Fun fact: the catchphrase "Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass!" was inspired by Wesley Willis.
RIP. A true visionary in the vocal vamp arena and a gem of Chicago's North Side sidewalk synthesizer music scene.
Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#22On the Mac, if you long for a Winamp-style player, try Vox.
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#23On the Mac, if you long for a Winamp-style player, try Vox.
Vox has been a great music player with constant updates over the months. I don't know what other music players would satisfy my need on OSX.
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#24On the Mac, if you long for a Winamp-style player, try Vox.
[deleted]
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#25So basically, a corporation bought a company they had no idea how to run, ran it into the ground pursuing monetization that worked elsewhere (kind of). This sounds like every acquisition between 97 and 05.
I wonder how many great products were destroyed by the big corporations attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole, and failing every time?
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#26“When you think about what AOL had in early 2000,” he told Ars, “the only thing that they were missing that [would be] essential to today’s media system is a hardware device. They had the number one software for playing [in Winamp], and in theory, although not in practice, the [Time Warner] content library that could have been a pioneer in streaming. And a radio service. It had all the elements. AOL could have been Spotify, it could have been Pandora.”
Winamp was one of my favorite programs. It was really fast, took very little memory and was really easy to use.
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#27I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…
I love(d) winamp... but I run more mac and linux lately.. the android player was about the best audio player out there. I was really sad to see winamp shuttered. I wish it could have been open-sourced/ported, because frankly the competition still isn't great.
Of course, these days I rely more on spotify and pandora, but the winamp streaming ability was always great, and it upset me when more online stations moved away from the generic, usable mp3 streams to more esoteric solutions.
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#28It's simple. They sold themselves to AOL.
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#29What's going on at Ars Technica? Between this (a straight-up repeat from 2012 with no obvious reason to bring it back now), and reblogging Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian articles from the same time frame (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-... and http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/ ), have they cut their budget for new writing?
They probably spent too much in two failed redesigns.
Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)
#30I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…
I love(d) winamp... but I run more mac and linux lately.. the android player was about the best audio player out there. I was really sad to see winamp shuttered. I wish it could have been open-sourced/ported, because frankly the competition still isn't great. Of course, these days I rely more on spotify and pandora, but the winamp streaming ability was always great, and it upset me when more online stations moved awa…
Similar story to me I used winamp in the '90's but then moved to Linux. I've used a few different programs, xmms, Amarok, Audacious. I even used VLC for a while to play MP3's. Not a fan of any of those programs.
Nowadays I use whatever is the Gnome default - Rhythmbox currently.