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Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

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Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#71

Post by threeio »

gonesilent wrote: post #60
rickcarlino wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/

It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.

I remember the early gnutella releases and we'd use the search history as a chatroom for the first like 24 hours before it got too saturated ;)

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#72

Post by scott01 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #50
scott01 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design.

> Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for…

From my experience, it’s very rare to see someone not using Reaper for sound design. Some use Pro Tools or Cubase, but they aren’t as common as Reaper. It really has no competition due to how easy it is to prepare dozens of assets with a single render (all with correct naming and loudness) as well as extensions that add features no other DAW has (e.g. Global Sampler, stuff by LKC Tools, etc.).

It’s not very good for music, though, so here, the situation is a bit more diverse. So yes, I’m talking concretely about sound design.

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#73

Post by spacechild1 »

SyneRyder wrote: post #14

For those who might not know: > With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar... I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download: https://www.reaper.fm/ The installer fo…

REAPER is awesome! It has been my DAW of choice for 15 years now. It opens instantly, it's very fast and snappy and it practically never crashes.

I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.

You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.

You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.

You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.

You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.

In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#74

Post by abhiyerra »

gonesilent wrote: post #65
rickcarlino wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you blogged about this or written it down? I would love to hear more about this piece of history and it seems that the history is slowly fading.

Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.

Oh man infrasearch. With Gene Kan right? Was trying to revive xcf at Berkeley with some friends.

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#75

Post by jimmyjazz14 »

SyneRyder wrote: post #14

For those who might not know: > With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar... I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download: https://www.reaper.fm/ The installer fo…

Glad to see a shout-out for Reaper in the first comments, its my favorite DAW and I've used them all.

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#76

Post by LocalH »

embedding-shape wrote: post #50
scott01 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design.

> Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for…

Harmonix uses REAPER for authoring Rock Band and Fortnite Festival charts and syncing them to the stems

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#77

Post by ruszki »

Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#78

Post by samplatt »

ecliptik wrote: post #20

My favorite Nullsoft software that came out the end of this era was WASTE [1]. Peer-to-peer (back when P2P was all the rage), encrypted, decentralized private networks. Group of friends and I used it post-college as a way to share files and chat, and was much better than AIM or other instant messaging at the time. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

WASTE became popular in our area just as LANning was ending its heyday. Even now I think the whole course of technology could have been altered if WASTE was utilised in a "corporate VPN" fashion, instead of the rise of Juniper routers and Sharepoint spaces, we could have had much simpler secure work-collaboration protocols.

Re: Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

#80

Post by cornholio »

g8oz wrote: post #49
p2detar wrote: post #45

Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield. What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also,…

I worked with both Installshield and NSIS and vastly prefered the latter, it just got the job done.

I used to do the CodeWarrior installer for Freescale/NXP embedded product lines in the 2010s and InstallShield became completely unworkable as a tool for a massive dev tool. Even today, a 400MB+ installer is difficult, let alone in the age of mechanical HDDs.

I had to choose between NSIS and Wix - and while native installer formats were clearly the future even back then, the performance and compression advantages of NSIS were so great that it was a clear choice. Solid LZMA was simply impossible to beat by any deflate/zlib/mszip oriented tool.

The joy of the dev team was palpable, the new installer was about 60% smaller and installed in one third the time.

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