Winamp Shutting Down On December 20 400
New submitter Cid Highwind writes "If you want to download the latest version of Winamp, you'd better do it soon. According to a new banner on the download page, AOL will be pulling the plug on the iconic llama-whipping music player in a month. 'Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.' Ars Technica ran an article last year detailing how the music player lost its dominance."
WinAMP still rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
so what should i be using now? (Score:2, Interesting)
i guess i was the only one left using it??
what should i go to now? I mostly played the shoutcast stations along with the music i converted from itunes a few years ago. I also use it exclusively on android.
Oh Man- My Lightshow (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's to hoping... (Score:5, Interesting)
Shame on AOL (Score:4, Interesting)
... for taking a great product with a large and growing user base and a lot of potential, then going virtually nowhere with it for year after year after year, until the only thing left to do was to kill it.
R.I.P. Winamp, you helped define the 90s and let the way for compressed digital formats.
Let's hope all the specialist plugins for all the legacy/specialist file formats that have been created over the years find a good home with ongoing support.
Re:Here's to hoping... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that someone who had been working on it "accidentally" leaks the source.
That might actually be a worse result. Unless there are Winamp-specific features/interfaces that are either difficult to clone or near-impossible to get full compatibility with, without the source, leaked-but-unlicensed source would just cast suspicion on any winamp-like projects, and fall into a difficult-to-develop for legal grey area (since the source leak itself would be hot, patchsets would presumably be legal; but actual compilation would require hanging out in warez circles and leave the resulting build illegal to distribute.)
Kind of like the issues XBMC had, back when they actually supported Xboxes. Their codebase was fine; but the SDK components required to actually do a build, and possibly the builds themselves, depending on exactly how hungry MS legal was feeling, were always illicit and kind of a pain to deal with.
Re:FB2K FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed.
My media player of choice these days is MPC-HC for casual listening with XBMC for dedicated playing. MPC-HC, while not a perfect interface, does the job and doesn't have these strange delays and buffering that VLC runs into, while at the same time supporting bit perfect playback via WASAPI.
XBMC is beautiful, but if it had a minimalist mode in addition to its 10 foot UI I'd probably use it exclusively. It also does an amazing job at cataloging your media if you want it to.
I suggest OggFrog! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:FB2K FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
A society that only satisfies the lowest common denominator is no society I'd want to live in. foobar is targeted at digital audio fans ...and of course every digital audio fan worth their salt has at least 100,000 files. </sarcasm>
I'm not saying that software should satisfy only the lowest common denominator, just that I suspect 150K files is a pretty severe abnormality even among music fans who love piracy. Personally, I very briefly tried foobar2k, and didn't feel like putting in the effort to figure out how to make it do what I want, so I just use other programs. And on normal-sized collections, they work plenty fine.
Re:FB2K FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
It was pretty powerful, and even without the features, I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes). You could search your library at will without changing anything in the playlist. They were in separate windows and the paradigm was pretty clear--you play music in the playing window, you search for music in the library.
Then, the playlist had ITS OWN INTERNAL MINI PLAYLIST! You could queue up specific tracks to play next (using j or q keyboard shortcuts IIRC). This great, because you could have your playlist on shuffle, but still be able to specify what song you want to hear next, all while still keeping your playlist sorted by artist/album/whatever. Infinitely better than software where the solution to "shuffle" was to actually shuffle your current playlist which makes browsing more difficult.
I will miss Winamp, but I must confess, I use it far less these days. Spotify has changed the way I listen to music--I no longer acquire music permanently and listen to much of it at work (vs using winamp for many many years as a student). This may not be a good thing...right now I can browse through my music folder and go on a nostalgia trip, much like my parents can flip through their records and CDs...with spotify, I will have to actually remember what I was listening to 15 years ago instead of stumbling across it when I set winamp to "shuffle all". But, it means I have cut out winamp. At work, I use Spotify...and at home mostly listen to music on my HTPC through spotify or XBMC. Winamp only gets used when I am using my desktop for something that doesn't have its own sound (like gaming or editing videos)...which is pretty much only when I work from home.
Re:FB2K FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:FB2K FTW (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll take mpd tyvm. Headless, can stream to icecast, great cataloging, controllable through various cli, gui, or other plugin based clients (irssi and firefox come to mind).
foobar is nice though...just not what I'd go with for usefulness over mpd