacement to winamp IMHO.

I switched to using quodlibet some time ago. Can't remember why (simplicity, the right views, stuff) but now everything else seems sucky.

deadbeef is a very nice lesser-known linux music player that's heavily influenced by foobar2000. quodlibet is probably my second favourite, but it's written in python, so it can be a bit slow/heavy on resources at times. banshee is great for large libraries and as an iTunes replacement.

I switched to quodlibet for the fast indexing and searching of large libraries. I'm sure other media library managers do that too, but it seems to be very nice in quod.

You can install Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) in your desktop and listen to your music from anywhere (iOS, Android, Windows 8). Your data, music and app is all local to system but still can access from anywhere as cloud.

This is part of why I prefer cloud services like Dropbox that also maintain local copies and simply use the cloud for syncing and backups. Best of both worlds, that way.

I also recently switched back to Winamp. It just works and it's easy to control.

There's also a plugin called Chipamp which ensures you have all the latest plugins required to play video game music files (nsf, rsn, usf, psf, etc.). This is the best PC tool for listening to video game music.

At least with winamp, there weren't really any major changes since Justin Frankel left, and what made it amazing back then is still in the program now.

Foobar2000 is also pretty stable and awesome -- just need to drop in the Facets component & it's a dream. Winamp is a nice memory from back in the Napster days tho. :)

I've heard some good things about it. I'll give it a try. Winamp is timeless because it's so simple and powerful. I loved the play next queue. If I felt like a few songs I could throw them on the temporary queue without interrupting what was going on. Great for playing music for others too.

foobar has similar features its just confusing at first cuz it puts playlists in tabs. super powerful but takes some getting used to. facets is the necessary add-on because it basically gives you a really powerful search whereas by default there is... none.

the other component i use is the ipod manager i forget what its called but you can find it easily. it lets you add/delete songs pretty easily & if you use flac/wav/whatever it can even convert to mp3 on the fly if you set up the encoder right. that way you can keep lossless on comp but have mp3 on ipod without making an mp3 directory

Thank you - I always looked down to Foobar2000 (it looked to basic for). But now I've downloaded it and it looks great !

Thank you for the tip. The facet plugin is great - exactly what I wanted.

VLC?

No kidding. I used to use it all the time, and I just re-downloaded about a week ago as my player of choice, especially since it's capable of playing FLACs (looking at you, WMP).

you should check out subsonic

http://subsonic.org/

I like the isub app for iphone, but there are android apps too: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/apps.jsp

I find subsonic works best with a friend or two participating. A miniature music club if you will.

If you already have a large library, you can use beets to organize it in a separate database (this is our current project) http://beets.radbox.org/

As Linux user forced to use OSX at work I've settled on VOX [http://coppertino.com/vox/] as suitable player for OSX.

Vox is nice but completely useless to me until it gets gapless playback.

Never noticed that. Bit of an omission on their part.

AIMP is Winamp's successor.

Wow, the end of an era.

Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.

I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while. But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.

Nothing will ever beat the joys of finding new "skins" for the Winamp player -- I had so many amazing ones lined up, and loved nothing more than switching them all out.

Sad to see it go...

IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA'S ASS

I had even created a few skins back then. The CDs that came with computer magazines were a great source of new skins.

I still do that fairly often. Audacious can load Winamp skins. Sometimes its interface borks on my collection (35,000+ songs), but it's responsive enough.

My desktop still looks very much like it did in the 1990s...

Cool! I've used the Sumea skin for about 15 years and I'd like to keep it, so I'm glad that I can use it with other music players.

Those were the days!

End of an era. Sad day.

> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.

Foobar 2k works very, very well.

Seconded, f2k works very well for super large complicated music collections. Prob not as easy to setup as winamp but you can more with f2k. Way more.

I like the ability to play archives of music files (zip,...) which are then uncompressed on-the-fly .

Searching and filtering works like a charm as well.

> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.

I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a player as winamp was but it did manage the library / tagging bits quite well. It seems to still be active so may be worth a look.

For a multiplatform solution, I used a MusicBrainz Picard client for batch autoidentification and ID3 correction. However currently I feel that I wasted too many hours of my life hoarding and caring for a local mp3/soulseek library and nowadays only listen to online music.

MediaMonkey [1] is awesome to find something. It's mainly a music organizer that just happens to be able to play music but it works great even with scattered single mp3 files. Autoplaylists [2], scriptable and extensive search options. Been using it for over 6 years now and never looked back :)

[1] http://www.mediamonkey.com

[2] Autoplaylists are only available for the Gold version.

Media Monkey was quite useful in adding mp3 tags the way I wanted and organizing the entire library.

+1 for MediaMonkey, been using it for 5+ years.

I definitely recommend MediaMonkey Gold. It will keep your library organized, but however you want it, with no hassle at all. And if you're insane like me and keep a flac library, you can keep an mp3 mirror for your mp3 player/phone.

And you can switch between space used and time/processing power needed. Instead of keeping mirrors you could tell it to convert the files (depending on what you connected) on the fly into whatever format you want.

As others have said, foobar2000 for the minimalist, free approach with lots of configuration options, or MediaMonkey for a really good bit of paid software. The paid version of MM syncs perfectly well with iDevices and pretty much anything else too. Highly recommended. Also it doesn't force you into any particular directory structure in your music library so it'll take what you give it.

I recently fixed the id3 tags of all the mp3 music I own using MusicBrainz picard. Very useful software that uses a global database of music signatures.

As others have said, we still has AIMP [aimp.ru]. They're clearly losing on not having a good English website.

There are ultimately two types of people in the comments right now: those that will miss Winamp and those laughing it was still around.

Winamp worked. It played all your MP3s without any of the other fluff. It played your music in a very lightweight program. What was also nice was this was before every program auto-updated; so you'd manually have to go update it; except, the newer versions were adding features, not fixing bugs. If you thought Winamp was fine, there was never a need to upgrade. I remember never upgrading Winamp until way into my college years.

People have mentioned it, but I didn't change to foobar because I always used Winamp. Even when they made the modern UI, you could (and can) still go Classic. Computer space and performance weren't issues because the extra bells and whistles are easy to never use.

Only a few weeks ago did I make the move from Winamp to foobar; and it was only to see the difference. Initial thoughts are I don't like how it displays my music; but I do like the shuffle since its playing songs I never hear.

It was really long ago when Winamp was still lightweight :)

The Lite version is still lightweight.

I recently updated Winamp to 6.65, and it removed the ‘play tracks similar to …’ feature. That is the only difference I noticed.

It worked for playing MP3s, but once you had a collection of a certain size it didn't do a very good job of managing that collection, at least at the time I stopped using it. You'd double-click an MP3 or a playlist and it would completely forget about everything that was in there before. I got so sick of that.

You can change that with a setting in the preferences.

Ain't that always the way.

