It includes a skin that allows it to work on modern display resolutions. It's really interesting to see just how low-res screens were when it was in it's hey-day, given that they are nearly unusable on a 4k monitor.
Edit: I was too young to remember the releases, but replies are indicating that version 5 was in fact, not the most popular :P
Question: so when you say folks are trying to keep the "last version" alive, which version are you referring too since later versions weren’t loved.
(None of this is important today, I guess)
I had to install milkdrop separately to WinAmp, but honestly, after reinstalling Windows 98 every 72 hours back in the bad old days, it kinda felt natural. Nostalgic.
Despite how powerful modern computers are, I still notice how much lighter 2.x is than 3.x.
I'm guessing they went with version 5, since it looks like versions after that might have been a full rewrite?
It's just... the complete opposite of what Winamp was all about, and it's horrible and leaves a bad taste in your mouth (-100 points for the atrocious "modern" website which loads MBs of Javascript, screams BIG TEXT at you, hijacks your scroll wheel, and still tells you nothing about the actual software other than it will probably suck. Oh and another -100 points for that cookie popup.)
The incorrect hyphen is just irritating as well.
That's... almost impressive in how bad that is. I didn't know a website COULD lock up an entire system in this day and age.
I do. 2.95 works fine right up to Windows 10 and probably 11, and still plays any MP3 and pretty much any other format with a plug-in. It even has a double-size display option built right in which makes it perfectly usable on modern 4k resolution.
This reminds me of the realization that modern MacOS apps can have icon sizes larger than the original Mac's screen- 512x512 icons vs. 512x384 monochrome screen.
I'm making something that I want to use (essentially a compatible implementation for my plug-ins to run under) & if it's of use to others then that's a bonus.
At no point has WACUP claimed to be 100% OSS nor should I be expected to do that when I'm the only one working on my Winamp reimplementation. Aspects that need to be done that way are done so accordingly.
-dro
The thing that I liked about Winamp that stopped being cool were visualizations. net Audio player nowaday are so bland and featureless (including Spotify, Tidal, Deezer and others I've tried).
TIL - Audacious was a fork of XMMS!
Monitor size/resolution has gotten larger which is some of the factor but I think people downplay the shift in common effective DPI which leads to a much bigger perceived change in UI sizing design than there really has been. In the late 90s to early 2000s an effective DPI of 75-85 for a typical home user was not uncommon. Nowadays an effective DPI of 125-135 is pretty standard, many tech folk using an effective DPI of 150 because it gives the effect of having more workspace.
So what may have looked like a half physical inch wide UI element on a standard user's display in the late 90s might look like a quarter inch wide UI element on many HN reader's screens today because nobody likes to set their DPI properly :p.
When WinAmp was big, typical resolution was 1024x768 (XGA). Wikipedia has a nice comparison image to give you a sense of how tiny that was compared to 4K:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#/media/File...
- running WACUP on Windows 10 for ARM on a Raspberry Pi 4 is now a known to work configuration
- Changed the shared metadata handling to do a better job in skipping trying to process requests for metadata requests that are always going to fail before triggering relatively time consuming calls
- Changed how the CD playback plug-in initialises itself to minimise the delays on loading that it can cause
- Fixed a crash when retrieving the raw lyrics data from a file's metadata tag on opening the Alt + 3 / View File Info dialog
-dro
also the classic modern skin is great
Of course, the copyright holders have every legal right to do so. But doesn’t it seem pointless? This codebase probably has more historical interest than commercial by now. Am I missing something?
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/07/2021-07-0...
I'll make the assumption that the founders have zero financial interest in Winamp. What's the point of exerting IP rights if you have nothing to gain financially... is it pride? A latent desire to stagnate innovation? Making other peoples' lives harder because yours was too? Who knows?
