Live data from Hacker News

Winamp source code leak

web.archive.org

291–300 of 338 posts

Re: Winamp source code leak

#292

I might be alone here but I still have Winamp on my Windows computers. From my 100 MHz pentium 1 to my bazillion core Ryzen, the only constant has been Winamp. Whether it was playing back mp3s, internet radio or ripping discs, it worked. I like the familiarity. Foobar and Clementine just feel so alien, I could never get used to them. Maybe it’s the compact, floaty UI, which first hog the entire screen. I’ve since swi…

I never even accept the iTunes TOS on any MacBook I purchase. I just refuse to let it run.

Re: Winamp source code leak

#294
post #186
post #120

I just can’t understand the point of the DMCA takedown here. This software is very dead and abandoned at this point, and the only thing bearing its name is vaporware that appears to be so distant from the original as to effectively not even compete with it. 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 commerci…

It's very likely about the brand and trademarks. The WinAmp software is dead, but the brand is alive and there is a company trying to build something under it.

Brand loyalty/trust is gone and companies wonder why... (Slight tangent; I believe Mozilla are tarnishing the Firefox name this way as well with firefox branded this and that.)

Re: Winamp source code leak

#295

I might be alone here but I still have Winamp on my Windows computers. From my 100 MHz pentium 1 to my bazillion core Ryzen, the only constant has been Winamp. Whether it was playing back mp3s, internet radio or ripping discs, it worked. I like the familiarity. Foobar and Clementine just feel so alien, I could never get used to them. Maybe it’s the compact, floaty UI, which first hog the entire screen. I’ve since swi…

I'm using Winamp on my Surface Pro 6, switched from foobar2000 for the Media Library feature. (I've been also using Winamp in my teens starting with the first versions up until last ones, then stopped listening to local music files).

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.

Re: Winamp source code leak

#296
post #55

Honest question, as someone who actually used Winamp back in ~2004: why would you want to use it now? 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.

Winamp has a media library feature, it can keep track of what you're listening to and builds playlists of your most listened and top rated tracks. Quite handy.

Re: Winamp source code leak

#297

I nearly got a job with them back around 2001. At the time they were revamping their development group. 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.

> It looks like the new lead developer wanted to rewrite everything. Using all kinds of object-oriented methodologies.

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.

Re: Winamp source code leak

#298
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should have infrastructure for sharing things like this without putting a centralized entity like archive.org in the crosshairs. Bittorrent comes to mind, but it could only be part of the solution.

All archive.org items have a torrent file, so even if IA goes down you can still download the item from seeders.

This isn't an archive.org item strictly speaking, just a page on the wayback machine. I'm not sure you can download it.

Re: Winamp source code leak

#299
post #92

I still remembers all those crazy music visualizations. It was rarely seen these days. Someone should make a WebGL version.

Is there any literature on how to write those? 2D graphics is kind of obscure but designing/making those is even more obscure.

Re: Winamp source code leak

#300
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If memory serves, the update from 2.x to 3.x was the one were suddenly skins no longer worked and they decided to base the program around a db instead of the file system. Which is not that bad (though still strictly inferior to file based) in modern cell phones, but at a time when computers were a lot slower and everybody had organized their music library around files instead of metadata it was a bloody disaster.

I dunno... Libraries were a revolution for me. If I remember correctly, that was around the time I briefly switched to iTunes for its library features. The ability to start typing and instantly see a list of song matches was great. The problem with the WinAMP library was that it wasn't that good. If course iTunes turned into a bloated mess too, and I ended up on foobar2000 for years.

Foobar2000 is even available on iOS -- although it doesn't really fit all that well in the new stramiong-focused ecosystem I guess.
Post reply on HN