'Holy Winamp! Opera Puts a Music Visualizer Inside Its Browser' (pcworld.com) 38
An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World:
It won't whip the llama's ass, but Opera has added a Spotify visualizer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser. Known as Sonic, the visualizer will be part of Opera's Dynamic Themes, which use the WebGPU standard to employ a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It's essentially a shader, which uses your PC's graphics engine to generate the moving background.
The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said. Opera's Sonic theme... takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background.
"As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played," the article points out.
And 27 years later, WinAmp arrived as an app in Apple's App Store and Google Play and in April of 2024. (The latest version was apparently released this May — and you can also download it to your desktop...)
Somewhere along the way, Winamp also announced "Winamp for Creators," which they're describing as a dedicated platform for music artists with monetization and promotion tools, music management services, and other essential resources "to help creators take control of their careers" (including "a powerful social media publishing tool that lets users write a single post and push it to all their social media channels simultaneously.")
The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said. Opera's Sonic theme... takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background.
"As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played," the article points out.
And 27 years later, WinAmp arrived as an app in Apple's App Store and Google Play and in April of 2024. (The latest version was apparently released this May — and you can also download it to your desktop...)
Somewhere along the way, Winamp also announced "Winamp for Creators," which they're describing as a dedicated platform for music artists with monetization and promotion tools, music management services, and other essential resources "to help creators take control of their careers" (including "a powerful social media publishing tool that lets users write a single post and push it to all their social media channels simultaneously.")
Winamp??? (Score:5, Informative)
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Not to mention Amiga had visualizers before people even knew what Windows was..
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In fact, music visualizers [wikipedia.org] existed even before people knew what windows were!
Re: Winamp??? (Score:2)
Sorry, thatâ(TM)s a wind audiolizer.
Re: Winamp??? (Score:1)
Is it really 2025 and Slashdot can't handle smart quotes? That just hurts. Slashdot used to be where all the nerds went to keep up on the bleeding edge of tech. How far it's fallen :(
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I had to read your message several times... I filter these “smart quotes” out, don't notice them anymore.
“1”
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Amiga Soundtracker had this in 1987 - a fair bit earlier than Windows.
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Not to mention Amiga had visualizers before people even knew what Windows was..
Yeah, but people still know what Windows is.
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Not to mention Amiga had visualizers before people even knew what Windows was..
Yeah but it didn't whip a lamas arse so no one remembers it.
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GPL violations get figured out (Score:2)
Did the GPL violations get figured out from that famously bad open source attempt?
Will it whip the Llama's ass? (Score:2)
Just asking for a friend.
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Does anybody else remember Jeff Minter?
The most important question (Score:2)
How do I shut it OFF?
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You're not well informed. They're 2.1% market share on desktop https://radar.cloudflare.com/r... [cloudflare.com] . You could only dream being as rich as whoever controls that much.
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2.1% of the desktop? Not enough enough space for a stupid Mongo DB ad.
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That ad was very good, judging that a large fraction of readers now 1) know the product name, 2) associate the product name with its function, 3) and a fraction of readers even amplify the message. This is the the level of best TV ads of the 80s-90s.
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I can't read your post because the ad covers half of it up.
Re: The most important question (Score:2)
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As a browser, yes. Now it's just a Chinese company trying to push a shit Chromium fork. Though to be fair, they hardly had any meaningful market share before either.
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Install Firefox.
Re: The most important question (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
That's a lot of effort. How doesn't improve the ability of the software to browse the web? After all, it is a web browser.
Imagine if they instead put that same effort into features that actually improve the ability to browse the web.
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How does it....not how doesn't it.
Stupid mongo db ad covered up where I was typing.
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It's a lot of effort considering Butterchurn is a thing, so making a new visualiser from scratch instead of just forking (or contributing to) an existing project smacks of NIH syndrome.
Milkdrop (Score:2)
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There was a visualizer called R2 back in the day that blew the doors off all the half-baked visualizers including Milkdrop, G-Force, Whitecap and all the other just low effort wiggly line art visualizers that came during the rise of iTunes and the sunset of Winamp. Nothing since R2/R4 ever matched it or anyone bothered to make a new one or update it.
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Winamp Is Garbage (Score:3)
IT's a shell of what it once was. Radionomy bought it for the shoutcast IP so they could restructure to a paid platform. You want to run a server, you have to pay them. You want to get listed in the directory, you have to pay them.
Then there was Winamp. They had no interest in it; so they ruined it too. Winamp For Creators was just bullshit crypto and NFTs. That's all. It was literally just a useless NFT marketplace.
And let's not forget the "open-source" fiasco. It wasn't open source, it was source available. They pushed it as open source, but the reality is they still had full control over the code and none of it was open.
The only thing this article did was drag Opera's name through Winamp's mud...which we all agreed should have been buried and erased at this point.
Foobar2000 is the new Winamp (Score:2)
https://www.foobar2000.org/ [foobar2000.org]
https://audio-file.org/categor... [audio-file.org]
https://audio-file.org/categor... [audio-file.org]
Exciting! (Score:2)
So you can play an opera with Opera? (Score:2)