Considering there are some references to cloud https://web.archive.org/web/20210418220750/https://github.co... I'm going to go ahead and guess that it's new.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
I have some nostalgia for it, sure, but what exactly does it actually offer you that something like VLC doesn't? It seems like it plays my music and videos competently enough, and I don't know anyone who actually uses Shoutcast anymore.
This isn't a passive aggressive dig or anything, I would actually like to know.
It was so good that I literally put an old desktop computer in the trunk of my car in 2000 (with eggshell foam bungee-corded around the hard drives for shock absorption) and ran a long keyboard wire to the drivers seat and I could queue up any song at all while driving with one hand without taking eyes off the road or hands off the wheel. When the computer booted, it loaded winamp with the full playlist and so the only user interaction was pressing the power button (mounted in my dash) and pressing 'j' to search and play.
I've never found this capability in e.g. VLC or anything else (maybe for the best ;). Am I missing it?
Why continue the search for perfection once it's been found?
I'll use Foobar2000 and VLC from time to time (Foobar's conversion and bulk tagging are great). I've tried using them full-time instead of Winamp, but they just don't feel right.
EDIT: I love how there's an 'active playlist' of what's playing now, and additional saved playlists in the library, and can move/copy entries between them. It's probably accidental design of adding a library later, but I haven't found another player that shows multiple playlists side-by-side without customizing it into something else.
1. Playback rate control, affecting both speed and pitch (like in a record player) 2. A bs2b transform 3. My own custom overdrive effect
I could skip the 3rd one, but the first two already greatly narrows down what I can use.
Clementine/Strawberry have issues with large libraries or just skip tracks
Spotify is cloud, automatically eliminated there
VLC Player gets used for porn and videos
Winamp quietly Just Works(tm), it scans all my songs, plays them, and is great for tag grooming and setting ReplayGain levels
What else is there?
Is there any other alternative I can try?
1) Global hotkeys to navigate through my playlists, enqueue songs, control playback etc. Also the global pop-up window (Ctrl+Alt+J) with my current playlist has a really fast search function as I type. Only 'Everything' has faster search. Otherwise modern apps have very slow searches.
2) Milkdrop 2. I have a very large curated collection of visualization presets for Milkdrop 2. This is not something I use when I'm behind the computer, but it's awesome to have running on some screens during a party as the visualizations are in sync with the music.
I don't know you, but I use a shoutcast based premium streaming service. Free tier has to use the official apps or the web. Winamp is still perfect for this; it loads quickly, my playlist has the couple of stations I want to listen to, etc. Foobar2000 works pretty well too, but llamas. VLC could work, but I don't think it starts as fast, and there are so many updates to install.
Every music player now has some shitty cloud integration that I have to ignore.
The playlist manager was top notch. 10 times better than itunes.
Literally never needs updated, until this leak at least...
It looks great.
What else do you need? :)
I had written some plug-ins for Winamp so I familiar with the plug-in structure. It looks like the new lead developer wanted to rewrite everything. Using all kinds of object-oriented methodologies. The older code was all C based and very simple. I wasn’t fan of the new direction.
Pretty sure the original author hung out in #winprog (EFnet IRC), I wasn't a great Windows programmer but I remember him showing off how he created the skinnable interface and everything. I also remember spending a half hour downloading a Rob Zombie MP3, using Winamp to play it, and wondering what the big deal was :)
A tale as old as time.
I had that experience with Aegisub; there's always a lot of real work to do on video and subtitles, but whenever I looked at the IRC channel the developer was thinking of new C++y ways to abstract the factory visitors.
I recall then that even new PC's couldn't decode at full CD quality and you had to downscale. We also picked which songs to download locally based on their size
Spiderbait's song "Calypso" was probably the most popular mp3 download in '97 since it was only 2.5MB and a lot of people just wanted to try this new mp3 thing everybody was talking about.
The decoder Winamp used was actually amp - developed by Tomislav Uzelac[1]. I can't remember how he dodged patent issues, but he had his name and an ask for donations in the about box of v1 iirc.