I won't lie, this was probably the only annoyance I had with Winamp; however, years ago, I just decided Winamp was the 'everything' playlist on shuffle and if I ever had a hankering for a specific song, I'd use VLC. If I ever accidentally did it in Winamp, it was just a simple 'Add Folder' click away. I still feel that issue wasn't a complete deal breaker though. Everything else ran swimmingly.

It's been almost 10 years since I've used a new version of Winamp, but I really have to disagree with you about performance. When they started adding features it immediately started to suck performance wise. Had to go back to v2.whatever because of it. At the time I was on a top of the line or near top of the line Northwood system. v5 was a little better than v3, but it was full of ads at every corner if I remember correctly.

I used both, but in the end I just stick with Winamp because all I really care about is listening to music. It's really no big deal for me to find a playlist with Everything (or even just navigate there with Windows Explorer) and double click it. I suppose Winamp just fits in better with my workflow.

Thank you Justin Frankel for this wonderfully whimsical piece of software and all the code you have shared over the years. I wouldn't have been a programmer if it weren't for you being providing such a stellar role model.

Amen! Winamp was not only whimsical, but also one of the first widely adopted catalysts to the rise of the digital economy.

And I bet many people don't even know that after Winamp Justin Frenkel started making his hands dirty with digital audio workstation coding and made a fantastic one! http://www.reaper.fm/ with a unbelievable set of features for 4 Mb (yessir!) and super competitive licensing options (but you can still try the full software free with no limitations whatsoever!). If you make music with your Pc or Mac this will shock you on many levels, starting from filesize! This guy knows what he's doing! Thanks Justin! If winamp code will be made public there will be a lot to learn!

Wow, i learned Reaper as part of a coursera course on Earsketch of Georgia Tech. I would never have guessed reaper was connected to winamp this way. Reaper is indeed a non-bs daw, among so many great ones....

I used Winamp for years, and have used Reaper for years and didn't realize they were connected. Makes perfect sense now that I think about it. Thanks for pointing that out.

love this bit from http://www.reaper.fm/purchase.php:

Honest Business Model We offer a good product at a fair price.

We don't spend money and effort on marketing, complicated piracy protection, or other things that do not directly improve REAPER and the user experience.

We think the good will generated by playing fair and being responsive to users is more valuable to our business than short-term profits.

Reaper is a fantastic piece of software!

Some insights from him: http://bigthink.com/users/justinfrankel

Dmitry Boldyrev's take on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773648

People laugh at me for still using winamp but I love it. It's fast, low memory, never crashes and the ui hasn't significantly changed for well over a decade.

More than that, it's one of the few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens when I was first getting seriously involved with computers.

Its death sort of marks an end of an era for me :'(

> few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens

Same here :(. I pirated it for so many years and it was the first license that I purchased after being able to afford it (after getting a job).

I would really like to know why :(. Winamp is one of the very few companies that I feel deserves many more pennies than they asked for.

Same here.

Well this really sucks the llama's ....

Thanks for all the skins and memories!

llama's aass! :) had to be said the right way!

I remember as a teen talking to the developers on IRC, in one of the Windows development channels. I remember thinking they were crazy because they didn't want to use the standard Windows components to do the UI. I also remember wondering why anyone bother spending a half hour downloading 1 song over a 56k modem when you could just set your Sony Discman on top of your computer!

Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and effort into a project.

Do you have any similar experiences like this with other teams or products?

I always used Winamp on Windows, so when I switched to Linux I tried basically every single open-source alternative that worked with my workflow: Per-song ratings, a nested Genre/Artist/Album/Song library browser, global hotkeys, able to handle a collection of >100 GB and a useful playlist/queue system.

For anyone else looking for the same thing: the one that I ended up choosing was http://gmusicbrowser.org/. See http://gmusicbrowser.org/screenshots/ListsLibraryContext.png.

I'll throw in my two cents for Audacious, see: http://audacious-dvb.sourceforge.net/screenshot.png

It probably lacks some of the advanced stuff you would want, but I use it as I still do with Winamp: setup keyboard hotkeys to execute audacious -[rft] (skip around in songs from any app), load a folder (or folders) of songs and play them. Throw on ProjectM and you have a poor man's substitute for Milkdrop. And there's Shoutcast support as well.

The UI runs in skinned mode (pictured above) or in a more traditional mode that doesn't look out of place on your desktop.

I did the same thing, ended up with cmus: http://cmus.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for that suggestion. Looking at its documentation, it seems that it does not support rating songs. Is that correct?

I use cmus too. For those who don't know it is a command line music player with a VIM-like command line interface ("/" to search, ":set x=x" to set various options).

MPD is pretty popular too http://www.musicpd.org/ It has a client/server model and you can create your own music streaming service by controlling it remotely and streaming back over http. ncmpc/ncmpcpp is a client for mpd that resembles cmus quite a lot.

mpd with ncmpc has brought my music very close to me - just a couple of keystrokes away.

Regarding Winamp, I've always loved it's tagline "Winamp kicks the llama's ass" (or was it butt?).

This seems like a good time to plug my latest open source project: libgroove [1]

It's a cross-platform music player backend C library. It's meant to be generic enough to be the backend of any music player.

I use it as the backend for Groove Basin [2] which just might hit milestone 1.0.0 around December 20.

[1]: https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove [2]: https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin

Groove Basin looks amazing!

Nice interface, but what does groovebasin offer that mpd doesn't?

I'll just name one: perfect replaygain. Meaning it uses the same code to decode and play audio as it does to scan and detect loudness. MPD does no replaygain scanning and only understands APEv2 tags. You have to manage replaygain scanning yourself, and if you have audio that does not support APEv2 tags you're shit out of luck. Groove Basin on the other hand does lazy multi-core replaygain scanning and everything it can play (which is everything that libav can decode (in other words anything that VLC can play)) it can scan. So you never run into that situation where you are listening to a quiet song, turn the volume up, and then a loud song blasts your ears off.

There are a bunch of other flaws in MPD's design which I've carefully fixed in the design of libgroove/groovebasin. I know because Groove Basin used to be an MPD client until I got stuck by all of the issues and then finally ripped out MPD and wrote my own backend to use instead.

I have a WIP blog article that goes into more detail about this stuff. This Winamp article might just be the kick in the pants I need to get it finished :)

Ars had a really nice article about the history of Winamp and of what went wrong: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-...

I think what "went wrong" can be summed up in a sentence. The player was never built to be a publishing platform or had any other monetization angle built into it.

As soon as it started getting features that would support this, the technical audience saw it coming a mile away and never adopted the required usage patterns needed to leverage such a monetization strategy. And not just because they wanted to avoid paying for music, but because the service model is just a pain in the ass compared to the self-service model.

