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Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

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Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#41
post #14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole generation of a potentially interested audience who was not yet aware of Nullsoft in 2004.

A generation who can't imagine the novelty of performing a first search on Napster or Direct Connect. Magic!

Audiogalaxy. Was always impressed how easy it was to find 320kbit versions or even some extremely rare songs...

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#42

I still use winamp as my mp3 player, one of the first things I install when I reinstall my Windows. It's everything that I need without the BS.

I'm also a fan of Foobar2000: not as pretty, but surpremely small and functional :)

There's no accounting for taste. I found Winamp gaudy, and actually preferred Foobar. The black theme was quite nice once the font colour was changed to off-white.

I cannot recommend Foobar enough, the tools for fixing up dodgy mp3s are very useful. It isn't so hot with mp4 tags though.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#43
post #15
post #11

Man I would kill for an ultra-simple, ultra-lightweight, robust music player for macOS that was just like Winamp 2.81, the last good version. No, not foobar.

"Ultra-lightweight" can mean two very different (and nearly opposite) things: some people want a player that has no external dependencies (and thus must do everything itself, like VLC); while others want a player with minimal binary size (which thus will then rely on the OS's AV frameworks as much as possible for media support.) Personally, I prefer the second definition, but it's the harder of the two to satisfy. I…

> I don't really understand why the approach Perian undertook was abandoned when Perian itself was.

Perian's approach was to implement additional codec/container support as a QuickTime component. QuickTime has been deprecated for several years, and AVFoundation doesn't provide any component or plugin interface for 3rd parties to add codecs.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#44
post #11

Man I would kill for an ultra-simple, ultra-lightweight, robust music player for macOS that was just like Winamp 2.81, the last good version. No, not foobar.

I would suggest checking out Swinsian http://swinsian.com and Audirvana https://audirvana.com for alternative mac audio players.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#45
Winamp was a great, music player back in my day that combined features with great, skinnable appearance and visualizations that could leave you in a trance. Plus it had a funnier opening than the competition at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaF-nRS_CWM

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#46

NSIS (created also by Nullsoft) was particularly awesome, made it a breeze to build a Windows installer. There was also a photo gallery script Justin created which I thought was ahead of its time back then.

That was good. I remember using it over Visual Studio a few times. One of those things that shows you that your main vendor is making things way more complicated than they need to be.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#47
post #14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole generation of a potentially interested audience who was not yet aware of Nullsoft in 2004.

A generation who can't imagine the novelty of performing a first search on Napster or Direct Connect. Magic!

Whippersnapper. Back in my day, we searched for MP3s on anonymous FTP sites via oth.net!

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I didn't know he made licecap as well. As far as gif recordings go, it really whips the llamas ass!

Licecap definitely changed how I worked. If you want the rest of your frontend development team to think you're a god, include licecap or other gifs of features/bugfixes on code reviews. It's a thing most developers don't even think of doing (at least most didn't in my experience). Makes it easy for stake holders (if they're allowed near your code reviews/tickets/whatever), devs, qa, to easily see how functionality h…

I'd like to give an honorable mention to Debugmode Wink [0] which for a long time was my go-to freeware application for recording and presenting screen-activity on Windows.

[0] http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#49

For what it's worth, Justin Frankel continues to produce great software. He founded Cockos Incorporated, which produces REAPER; I think it's pretty widely accepted in the audio recording community that REAPER is the best value in the multitrack recording DAW market, and among the best overall tools for the purpose. He's obviously wealthy enough to never need to work again. It's clear Frankel just loves music, and wan…

He was a regular in #c on IRC back in the 90s. Pleasant, fun guy. I kind of miss those days.

Me too, back then, programming was more about having fun and less about striking it rich building walled garden commercial software that tricks more people into clicking on ads.

Re: Nullsoft: The death of the last maverick tech company (2004)

#50
post #36

For what it's worth, Justin Frankel continues to produce great software. He founded Cockos Incorporated, which produces REAPER; I think it's pretty widely accepted in the audio recording community that REAPER is the best value in the multitrack recording DAW market, and among the best overall tools for the purpose. He's obviously wealthy enough to never need to work again. It's clear Frankel just loves music, and wan…

I agree, REAPER is very highly regarded in music production circles. Anecdotically, I have been producing electronic music as a hobby for many years now, and while I own much more expensive programs (e.g. Ableton Live Suite which cost a staggering AU $999) I find REAPER to be an extremely enjoyable piece of software and I have found myself using it often.

I wouldn't really consider it a competitor to Ableton Live, though there's some overlap. But, as a competitor to Pro Tools, it's hard for me to think of anything even in the same ball park as REAPER (and REAPER costs a fraction of what Pro Tools costs, as well). I use FL Studio or Renoise for the stuff that people use Ableton for; but, REAPER blows them all away for recording live musicians and then mixing the resulting tracks.

The term "DAW" has too many uses, and it can be confusing. REAPER is a Pro Tools competitor (and a good one). Ableton can be used for multitrack recording of live musicians, but I don't know of any studios that use it for that, unless their focus is on electronic production with some live music added on top. And, REAPER can be used for electronic productions and loop-based composition and live performance (and there's even a UI for REAPER that makes it act more like Ableton), but it's not its raison d'être.

If you're composing and performing predominantly electronic music in-the-box, then Ableton or others might be a better choice. But, if you're recording live musicians, REAPER is amazing. There can be some useful interoperation between them, as well. Live can plug into REAPER, so you can sync up your Live performance with your REAPER tracks, and produce a hybrid work. REAPER may be stronger for mastering, as well, depending on how you like to work.

Traditional recording engineers, who learned in a studio with tape and hardware mixers and patch bays, will be quickly comfortable with REAPER. The same can not be said of Ableton Live (or FL Studio, etc.). But, musicians who grew up on synths, sequencers and beat machines with sequencers (like 303, 808, etc.), may find the Ableton approach more intuitive. Both are high quality tools doing a very good job in their niche. REAPER just happens to be so good at such a low price that it stands out as exceptional and worth praise, IMHO.

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