Winamp 2 in HTML5
jordaneldredge.com
jordaneldredge.com
Justin Frankel is one of my role models as far as how to 'live the dream' goes. He built something great, cashed out young, avoided becoming a tech celebrity, stayed a curious geek and just carried on doing what he loves. The fact winamp is still around and keeping people happy all these years later is the icing on the cake (and proof, if any were needed, that he deserved all the success he got). Justin Frankel really did whip the llama's ass.
I have a special place in my heart for Winamp's classic UI (Winamp 2). In my opinion, it was the most intuitive interface for a music player. it had a playlist, equalizer, plugins, all of which were condensable to a fraction of it's full size. Of course, now there are a number of similar players that have the same capabilities, but shit, Winamp 2.x was where it started. Even today, it blows todays iTunes interface way out of the water.
This has inspired me to figure a way to get my Wine'd Foobar2K to look like Winamp 2. There's probably a helpful article on that somewhere.
http://www.splitbar.se/sites/default/files/field/image/amiga...
Plugins? Check. Highly configurable? Check. Showing and hiding the playlist in a movable window at the click of a button? Plenty of visualization and information windows, all open at the same time if you want? Check. Early 90s? Check! :) Though I won't claim Eagleplayer and Delitracker invented that stuff, they were just the first audio players I used a lot.
It's really a pity Deliplayer for Windows isn't developed anymore... it could have gone places I'm sure.
Security says "This new thing has to use our approved login system".
Ops says "This new thing has to run on our servers/VMs".
Eng says "This new thing has to use Technology X so it fits in with everything else".
Nobody needs to have bad intentions but the weight of all that slows it down and makes it un-fun for the original team and the new people who take it over don't care that much about it because it came from outside.
I think somehow management sees the assets and wants to capitalize on them, without bothering to understand the process that created the assets in the first place (whether those are people or products). It's like if they took over a farm and harvested all the wheat without planting any seeds, and then wondered why they weren't getting crops anymore.
I just think it's amazing how frequently corporations will buy an asset for millions or billions with apparently no idea how the entity actually works. I mean if I were going to spend a few million on a company, I'd want to know how and why it's been successful, I wouldn't just want to acquire a "brand" that would get immediately tarnished.
Sadly, Winamp went completely downhill from here (IMHO) and the subsequent versions never felt as minimal as this version. AIMP[0] comes pretty close and is a good enough clone of winamp if you're interested.
[0] - http://www.aimp2.us/
And of course, if you're on Unixen, XMMS is pretty much a direct clone of the old Winamp (and used to even use the same skin by default).
I think we should agree it's highly customizable, both for function or style.
http://www.zophar.net/music.html
Audacious comes close, but isn't quite there. PSF2 support is mostly non-functional, for instance.
I loved how minimal and fast it was. You didn't need to import and manage your media, just drag a folder onto it and blam, it's playing. Nice keyboard shortcuts, no extra crap.
So much of my music is still just folders of mp3s in /artist/album/*.mp3 format and I really can't be bothered importing it all into iTunes, meaning I just listen to the same few dozen albums I do have in iTunes.
These days I more often just drag the folder into the VLC playlist or even use an old version of Winamp if I just want to shuffle through everything or make a playlist. The idea that my music is "in" the media player is something I could never get on board with. The media player is just accessing files in easily located folders. The way iTunes and some others try to hide that fact bothers me on some weird curmudgeonly level.
I chose to let it manage the files but reduced some of the folder nesting. It doesn't obfuscate file names and you can elect for Artist > Album > [file] structure or whatever your heart desires.
Other than skins, the other most frequented activity was finding new, trippy visualizations (https://www.google.com/search?q=geis+plugin) - ahh college.
And this! "Uses the acutal skin assets, so it's compatible with all skins" - gotta try this
Github pages is awesome.
Edit: Maybe it's a WIP, it's not linked from the author's project page http://jordaneldredge.com/projects/
I found a Github link deep at the bottom of the page: https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js
> As you all surely know by now, Winamp & SHOUTcast have recently changed ownership (from AOL to Radionomy).
The winamp.com website is currently undergoing heavy work and an almost-completely new redesign. As a result, many features will be unavailable, including some in-client services.
The Winamp downloads and Winamp Pro purchases will also be temporarily unavailable whilst code licensed to/by the previous owner is removed/replaced.
We hope to have everything restored and back in working order as soon as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused in the meantime.
Watch this thread for any further updates.
;)
I wrote a music player from scratch with Sound Manager 2 and I realized ... this stuff isn't that hard. We can build real software in the browser.
Someone bought Winamp for a couple hundred million about 15 years ago. Today, you can throw it together in the browser and do distribution for practically free.
Long live Client-Side Javascript!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...
I'd be happy to help out if anyone has questions on how to go about that stuff. I've done a ton of Web Audio work in the past couple years.
Actually is a fully functional music player that runs in the browser.
Spotiamp is a Swedish product made by Ludde in Gothenburg, Sweden. Spotiamp is not an officially supported product of Spotify®.
According to the webs, there are some x86 → LLVM converters, and then Emscripten can convert LLVM → asm.js, but getting that to work would probably take many months.
And it's rather much splitting hairs. HTML isn't very useful without CSS, CSS isn't useful at all without HTML, and JS is the only choice of languages for interactivity in HTML. "Can we please stop using 'car' to mean 'car'+'engine'+'tires'".