"It could have been Pandora" ignores the fact that Pandora basically sucks and people just tolerate it. People want to be in control of their software despite what the business fucks running "IT" think now, conceptualizing a "service" where none is needed, trying to pull infinite profit from such trivial functions such as routing packets correctly or parsing compressed audio and routing it through hardware to a speaker without pointless and pathetic DRM algorithms trying to detect time-skewed copyright audio.. sigh. by setting the bar so low that people think that shitfuck-suck software is what you have to put up with unless you have "long term support" or other wedges into your conceptual/computational sovereignty to do something as simple as publish a document and expect it to be readable on another computer in 10 years, a problem that was solved 200 years ago is now the cutting edge of business technology and development, fueling well known multinationals such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Computing never was meant to be a platform for economic revolution, it just abstracts away paper work. You still have the exact same problems as with the internet as without it. I won't say the internet bubble is over until the world is actually simpler with computers instead of way, way more complicated and outright retarded in many aspects.

NO, WINAMP DIDN'T FAIL, in contrary, economic motivations failed to make Winamp suck, failed to steal a public resource and public work. Failed to co-opt the direction and passion of artists. AOL failed to capitalize on selfless engineering that actually solved a problem the correct way, it failed to corrupt the best solution with advertising indicators and economic feedback loops built into a market, shoehorned into an audio player. It failed to take us back instead of forward, like technology is supposed to.

I think the clearest indicator that WINAMP is a success, is the fact that XMMS exists, the fact that people use version 2.x without AOL's "support", 10+ years since release. It's a simple idea: a media player that supports plugins via a standardized API. (a real standard, not a "living standard" business-oxymoron) People still use it, for business and personal usage, and it doesn't tax them to do it, any more than a screwdriver taxes you, but not like the way a "service" taxes you.

Also this: http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/

Please open source it. It is still best player around with classic skin.

My thoughts exactly. It would be great if they would open-source the code.

After this many years.. I'd be really interested to see how clean/mangled the code is

I'm another long-time winamp user. I got stuck on 2.91, never needed to update since it worked perfectly. The biggest reason why I never switched to another player (aside from all of them having zero features that interested me) is that the plugin system was extremely easy to use and had a community of devoted developers. I can reproduce like 20 or so different formats that the "naked" winamp cannot (mostly console chiptunes, like .vgm, .spc or .psf). I know that other players support those plugins, but for me, there's simply no need to switch. There's nothing I miss.

I strongly associate winamp with the early days of P2P, when I was just a teen and got fascinated by the possibility of, at last, getting (at 5k/s; way better than nothing) all those songs from a foreign music TV channel that never played in the local radios... and using Winamp to play them. But it's not just nostalgia: what makes Winamp such a great piece of software is that I still use it every day and it doesn't show its age.

There was something magical about spending forever downloading an MP3 with a modem, then playing it at 22kHZ because computer was not fast enough to run Winamp at full quality :-)

Now I have every song I could possibly want to listen to in Spotify, which is magical in another way.

Is it only me, or there is some JS <script> tag in winamp's <title>?

Nope, I see it too. Some ad code from what I can see.

yup, my browser is displaying getting fragments of html at the top of the rendered page.

I noticed that the first thing too. Well, early signs of the website completely shutting off ... sigh ...

Its a A(W)OL failed code.

Nostalgia. I remember the good old days just a decade ago when we would download any song we want (courtesy napster/kazaa) and the default music player would be: yep Winamp hands down. Keyboard shortcuts were so convenient. It just seems like we have headed in the wrong direction with how music is managed on our computers/devices etc. Not to mention the beautiful skins that we could apply for funkiness. RIP winamp and you will be missed.

Too bad, I liked their Android player as well. One of the few pieces of software I have used continuously for... oi... longer than I care to admit. Makes me sad.

Android user here too. I remember just a year ago I tried a dozen apps for ShoutCast playing and it was the best. Sad to see it go. Used it a lot back on Windows back in the day when that was my OS as well. Was one of the few players with lots of high quality skins, including large size ones, and game pad controls, great for parties.

I still use Winamp as my main musicplayer - it's customizable, import/exports to iPod easily, doesn't spam me with updates, doesn't force me to buy things through it, reads basically every format and above all it is really light.

It's a shame - seems like it died because it doesn't have a content purchasing mechanism forced on the user.

This is a sad day in computer history. Winamp was my first default music player and first true love of a computer program. It was in the end of the 1990s and ICQ ruled internet chatting and mp3s was new thing.

I used Winamp everyday. We shared music from dorm to dorm on the campus network. Everyone had Winamp. Parties had a dedicated Winamp computer with all the playlists with music available from the campus network.

We searched the net with Phoenix (now called Firefox) or Opera to find all the album art work. We installed beautiful Winamp skins and was amazed at audio 3d-visualization plugins that Winamp offered.

Winamp was early on handling multiple audio cards. I had dual audio cards, one just for Winamp connected to my HiFi equipment and the other for the rest of the Windows sounds connected to the computer table speakers.

Early with global hotkey support. Plugins that showed GUI popups of the music playing. Fraunhofer codec support. And it was super fast.

And I still remember the uproar when Winamp 3 was released. True fanboys stayed with the Winamp 2 release for many years, the classic.

Sad this has to end, but Winamp never successfully adopted to a world with full fledged media library players like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Back in the day we used Windows Explorer (or Norton Commander) to cataloged all our music and soon a community based naming standard convention of music was "created" by mutual agreement.

And then came music streaming.

Bye Winamp!

// A pro license owner

I guess the Llama's ass now gets a break.

Rumour has it that PETA forced the shutdown.

Why is this the title of the page?

Is the title an Ad?

I'll hazard a guess that they have some dreadful ad platform that greps keywords on the site and replaces them with a mouseover popup ad.

I hate AOL. They buy things and shut it down without much thought. I still remember Goowy, a flash based desktop and OS with the early concept of having Apps. Imagine if it were still there, you would have flash-based tablet.

But there is one victory from AOL, the spinoff off Mozilla. You would think they could do the same with Winamp

"It really whips the lama's ass" What an era.

Winamp's goodbye might go in a similar fashion to Sonique's. Slowly and quietly. Sonique was a music player that was bought for about $20 million by Lycos (back in the dot com bubble days) and then shut down after it plateau'd in development and execs realized "dude, it's just a media player". It had a huge community (but no where near as big as Winamp's) and literally a TON (hundreds and hundreds of pages) of really amazing skins and visualization plugins. The site was shut down without much notice.

You can still download the lastest stable versions of Sonique on a fan site and it'll still work. I have a feeling that's how Winamp will be. Unless the developers release the source code.

The magic moment was when we all realized, pretty much simultaneously, that CDs and radio were obsolete. And this wasn't from some iterative Moore's Law like growth in hard drive size, it was sudden algorithmic brilliance that allowed music to be compressed small enough to be easily downloaded and shared. Suddenly digital distribution seemed inevitable and obvious. We could listen to whole collections of songs very, very fast. Old bands became popular, and we would sit around for hours playing song after amazing song for our friends. Winamp was the app that made it possible. The skins let us change its look to fit us better, and its music visualizations were an awesome backdrop for parties. A great app and a great time.

We live in the future.

"And this wasn't from some iterative Moore's Law"

It was WRT CPU power. I remember having to use some specially compiled for 486 player to just barely be able to play mp3s. Before that on my 386-40 I was below real time.

