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

Some context: Winamp&#x27;s owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they&#x27;re willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.winamp.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;winamp&#x2F;winamp-site-design&#x2F;4620943-winamp-windows-desktop-version-download-directory-on-server#post4621013" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.winamp.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;winamp&#x2F;winamp-site-design&#x2F;46...</a>

Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it&#x27;s still nice to see.<p>Interesting that there&#x27;s no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it&#x27;s only available following email enquiries, of all things. I&#x27;m surprised they&#x27;re even bothering, at this point - the software&#x27;s so obsolete that it&#x27;s not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.

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

Good. Love the reimplementation in HTML <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webamp.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webamp.org&#x2F;</a>

About 20 years ago, I almost got hired on the Winamp team. They were busy working on Winamp 3, which, from what I gathered, was a pretty much total rewrite using modern C++.<p>The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I wonder which source code they&#x27;ll open up. Maybe both.

For anyone looking for a <i>slightly</i> more modern alternative, I recommend foobar2000[1].<p>It&#x27;s not quite as pretty out of the box, but it makes up for it with some insane customizability. It also has a very robust ecosystem of components, and works very well in Wine.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m skeptical this will be a fully free license based on the cagey language in the announcement :&#x2F;

This leaked a couple years ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29379346">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29379346</a>

It really whips the llama&#x27;s ass.

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

The most impressive feature of classic winamp were it&#x27;s skins. You can effortlessly watch them in all their classic glory on WebAmp.org [0].<p>(There is also some nice music there)<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webamp.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webamp.org&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been using WACUP, it&#x27;s really good: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;</a>

Kinda late. Maybe it would&#x27;ve been cool in 2006 when I still used Windows.<p>But what I really want to know is: will it really kick the LLaMAs ass now with AI features?

It&#x27;s amazing… how WinAmp and the other softwares and websites that were so crucial in the rise of the internet AND computers in general, just..faded away like they did, and we got stuck with the Facebook and TikTok and Twitter and Netflix etc bs we have left today..

Note their careful wording...&quot;opened up source&quot;, not &quot;open source&quot;.

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

AIMP3 is still in regular development for windows and Android and for me at least seems to nicely emulate winamp in UI, skins, plugins and extra features. I have fond memories of Winamp, but I don&#x27;t miss it.

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

I still use the old Winamp on all my devices. Winamp: old or new is being open sourced? If it&#x27;s the old one, wonderful! WACUP team are now able to develop a ARM version.

Currently dating myself by playing Portishead&#x27;s Dummy in Winamp 5.66...<p>Looking forward to this code being lightly maintained for minimal compatibility with future OSes. I dislike change!

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

The dozen people still using Winamp rejoice...

Oh my God. My favorite piece of software of all time. Would love to read it&#x27;s source.

&quot;Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version,&quot; explains Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp.&quot;<p>Which license will be used? &quot;Opening up&quot; is not exactly GPL.

Also someone has rewritten Winamp in Swift as well. Few days ago it was on Product hunt and got 4 likes.<p>Check it out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;re-amp.ru" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;re-amp.ru</a>

I hope for the code to read the library database. Perhaps I&#x27;ll be able to debug what&#x27;s broken in mine and fix it so I can use it again.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qmmp.ylsoftware.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qmmp.ylsoftware.com&#x2F;</a> already exists, though.

No one would ever believe me but last night I had a dream about exactly this.<p>I was shocked to wake up and read about this in the news.

Wow, for me Winamp was one of the first &quot;enshittified&quot; pieces of software.<p>I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I&#x27;m pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something<p>I remember I used to use <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldversion.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldversion.com</a> [1] to download the previous one<p>Ever since then I have been wary of &quot;improvements&quot; that make software worse, which has been happening a lot recently.<p>I&#x27;d be really interested in seeing the source code to the original. I didn&#x27;t know much about programming then, and to me that would be similar to reading the original source code of Doom (which I&#x27;ve done a bit)<p>[1] this site still seems alive? But doesn&#x27;t even have https?

To me the gold version was winamp-v2.94 ... ~1.2MB of magic. I still use it today.<p>Notable mention on BEOS ... CL-Amp

The weaselly wording doesn&#x27;t make me optimistic, but I hope it&#x27;s an open source license.

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

I used to love Winamp for internet radio&#x2F;tv.<p>Maybe plug-in NewPipe or similar instead and fork it?

I can&#x27;t remember the last time I thought of winamp, I moved on to foobar2000 and then to streaming services. Even with this announcement, there&#x27;s no mention of a licence... Too little too late, maybe if foobar2000 became open source but I&#x27;d doubt it.

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

I want to see a wasm version of winamp.

til: Winamp is still alive and kicking

Linux Winamp?

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

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

didn&#x27;t it leak some time ago? did AOL ever spin nullsoft back out?

do people still use winamp over foobar?

Maybe now we can finally add RealVideo support to it.

llama

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