How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

I hate the expression &quot;ahead of its time&quot;, but I do feel like Shoutcast in Winamp was way ahead of its time. I was watching live video streams from random people for <i>years</i> before I had ever heard of Twitch, on a fairly crappy internet connection.<p>AOL really did them a disservice.

I still use Winamp! Why? Well, i listen to video game soundtracks, but not compressed or even high quality recordings, the actual source files ripped from the games and reproduced with plugins much like an emulator would. You can even juice quality settings way past what the original consoles would play them back as, such as being tied to 22kHz on a Sega Genesis or 32kHz on a Super Nintendo, i can reproduce the original songs at 96kHz lol. The sound quality is far superior than any compressed &#x2F; lossless &#x2F; uncompressed &#x2F; or even an original hardware solution for that matter.<p>Now, there are plenty of individual players for these files, HOWEVER, if i want to play ALL of the music from ALL of the consoles on one playlist, there is no valid substitute for the Winamp plugin system. So yes, valid use cases still exist, and i will be whipping the llamas ass for the foreseeable future.

&gt; There&#x27;s no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today [...]<p>It is in exactly the same position as far as I can tell – i.e. replaced by streaming services like Apple Music.

WinAMP looked like nothing else on the very utilitarian Windows OS, and I think that was a big part of the appeal.<p>To me the design seemed like a copy of the earlier MOD players that were popular on the Amiga platform.

Frankel is a a developer I hold in really high esteem. IDK what I would do without LICEcap, which I use on a daily basis (and I&#x27;m sure it was just a little side project they through together to make debugging easier in a short amount of time). And REAPER is probably the only user-customizable and extendable digital audio workstation in existence. You can see the echos of Winamp in it...

Used it heavily. Fed it with gnutella. I liked the skins option and ran with a quad ][ amp look because I gad a quad 2 valve amp which subsequently got destroyed in a flood.<p>It didn&#x27;t kill a pc to run either. Low overhead and low screen real estate.

Winamp was doomed to be a relic of a simpler time. Even if you take the iPod and iTunes Store out of the equation Winamp&#x27;s file-centric approach was a limitation as people&#x27;s music libraries increased in size and complexity. All their attempts to add more modern features just made Winamp worse for the people who did like its simplicity and file-centric design.

I used winamp in the late 90s and early 2000s. During that time it was a necessary program to have on the PC, but I stopped using it once MP3 players and ipods became more common &#x2F; affordable. Then youtube came out and when on my pc, I mostly listened to music that way.<p>Its extremely rare that I want to play an mp3 on my pc, thus no need to use something like winamp.

&gt; <i>Amazingly, given all the time elapsed, AOL still makes a decent amount of money on the site and on the program—while the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually. </i><p>How does it make this money? What&#x27;s the source of revenue? Are there ads in Winamp?

If Winamp lived it would&#x27;ve HAD to become first a music store, and then a streaming service.<p>And we&#x27;d be getting articles about how Winamp &quot;used&quot; to be simple, but is now &quot;bloated&quot;, and all the internet greybeard nerds (hi, it&#x27;s me) would be talking about how they just want to play the tens of thousands of local MP3s they have not pay for a subscription to stream from the web, which is why they&#x27;re &quot;still on Winamp 5&quot;.<p>So, while I do think there&#x27;s an alternate future where &quot;Winamp&quot; became as big and as ubiquitous as iTunes or Spotify, or both combined, I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a future where it does any better than those and there is no 2024 (or 2017) nostalgia for what it once was.

The age of MP3 players ended when streaming became ubiqutous.<p>I know some OSS players that became worse over time. The usablity hero that was amaroK became so bad after an overhaul that it was forked as Clementine. For example, if you had shuffle on, and double-clicked a song in your playlist, a different random one will start.<p>Then Clementine now sometimes hangs when you rewind an MP3. It understands where the new position is and that it is supposed to be playing, just can&#x27;t. They also unlearned a tiny UI improvement that I&#x27;ve contributed a decade ago. Indeed they would be a much better product if they did nothing other than fixing bit rot.<p>I remember there was a Gnome option, wonder if it is alive. Can&#x27;t remember the name though.

Edit: Should actually be labeled (2012). Was republished in 2017.

A key contributor to its success is that competitors media players often couldn&#x27;t play mp3s without skipping on the hardware of the day, and that included microsoft&#x27;s own media player.<p>So for many this was the only useful way to play mp3s on windows.

When I got a new laptop six months ago, it was my first new computer since the 90s where I didn&#x27;t install Winamp as one of the first steps. Really only because it was my first non-Windows machine. Didn&#x27;t even get deep into researching Mac alternatives before realizing that I haven&#x27;t played an mp3 file more than a handful of times since signing up for Spotify years ago. Streaming irrevocably changed how I consume and think about music.

I have tremendous respect for Justin Frankel.<p>Hindsight is 20&#x2F;20 and all that but it seemed likely that AOL and Nullsoft were not the best culture fit and taking Spinner out of the equation, I still don&#x27;t think it would have worked out well.<p>That being said, Winamp was and is one of the best media players ever created. It&#x27;s the prime example of how good software can be when the creator is fully aligned with his&#x2F;her users.

Milkdrop, the music visualizer bundled with Winamp, is still alive and well in the VJ community through the NestDrop app. (co-developer here) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nestimmersion.ca&#x2F;nestdrop.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nestimmersion.ca&#x2F;nestdrop.php</a>

As a poor grad student, I used to unwind by watching Arrested Development playing all 3 seasons in a loop over Shoutcast. Fun times.

Obligatory mention of the current fork of winamp: WACUP <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;</a><p>Based on core that was open sourced around Winamp 3 DrO one of the ex devs is gradually re-implementing all the other parts.

a bunch of drifter con artists didn&#x27;t deliver anything with sustainable value. shocked not shocked.