I'm pretty sure this is what I was using:

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/mpg123-oss-i486

This was the days long before P2P, using binaries usenet groups. Or ripping songs yourself, which took quite a long time indeed (like 10 or 15 minutes per song?)

Haha ah yes, I remember being amazed by a friend who could convert WAVs to MP3s faster than ripping the CD to WAV. Good times. I remember a base Pentium 90 laptop struggling to play MP3s in Winamp, not massively high bitrate either. I could just about play MP3s on a 486 DX2 66Mhz (and discovered MODs etc. at that time too - smaller to download, using floppy disk and a school's internet access). I was amazed with Grip and its ability to rip and convert straight to MP3s, but it took forever. Good times using RH 6.2.

Show me one product/service/platform that got acquired by AOL and got better/bigger at there.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

I'd say Mozilla/Firefox somewhat counts. They acquired Netscape around 1998, and although they eventually ran Netscape itself into the ground AOL-style, they allowed the devs to work on Mozilla for quite some time. Long enough so they could create what would become the foundation of Firefox (Gecko and XUL, most notably).

Mirabilis, with ICQ? I don't remember when it peaked but it certainly was huge. I was using it heavily around 2000-2003.

Makes you wonder why they cannot open source the code instead of completely killing it.

Probably because the codebase stinks and releasing it would end up in multiple vulnerability discoveries.

... which would presumably be patched, if it were embraced by the open-source community.

That's fine and all that but it takes time for the new inevitable forks to stabilise and some people will never switch.

I would have love for it to go open source maybe at that point Linux would have more visual music

As @thinkpad20 said. I bet there are a lot of people that would fix things, provided it is not systemic design errors that would require global refactoring.

The original developers all departed in 2003/2004, winamp has been maintained / extended by whomever AOL could find to work on it for about a decade now. That doesn't bode terribly well for the current state of the code base.

How would the vulnerability discovery work? Is the current code encrypted so that it can't be viewed?

My understanding of the process is that code is written in a language that must be compiled. After it is compiled, it is then "packaged" into an installer file, whose internals cannot be examined. After it is installed, it then consists of a directory full of files which help run the program, but these can still not be examined.

Is it true that the code cannot be seen at all these stages? No way to reverse engineer it?

And by open sourcing, an experienced person could see ways to break the code by causing infinite loops, creating false helper files, using a fake "mp3" file, etc?

Vulnerabilities can still be discovered in the compiled code, but they are easier to discover in the source code. Simply running a static analyser on the code will probably point out numerous possible vulnerabilities already.

XMMP already exists.

Except it is mostly abandoned. It requires GTK1 and hasn't been updated since 2007.

Which might be an indication of the type of community involvement an open source version of winamp would see. Although I would love to see it try.

Aren't there several Winamp OS clones? I remember there being a few years ago but maybe everyone has moved on.

At least on Linux. The original was x11amp, which becamse XMMS. But there are much better options, especially if you want to go text mode. MOC (http://moc.daper.net/), or even mplayer if you just want simple playback. And of course, the original mpg123. Let's just say, open source music players are a solved problem.

Like most dead closed-source apps, probably licensing.

Winamp has pretty much been Adware since Nullsoft was bought by AOL. It takes time to get an old proprietary codebase into a state where it can be released publicly. It could contain poor written code, rude comments, adware, phoning home, GPL or patent violations, secret RIAA backdoors, etc.

gubatron, you've been banned for a year now.

I prefer Clementine, Amarok, and Rhythmbox. No point using a proprietary app when there's plenty of open-source apps which are just as good if not better...

As someone who adores Clementine, using it all the time, and as someone who has contributed patches (both bug and feature) to it, it isn't lean. My instance right now (running for over a week straight, playing music most of the time, I have around a dozen playlists open, and I have it auto download a half dozen podcasts) has 122M of resident memory usage, and 85 minutes of execution time on an i7 at 4.5ghz.

A really lean music player wouldn't use more than a dozen MB of resident memory (after whatever libraries need loaded, but since i run KDE Clementine isn't bearing the blunt of Qt loading) but Clementine intentionally caches a lot of information to make the UI lag less and make transitions seamless.

Oh this takes me back... I redesigned WinAmp's website back in 2004 or 3 for Odopod in San Francisco. The wonderful Andre Adreev assisted (he now running http://www.dresscodeny.com/ ).

Here are some comps for those interested... http://smokinggun.com/projects/winamp/index.php?id=0

Great work, that takes me back.

That's a shame. Winamp is still my music player of choice when I'm not using a streaming service. I've always appreciated the design that allows me to minimize it to a thin bar and leave it on top in a way that's unobtrusive. Has anyone else copied that design?

iTunes and Windows Media Player are both monstrosities, and while I appreciate VLC for playing video, I've never been inclined to use it as a music player.

Sad! It really whipped the Llama's ass! It is still my music player on PC. I have saved the installer.

Although I'm not using winamp any more, for at least 5 years now. This makes me really sad.

First Sonique, now this? At least we've still got foobar2000.

While I haven't used Winamp in years, this still makes me kind of sad. Justin Frankel & Co. really changed the game.

Relive the nostalgia through this Ars article that's not half bad:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-...

If there was ever an example of how to acquire a technology you don't know what to do with and then sit on it till it's dead, the Winamp story is it (and I guess Sonique as well).

Made a couple people rich (well deserved) at least.

Aaaaand here's a clone of the Skin / Plugin section from the winamp website: http://winamp.dpedu.io/

Skins are coming soon, they're still scraping :)

I use Winamp since version 2 when it was released in 1998 (I was 8) I think, my dad started using it and I still use it everyday, nothing can be compared to it, the simplicity of use it's just insuperable, it's the best music player out there and I'll continue using it. I tried AIMP, Foobar in Windows but the just don't... and in Linux the only thing comparable is Audacious but of course it lacks all the development that Winamp carries from all its years, it's a sad day, AOL was the worst thing that could happen to this great piece of software.

If anyone is looking for a replacement of Winamp, I highly recommend AIMP, I have been using it for about two years now.

http://www.aimp.ru/

sorry but AIMP UI design is worse than XMMP player 5 years ago!

I remember using Winamp back in the day. At one point in time, it was the only mp3 player out there that didn't absolutely suck. It was pretty amazing how usenet and winamp opened up a whole world of music you just couldn't buy anywhere at the time. Truly a leap forwards in distribution! It's too bad the music industry reacted with such paranoia that they arguably still haven't adequately monetized it.

A couple of years ago I used OSX for about 6 months. One of the more minor reasons I was relieved to uninstall it was that I never found a music player I really liked. Let's face it, iTunes is crap even on the OS it was meant for!

On Windows, look no further than Foobar2000. It's not a super-sexy looking player (although it can be if you put some work into it), but it is eminently functional. It does practically anything you can want (with extensions), has an easy to figure out but powerful interface, and is audiophile-grade. This lives on my HTPC, which interfaces with my stereo, so it's what I'm primarily used to. Love it! There's one extension (foo_httpcontrol) you can add that allows you to control your stereo from any networked device (there are a few android apps designed to work through this interface), which is handy for flipping through music while reading in your comfy chair or sitting on the porcelain throne!