Winamp owe a lot to amp - the first version was essentially a skin + port of his library to Windows. I'm pretty certain Winamp v2 also used amp, just as it was blowing up to become the most downloaded program online.
Nullsoft and Justin were absolute legends. He wrote an AOL ad removal / blocking tool and WASTE while at AOL. I can't think of any similar startup or subsidiary today that has even close to the attitude / courage they had.
A combination of limited hard drive space + sad dialup speeds prevented me from actually downloading the entire discog before the eventual shutdown in 98 or 99-ish.
I remember pentium 90's struggling to play mp3's on Win95/98 while at uni. They would play but you couldn't do much else otherwise they would stutter. Even minimizing and maximizing the mp3 player would cause stuttering.
I also remember being so thrilled to be able to store several MP3's on my 64mb Sharp Zaurus SL-5600.
Was on par with a 90 Mhz Pentium for integer processing, IIRC, so MP3 playback didn't drag the system to a halt, though it was still a noticeable impact on performance.
What really dragged the performance down was when I'd try to run 3D Studio MAX at the same time. I had 24 MB of RAM, and the installer warned that they did not recommend running with less than 48 MB, which was an absurd number for a home user at the time.
My condolences.
Hopefully that will never happen.
In some aspect Archive.org is better than some private torrent trackers
Archive.org can't just ignore a DMCA takedown, that would threaten their safe haven status.
However, the goals of Filecoin seem to be right up this alley. Distribute file storage among billions of users where the more you host and help the swarm, the more coins you earn.
Last I checked (about a month ago) there was still no way to "help the swarm" without having a ridiculous set up but I imagine someone with more experience will correct me.
I’ve since switched to mainly macOS but iTunes feels awful and sluggish in comparison, especially with Apple Music, I hate even starting it.
It's an amazing low resource player. The YouTube playlists I'm listening to in Firefox consume 1.6GB of RAM and significant CPU, the downloaded opus files with Winamp take up a few megs of RAM (and bunch of disk space on my SD card).
I tried WACUP but it doesn't work well for me. Very complicated UI, too many settings, it also corrupted my real Winamp library.
Regarding the leak - perhaps the founders aren't happy with the direction of the app in the upcoming release (we can notice the ugly website update) so they may have leaked the code. Great news.
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=16613.0
https://web.archive.org/web/20031210093403/http://www.wasabi...
Seems nobody cared at the time. Never heard of a community springing up around it, and you can hardly find it now. Got it in my archives somewhere.
-dro
The source seem to have been on trac on wasabi.t0x.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060508052407/http://wasabi.t0x...
And this might be the same on github: https://github.com/bizzehdee/wasabi/blob/49d293042ce17b0d137...
Fair to say: doesn't look like it's related to winamp and doesn't look very complete.
It still seems to be free to download though? What is even the point of keeping the code closed?
- what do you mean by "miners" in this context? Malicious contributors sneaking crypto-mining logic into the codebase?
- doesn't the concern about Trojans and spyware affect every other open-source project in existence? How have they been protecting against that, and why couldn't the Winamp maintainers take similar measures?
It was rarely seen these days. Someone should make a WebGL version.
Apparently it was a Wesley Willis reference, too, which just makes it 1000x better.
Not sure what happens on Windows systems nowadays but I always include Winamp 2.95 as part of the Windows installation that I do for family/buddies ... I just change the default 'ugly as fuck' theme to something usable and nice appealing :)
The problem I have with most "modern" players is that they seem to want to be a total music library manager, insisting on doing it all based on their interpretation of the metadata in your files. I'm never happy with this experience, so I'd rather something that lets me simply pick music from a directory structure I decided on an organization scheme for.
These days I mostly listen to soma.fm (you can use mplayer for their feeds[0]) or youtube in browser
[0] A small gist I am super proud of as I don't write much bash: https://gist.github.com/tomrod/0b5caceec1a10acfb134aefb5fd85...
-dro
