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The death of WinAmp

vwestlife

vwestlife

Veteran Member
Joined
May 2, 2008
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Location
central NJ
AOL is ending development of WinAmp and shutting down the web site for good -- so download it while you still can:

"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."

http://www.winamp.com/media-player/en

I'd like to see the further development of WinAmp handed off to an open-source project, but I know AOL will never agree to that. They'll most likely maintain and enforce their rights to it, even though they won't be developing or providing it for download anymore.
 
I stull use XMMS under Linux just about every day. The interface is a clone of the Winamp 2.x interface, it's even compatible with the same skins. I'm sure if there is a strong enough call for a Winamp-like replacement on Windows, the code could be ported. It's a GTK app, and /that/ has already been ported.

Aside from bugfix/security (which shouldn't be an issue with a music player really), what continued development needs to happen? Formats have been stable for a very long time, and can be extended with plugins.
 
I thought there already were some open source clones of winamp (xamp?) but can't remember the name. Interesting news though. I guess it's all free again? In all honesty I stopped using winamp after it went 32-bit and became sluggish as hell (v1.65?). Afterwards I just sorta stopped using it completely or use older versions. Speaking of which you can probably still pull down the older ones if that old-version.com site or whatever it was called is still valid.
 
The bigger loss will be of the other resources on the website, namely the databases of plug-ins and skins.
 
At least it lasted a lot longer than Sonique did... but as soon as AOL took over, things started going downhill. They shot themselves in the foot with the disastrous Winamp version 3, which was a resource hog and was incompatible with all existing skins and plugins. Version 5 fixed those problems, but has failed to make improvements where needed, and instead has added a lot of junk features nobody uses (who cares about playing videos or burning CDs in WinAmp, when there are other programs which do those things 10 times better?).

I also remember when they released a new verison (5.3-something) which was no longer compatible with Windows 9x, but they forgot to tell anyone about that change. The installer would work fine in Windows 98, but as soon as you tried to run WinAmp, it would just crash... and if you installed it on top of a previous version, you were screwed, as you'd have to reinstall it from scratch to get the old version back.
 
vwestlife said:
I'd like to see the further development of WinAmp handed off to an open-source project, but I know AOL will never agree to that.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, now it seems that the exact opposite might happen: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/21/source-microsoft-in-talks-to-buy-shoutcast-and-winamp-from-aol/

Sad state of affairs. Winamp, with all of its flexibility, support for tons of obscure media formats, and years of development, has managed to remain a beacon of sanity and efficiency amongst media players - yes, even in its 5.x incarnations. Unlike the bloatware that people inflict on their machines these days (e.g. iTunes: ten times Winamp's size, and proportionally more resource-hungry).

The lead developer has announced his intention to continue developing plugins for the just-released final version, but if it all gets bought by MS, that might just get buried too.
 
This is depressing, I've been a loyal WinAmp user since 1998. It's the best audio player you can get. Small, unobstrusive as far as screen real estate, powerful, and best of all light on resources.
 
Where do you get the older versions (Win95/98 for example)? Figured I would download and archive it.
 
Unknown_K said:
Where do you get the older versions (Win95/98 for example)? Figured I would download and archive it.
Click to expand...

That oldapps.com site above has versions that will run. That's actually what my friends and I used to keep. I used to burn a copy onto a cd with backups of my cds (mp3) then make a local playlist file and could play it all on a work computer without installing any program as well as keep my mp3 archive in a useful format that was compatible with other players and mp3 cdrom players.

All I remember is somewhere around 1.5 it became bloated then later versions you had to watch for bundled crap which was annoying as &@#%.
 
The bundles are annoying, but how do you define bloated? I'm using 5.65 and playing an mp3 right now, it's using less than 5 MB of RAM. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
 
Version 3 of Winamp was a fiasco, and they were fourteen years late delivering a Mac version. Still it was one of the few pieces of usable modern software, and given AOL's track record (Netscape *cough*cough*) I'm amazed they let it live and linger as long as they did.

I doubt the news will be of much practical consequence. It isn't as though the MP3 file format changes à la Quicktime or PDF, and it isn't as though old versions will suddenly self-destruct the instant winamp.com goes down.
 
On my systems at the time (probably between 200Mhz and 450Mhz) that version became quite slow and memory intensive. It could lag sometimes and I found it annoying while the lighter older versions didn't have that issue. On today's current hardware I'm sure it's not a problem other than the stated crapware but for me it was really just the comparison of performance on now obsolete hardware that I used to run it on.
 
I've always downloaded the "Lite" version of Winamp to avoid all of the frills it otherwise comes bundled with. It's still available, but they've made it more difficult to find on the web site.
 
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