On Linux, Amarok. Sexier apps come and are abandoned to become bug-infested swamps of suck, but Amarok has been going strong for a very long time. I often try newer music apps, but Amarok is the default on KDE for a reason.

I'm surprised you recommend Amarok as a foobar2k user. Amarok is closer to iTunes than it is foobar2k.

Linux users: look for Audacious or DeaDBeeF. They are the best Linux alternatives to foobar2k.

Even though I moved to another player on my desktop long ago, I still use it on my Android device. Sad that it's going away :(. They should definitely open source it.

How come Winamp is shutting down and Real Player still around !?!?

Notwithstanding that Real Player was quite popular in Asia, a few years ago, during the portable media player years.

I still use Winamp on every PC I own.. Even bought a license but i never bother to add it.

Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass! :-(

One of my favorite slogans ever.

Memories of napster/kazaa coming back from reading this. Best MP3 player. Fast, skinnable with ease, supported ID3 tags, one of the first with visualizations (cool feature but didn't use it much)

VLC is the same for me for video. Fast and plays almost all formats plus its open source. Winamp should have been open source to further its usage and development.

Thank you for the music, WinAmp.

Edit: Will this affect Shoutcast?

Doesn't look like it, but maybe?

http://www.shoutcast.com/

I hope not.. there's a ton of services out there relying on the Shoutcast directory.

I don't know about you guys, but I've this news just ended my teenage years =( I've used winamp to store my 2TB music collection for like 10 years. yeah back then to get 2TB from 120gb hdd's was something big, but anyway, even after dragging and dropping the whole 2TB directory into winamp, it processed track by track, without destroying my ram, and my CPU. I've had a zillions (Around 10gb, it's 1-2kb per song) of modular music from: atari, c64, nds, n64, sega, ps1,2,3 and etc and etc. All of these was supported by winamp plugins. This was working perfectly, sorted in my winamp by categories/genres and various other methods. I've been really enjoying this player for all my geeky life. And now it's going way =( They could at least release and opensource. That classical design is masterpiece, I don't know any player you can beat winamp's design, unless it's xmms player in linux, which is probably also dead for a long long time. Although I'm currently residing on OSX, and I'm using iTunes to sort all my stuff, it's still not so great as Winamp. All I need is proper music indexer, and all possible music format support. What could be better is having transcoding software together with this cute player, and I'd be happy till the end of my life lol. Now I have to use only ALAC instead of FLAC, and ofcourse mp3. For converter I'm using XLD, for video VLC or mplayerx, for converting videos Handbrake. C'mon Winamp was universal tool! I belive some plugins could provide transcoding.

LET'S CRAWL WINAMP SIDE AND SAVE A HISTORY OF GREAT SOFTWARE.

Lol i think this should be in computer museum or something =/

Winamp, I'll miss you so much, I know that "justin can't code it" sometimes, but I still love all your team, your product, your efforts, Thanks for being with us with our teenhood!!!

P.s and what about winamp shoutcast? this was only ultimate radio solution in the whole web!!

I wonder if this is a hoax/website hack? There's no mention of it anywhere else apart from this particular URL. No mention on Twitter, no talk of it in the forums etc. They only just updated the Winamp Android Client.

I doubt it, but the odd HTML in the title and lack of any other information makes me doubt it's authenticity.

No, it's official. DJ Egg has posted as much in the forums. Wow. RIP Winamp.

Winamp proved that offer sensible playlist management and multi-format support and you can't go wrong. I only wonder two things: why Winamp wasn't bagged by the big players earlier, and why the other players (i've only tried the free/freemium warez) still don't get it.

Before I knew the word “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse[1], still shows up on their site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish. It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would use.

Saddest to me, is that I can’t think of today’s equivalent, a widespread and useful app that encourages its users to tinker and easily modify the interface.

[1] http://www.winamp.com/skin/impulse/142212

Perhaps Tumblr to a certain degree? I've met some young front-end guys that cut their teeth making Tumblr themes. I suppose what you can modify with Tumblr Themes is more limited than winamp skins.

Anyone here old enough to remember Sonique? Back in the late 90's skinning your MP3 player was the bees knees. I remember having debates about Winamp plugins, flame wars about the direction of the software ... the good ol' days. iTune sucks.

My favorite winamp plugin was Punkie. it was a visualization that had seemingly endless randomness to it. and file was only 72K and it managed to look incredible on even the lowliest video cards and resolutions.

Huh. Has anyone offered AOL some cash for Winamp? it isn't like it'd be expensive to maintain, if AOL was willing to part with it for reasonable money.

Is there a reason why they'd want to shut down the company rather than selling it for cheap?

Ah, the good old days of winamp are coming to an end.

I'll miss the old days of 1999, using winamp to play my latest Napster "acquisitions".

For myself, I generally just use mplayer or music-on-console (moc) nowadays. It gets the job done with no fuss and no mess.

Brings up a great question: What are the alternatives to Winamp? (No iTunes please)

Tomahawk. http://www.tomahawk-player.org/

Foobar2k. http://www.foobar2000.org/

Thanks for the Tomahawk recommendation - it was very nearly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately it does not support the Mac Play/Pause/etc keys. I'm staggered that such an otherwise well put together application lacks such basic functionality.

Support for this was added a couple years ago: https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk/commit/5cd9e4962...

I think you ought to file a bug, because it's supposed to work.

XMMS - http://www.xmms.org/

Indeed. I still use the 100% perfect XMMS 1.

Audacity and XMMS 2 both were a lot worse for some reason (like slower, weird bugs, needlessly unneeded server/client model, ...)

In XMMS 1, you can have 10000s of songs in the playlist (i.e. your whole harddisk), and jump to any of them immediately by just pressing the "j" key and typing part of its name, and it remains blazing fast.

Not sure how Winamp was these days. I remember it was good at version 2, then starting from version 5 ("2 + 3"), it became bloated.

I also use XMMS as my primary media player. It "just works" and I don't need a lot of fancy stuff in a music player. XMMS for music, and VLC for video, that's pretty much all I need.

XMMS is great! I like mplayer better for video though, it's much easier to control and understand.

I like VLC more myself. Seems to support more videos, and easier UI to access its massive amount of options and features.

I think you mean audacious [1] not audacity [2] although both are useful tools (If you're not familiar, audacious is a media player that supports XMMS plugins and Winamp2 skins). But WRT Audacious vs XMMS, I've also noticed that audacious doesn't seem to scale as well as XMMS with a lot of songs in your playlist.

[1] http://audacious-media-player.org/ [2] http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

http://gmusicbrowser.org/ is the most similar open source music player, in my experience.

Clementine is a great multi-platform open-source clone of Amarok 1.4.x. A little different from the old Winamp/XMMS "tape deck" feel, but very responsive and light with many modern features.

Another vote for Clementine. Nice, clean audio player, with the right number of features.

That's my favourite too. Only thing missing for me is mpd support but that is maybe not an everyday requirement.

Clementine is great, but I sometimes wish they could implement some scripting/plugin mechanism somehow .

I use to love Amarok back in the 1.4.x days, but after Amarok messed everything up with 2.0, I swore it off and wrote my own XMMS2 client. Clementine wasn't out yet and I decided that the only way to get something that I wouldn't hate would be to write it myself.

These days I just use zsh and mplayer though. Apparently all of my use-cases sum up to "play one or more albums, perhaps shuffling them first". I've given Clementine a shot, and it is quite like Amarok use to be, but now it all seems like clutter.

MediaMonkey http://www.mediamonkey.com/

I've had pretty good experience with AIMP. Very similar to WinAmp in most regards. (http://www.aimp.ru/)

I loved WinAmp - now I'm using Vox on Mac. It is much more basic but it's very polished and is the best of the players I tried http://coppertino.com/vox/

foobar2000 is great for Windows.

I'm surprised MPD[1] isn't favored a bit more on HN. I primarily use ncmpcpp on desktop, but fall back to ario when using gnome, and MPDroid from android.

The simplicity is great. I have a single NAS containing my entire collection connected to some speakers. In another room I have a rasp pi connected to a different set of speakers which streams the music being played via Icecast2. I can control the music in either room using pretty much any device connected to the network (PC, laptop, pi, tablet, phone), and also stream my collection when not at home.

I don't know of any particular client that's similar to winamp or itunes, but there's a lot to chose from[2], although many of those are a bit dated.

[1]:http://www.musicpd.org/ [2]:http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

I do enjoy my MPD/ncmpcpp setup as well.

however, I also use plex connected to my roku for other media needs. But, I often find when on the go I will use plex on my phone primarily for music...or a superior remote for the roku...

On Windows, MusicBee is pretty good with lot of possibilites. http://getmusicbee.com/

+1 on MusicBee, can't praise it enough

MusicBee is awesome!

Having used Winamp for over a decade, I switched to MusicBee and never looked back. The level of customization, fluidity and smoothness were all I was looking in a media player. While it's not as lightweight as foobar it feels a lot more polished.

Sad to see the old folk go though.

This one is a little esoteric, but Billy is a cool, incredibly minimalist audio player:

http://sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html

Unfortunately, it looks like the site's downloads are unavailable right now (suffering from nostalgia overload?), but it's definitely worth checking out:

    * tiny -- like, 500K
    * gapless playback
    * 100% controllable by keyboard

Glad you mentioned this. This is my favorite, out of the way player. All I want is to just listen to the music and Billy does it.

Thanks for the memories, I will never stop using Winamp in my mind. I have so many memories tied to it. It was crazy you had to download it to play those surreal .mp3 files. Then it was my patient assistant when I had to make my first (teen) love compilation! I also used to show people how many beatiful skins it had. And what about when lyrics plugins came out and no no other players could do it. And what about breath taking, stunning visualizations plugins when WMP would just show you those low resolution ugly bricks? (has this last point got any better?) Thanks Justin for all you did!

Why do they not open source the entire package? I have to think that AOL has clean intellectual property ownership on the code base. It would be better than letting this important historical codebase slip into oblivion.

I stopped using Windamp for a long time until I purchased my first Android phone. After looking through the dozens of Mp3 players on the market, I saw my old fave, downloaded it and have been using it ever since on my phone.

RIP Llama

I have not seen a better music player.

Lightweight

Unobtrusive, customisable, highly functional UI

Fades out tracks when u stop (to not have a harsh cut off waveform)

Its what I currently use. Current build will probably run on windows for a loong loong time to come tho.

foobar2000 has all of those features

Doesn't require customization to be usable.

Winamp is a great music player. It is still the best for some file formats. Via it's plugins it can play more exotic audio file formats than any other player. Some players support s3m and it, but play only half of some files: Winamp plays it all. There are great plugins for nsf, spc, psf and usf sound files (sound files form NES, SNES, PS1 and N64 games). I wish there would be a real alternative (for Linux). Does anyone know a good player for these file formats? Audacious is good for s3m, it and nsf, but spc, psf and usf?

I like deadbeef, which uses libgme to play SPC, at least; haven't tried PSF or USF.

Wait, I just realized Audacious CAN play psf and spc (forgot about that). The only thing I'm missing is (mini)usf (Nintendo 64 music). Although the Winamp plugins are much more feature rich: more metadata, (live!) disabling and enabling of channels (instruments), custom song length configuration etc. That's why I still used Winamp for that.

I use to use winamp to fill my house with audio. I had a few PCs throughout the house and had set up my own radio station. I would hit play on one of the PCs and all the computers would start playing throughout my home. I could even access and control my broadcast outside my home.

Back then I had a ton of curiosity but development skills. Tinkering as did with Winamp and other programs like edonkey and Bit torrent compelled me to create and then learn how to turn my web ideas into reality.

Thanks Winamp for helping me get going!

Just for those who are looking for a replacement player on Windows Desktop. I have been using JetAudio player, and have been very happy with it. It supports global keyboard shortcuts (VERY important for me), CD ripping, playlists with live monitoring and what not. And one of the biggest reasons I moved to it from Winamp was that it could handle the 4500 something songs I had on my machine in one playlist, without getting laggy. Winamp would just crawl with those many songs.

XMPlay has to be mentioned here! Great player in not even 400 kB, but unfortunately Windows only.

http://support.xmplay.com/

I second this. So tiny, yet with such great sound quality.

Sad. Years ago I found WinAmp and its programmable visualizer an indispensable tool when teaching Mathematics. Graphing sine waves is so much fun when combined with a good beat.

I still use it everyday, never changed player since its first release. I guess it's the piece of software I have used for the longest time now (for free!) ?

It just works for me. Controls in the systray (deal breaker for me with other players), brillant mix of media library and playlists, the Bento skin is very decent etc.

Once in a while a shoutcast radio or a trippy Milkdrop session.

I get that people use Spotify now. I'm not in the cloud yet but I see the appeal.

I still use winamp. I have been a faithful user of winamp for the last 12 years. Everything else seems very bloated and try to do too many things at once.

Oh, memories. I've been using Winamp for at least 10 years. I still have a Netscape skin for the legacy version (came out with Netscape Navigator, I believe). Yes, Winamp was the audio player back then.

I switched to Winamp lite when they started adding "bloat" features like media library, video playback, etc. It plays music and it does it awesomely. It's likely I'll be using it for 10 more years.

Still use it and prefer it to VLC or Foobar. I hope they opensource it, but I suspect it's unlikely? Would be cool to see all old versions too.

This is sad. I discovered so much music throughout my teenage life using WinAMP. I used to do shoutCast broadcast for friends and feel like a DJ. I used to be excited when a friend would allow me to replace their MusicMatch Jukebox with Winamp. It was solid, and worked. Why shutdown? :(

I supposed I've only been installing the <3.00 version anyway, so I can stick with it, but still...mixed emotions.

It's been a couple of years since I tried to find a good alternative to iTunes on OS X. Does it exist yet? Is there a Winamp for mac yet?

Possibly Vox: http://coppertino.com/vox/

Thanks! I'll try as soon as I upgrade from 10.6.

There is also http://cogx.org/ (but it is a lot more minimal)

You can also use Wine + Foobar2000 (+plugins). It's running pretty smooth on my Mac (albeit rather ugly in terms of appearance)

I have purchased Parallels and also recently upgraded to v9 _just_ to run the Windows version of Winamp as my main mp3 player. Running Parallels in "coherence" mode makes Winamp look/act/run basically as if it were any other OS X app. It's amazing.

I'm working on an own player which supports >=MacOSX 10.6.

Maybe it is already usable enough for you.

http://albertz.github.io/music-player/

Hi Albertz,

It looks something I've been looking. I'll give it a try.

Thanks for the extra effort on keeping it 10.6-compatible!

I feel like I already know the answer but I really hope they release the source code. At least the community can take Winamp forward then.

In their dog days they are now giving away the pro version of Winamp, which does CD ripping, removes ads and has a few other features. i.e. the link to the Free version is now the Pro version.

I was another pretty recent convert to Winamp after using it in the 90s then switching to Linux, but it still does the job _fast_ if you still keep a big hard drive of MP3s.

Does this affect SHOUTcast?

Audacious + Winamp Classic Skin = Winamp.

For the skin: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Winamp+Classic+Skin?c...

For the player: http://audacious-media-player.org/

I have a lot of hardware that's SOL if Shoutcast goes down. I hope they have a transition plan if that's the case.

I'm surprised some other personal broadcast approach hasn't replaced it by now.

Lots of great online radio (and formerly video) was Shoutcast.

I think it was like Reader, where the service was so good and ubiquitous that nobody felt compelled to make a replacement.

This will affect a lot more people than the Reader shutdown, and in a way that hits the pocketbook for those that have devices that depend on Shoutcast like my Yamaha receiver. I wonder if the outcry will be as strong?

Started using Winamp 1.90 in 1998. Don't think I've ever played MP3s in any other application since. :(

I know it's lame to hijack topics with "yeah, but [something else but similar]" posts, but I am still sad that DeliPlayer isn't being developed anymore :(

http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/DeliPlayer

This sucks... winamp has been my go to media player, along with shoutcast services forever and a day... Their android player is imho one of the best ones available at that.

I honestly haven't been into any of the skin options since version 5.. but the player has been awesome. This is really a shame.

I actually really like the Zune music player that you could (still can?) download from Microsoft. I never even owned a Zune, but the player software is a lightweight WMP with better design. Sure the Zune Marketplace/pass links were all there, but they are easy enough to ignore.

I'm so bummed about this.

It's my favorite media player.

It was the first media player in its day that payed every file you threw at it.

It has never disappointed me since.

I really wish the owner would opensource it though if he doesn't have the time to maintain it I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands of people who will.

Thank you Winamp for the good times.

I wouldn't call it an end of an era though, I feel like Winamp's era ended several years ago.

Now the only program Windows users still use in this day of age that I can't understand is shareware WinRAR. Seriously. (Who hasn't been using 7-Zip for years?)

This will likely be buried beneath the upvoted comments, but does anyone know if there's a backup of the entire skins and plugins database?

Would be a tragedy to lose all the brilliant work that's been created over the years, even if I don't use Winamp anymore.

If you want a nice, cross-platform, sane, fast alternative, including streaming between users, you should have a look at the open source Tomahawk. http://www.tomahawk-player.org/

Tomahawk is the only cross-platform media player I've seen that looks really good on OS X, too. I don't have much need for a desktop media player anymore with a phone always in my pocket, but I really enjoyed using it when I did.

Show me 1 product/service/platform that got acquired by AOL and got better/bigger at there.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

Well, MapQuest probably isn't worse (although obviously it has been overtaken by Google Maps in popularity). MapQuest Open ( http://open.mapquest.com/ ) is actually a pretty good interface to OpenStreetMap; it does search, directions, and a good job of tile rendering.

Please sign a petition to opensource a winamp! https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/attention-aol-let-win...

With HTML like this, I can see perhaps why folks aren't tuning in as much https://gist.github.com/editor/ed6339a732d6c7c06dd3

Best music player with all the customizations I need and manages all the external devices very well. Quite a shame that it has to shut down. Another disappointment but not as large as Google reader, I will still be using my winamp.

"It really whips the llama's ass" was a reference to the late, great Wesely Willis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM

Winamp was being shopped around recently.

Either they didn't end up finding a buyer or they did and the buyer is taking the tech private (cheaper than staffing a product and paying for bandwidth costs). I'm guessing it is the latter.

Winamp has a special place in my heart it was the first music app that I really like when I was in my teens.

I remember downloading a song in 15 minutes off Napster when my family first got an ISDN line. Oh man 10-15kbs was screaming.

Just got it running with the D-Reliction skin using Wine in Ubuntu. Then the first song it picks on shuffle is all, "numa numa yey"...haha, man, I'll bet they've had so many downloads today. lol

Which version? I installed v2.95, but the library doesn't seem to work.

I ended up seeing a lot of glitches too, to the point where the player buttons stopped responding. I might still run it in a Windows VM. The lite version seems OK though.

That version did not include a library manager.

I had a 6500 and used SoundApp, it was scriptable, thanks Norman!

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~franke/SoundApp/

http://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html

This was my go to music player before I moved over to Play Music and then Spotify.

Well, shit. It's still the best music player for Windows, even after a decade. I haven't updated it for over a year, though, so I guess the latest version will have to do for the next decade :-)

Just in case you're looking for winamp after the close date, you can find old versions of it on http://oldversion.com. My fave is 2.95.

Trough WinAmp I discovered MP2. Then MP3. I even created an amazing skin for Winamp back in 2000, before they went with the scalable one. It was hellish popular back in the days, it was a Puma skin :)

My progression over the last 15 years has gone Winamp, Foobar, MediaMonkey, itunes, Spotify. I keep itunes around just for CD ripping and ipod syncing, but I'd like to abandon it altogether.

Why does it have to shut down, cant they just not release new versions?

Because no one wants to pay to keep it up?

I'd pitch in towards the $20 a year for the domain + vps.

Pitch in to archive all of their releases or a donation to Archive Team[1] to archive all of their releases.

[1] http://www.archiveteam.org/

it's better to just let it die, unless they open source it. helping people find and use unmaintained software is a terrible idea.

It's better to archive software (well, everything!), regardless of what it is. Helping people find and use archived historical software is a wonderful idea.

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Already finishing up pulling the whole site into a warc/cdx and getting it to textfiles.com (aka ArchiveTeam).

Guess I'm slow. I'm halfway through recursively fetching download.nullsoft.com/winamp/ with the intention of seeding a new torrent on TPB. Is that what you grabbed?

No, grabbed *.winamp.com/winamp.com (full grab I'll send off to be added to archive.org).

Will you also indemnify AOL against all third party claims should someone use the software, it messes up their Windows 9.3 filesystem, and they end up suing... however meritless the case may be? Will you accept responsibility for acting as the DMCA contact and updating the site within the time limits provided in the Safe Harbor provisions should a skin, plugin, or visualization infringe someone else's copyright? Will you also update the apps for free to keep current with mobile and desktop OS changes?

I'm guessing AOL has looked at all this and sees $$$ for both the business risk as well as maintaining software which they have deemed does nothing for their company goals. As a result, they are better off focusing their limited resources towards efforts which do further their goals.

This is why I really, really hate the modern, diversified corporation.

The decision of whether to continue a product line within a large corporation is very, very different from whether or not a product line could keep a small business afloat. If you're a small business, the only question is "are we making payroll?". Within a large, diversified corporation, you have to ask if a project is as valuable as your alternatives. Mom-and-pop's with a sustainable business can't and don't say, "Yeah, this is profitable, but it'd be more profitable if we dropped everything we're doing and put our resources towards a different sector entirely." But it's entirely feasible and rational for a large corporation to look at it's hundred sub-businesses, axe the ten least profitable, and put the people to work on the ten most profitable.

I'd be a lot happier if modern corporations were small, narrowly focused beasts, and not the monstrous conglomerations we have instead.

Would open sourcing the code get around that?

Just give it a year and you might be able to...

    Domain Name.......... winamp.com
      Creation Date........ 1997-12-30
      Registration Date.... 2009-10-03
      Expiry Date.......... 2014-12-24

No he won't. All expired domains are immediately parked by the registrar. Parked domains are much more expensive than free domains.

seems weird that would be a problem for AOL.

I would guess that there will be some sort of re-branding/re-launch of something since the message refers primarily to the winamp.com domain. Someone may have purchased the domain or AOL may do something new with it.

The end of an era. I still have it installed, as on Windows there's still nothing better.

I remember switching to Linux and being frustrated by XMMS because it wasn't Winamp, although it tried to be.

I remember having to rip cds to wav files on my x4 CD burner (the fastest at the time) and then using winamp to convert them to mp3 before winamp had the add-in that did it all in one step.

First thing I do when setting up a fresh PC is installing Winamp 2.95. It's the perfect mp3 player for the simple use case of just dragging some files onto a window and hitting play.

Fifteen years ago, i was downloaded winamp. Now i'm use other SO, it's sad, but it's the end of many first music player, other example is sonique, downed in 2002.

I believe AOL owns Winamp now. I hope they open source the code!

AOL used to do some cool open-source stuff back in the 2000s. At the time, a lot of their tech was based on AOLServer which was an web server they acquired in the 90s and open-sourced. AOLServer is also tightly coupled with Tcl and AOL used to contribute to Tcl development as well.

Alas, I doubt anyone involved in open-sourcing anything is still there.

I loved the visualization plugins for Winamp. I remember throwing parties using Winamp to play the tunes and projecting the visualizations on a huge screen. So good!

Isn't XMMS still around? That looks a hell of a lot like winamp. http://www.xmms.org/

XMMS is obsolete; in particular, it uses GTK+1.2 which is no longer available in most Linux distributions. It was removed from Debian in 2008: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/07/msg00026.html

I don't know what the status of XMMS2 is, but it's a client-server model like MPD.

The GTK2 fork of XMMS, Beep Media Player, is reported by Wikipedia to be discontinued; the BMPx fork of BMP has also been removed Debian. Audacious is another Linux music player with Winamp skin support, it is actively maintained.

Perhaps somebody should do a Winamp2-compatible MPD client for nostalgia purposes.

Nooo... This is a bad, bad day! It would really interesting to learn more about this company and how it survived for 15 years in a very competitive market.

Peter Pawlowski's work on Foobar2000 is / was great. Winamp did the trick, but after 2.95 it lost me.

That said, it's sad to see the name go.

Winamp.com and associated web services

Associated web services sounds a lot like Shoutcast.

AOL wants to double down on stupid journalism. Winamp is a distraction.

Sad to see Winamp go and hopefully AOL won't do the same with Shoutcast. Would be nice to see AOL update the Shoutcast app more.

    "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!"

My favourite mp3 player during internet 1.0. Good times.

http://i.imgur.com/Y9Y4yZI.jpg You will be missed!

Winamp was very popular back in the days. When I was in 6, 7th grade I would use it every day! Sad to see this going down.

God I hate Aol.

Why shutting down and not open-source?

I really liked the windamp android player, specially because it had lastfm integration. sad news.

Winamp + Napster reminds me of 1999.

Writing simple Winamp Plugin was my first C++ experience about 10 years ago and it was amazing.

WinAmp was dead to me a few months into AOL owning it. Long live Nullsoft & Justin!

Sad news. Always loved using winamp. Really did "kick the llama's ass."

What does it even mean to "shut down" a piece of download-and-run software?

Wow I feel like I am leaving a piece of my childhood behind. Long live winamp haha

This makes me really sad. I learned to code while listening to music using Winamp.

It was great while it lasted. I am sorry to see them shut down, but I understand.

Winamp? I used it years ago. I use VLC and mplayer for quite a while already.

> Why Go Pro? Help fund continued product development & innovation

Well... no more...

Charging a 1 time fee probably wasn't the best idea for life-time support.

Perhaps AOL hoped they would have their own itunes and it would self support the player development

And this is not gonna top up on 4chan. This is why I like it better here.

noooooooooooooooooo.....

It turns out that the lama came back and whooped it's arse.

I guess the Llama got sick of its ass being whipped.:/

Ah, fond memories of downloading MP3's via irc DCC :)

great example of how unimaginative AOL is. winamp has (had) a massive user base. it would have been a great base to start a spotify competitor with.

Just in time for me to download and get my latest skin.

Someone should create a Winamp 2 theme for FooBar now.

I would love to contribute if there was a public repo.

Geiss is my favourite music visualisation program

For those looking for a lightweight alternative, I recently switched to GOM Music Player on Windows. No library (yet), but a nice modern GUI and good Context Menu integration.

Give Mediamonkey a try.. syncs with iPods too

Its a great app. Sad they are shutting down.

And the llama may finally rest in peace.

Dear Winamp, thank you for XMMS. Adios!

It really kicked the llama's ass.

They brought MP3s to the masses. RIP.

You win this time llama's ass!!

Holy shit, Winamp is still around!?

Winamp was my first mp3 player.

RIP the era of windows ricing.

Shift+V for fadeout for life.

Internet history dieing.

AOL money down the drain

Noooooooo.....

(tears)

Anyway, why are they shutting down?

this sucks, let's start a form to keep WinAmp alive :)

this is a sad day! I've been using it since 1999. :(

I blame the llamas.

This makes me sad.

say hi to foobar

Imagine if they opened the sources on this...

end of an era

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