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Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

winamp.com

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Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#91
post #80

I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes. At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported. This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me. Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world.

Why winamp? my understanding is that it's long been surpassed by other apps, i.e. foobar, even VLC

I have used it for all these years because it "just works". I have 2 needs in a music player - play whatever I have locally, and stream me something different when I want to. Winamp did both of those, and I never had an issue with it.

It is hard to "surpass" something that meets my needs perfectly and has given me no issues for over 10 years.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#92
post #54
post #33

Wow, the end of an era. Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and fast to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing. I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most people consume musi…

> I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality. I've been off windows for a few years now but I used to use Media Monkey ( http://www.mediamonkey.com/ ) for managing a very large collection of poorly tagged music I'd collected over the years, lots of live recordings and whatnot. It's definitely not as clean a playe…

For a multiplatform solution, I used a MusicBrainz Picard client for batch autoidentification and ID3 correction. However currently I feel that I wasted too many hours of my life hoarding and caring for a local mp3/soulseek library and nowadays only listen to online music.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#93
post #12

Thank you Justin Frankel for this wonderfully whimsical piece of software and all the code you have shared over the years. I wouldn't have been a programmer if it weren't for you being providing such a stellar role model.

Amen! Winamp was not only whimsical, but also one of the first widely adopted catalysts to the rise of the digital economy.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#95
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because the codebase stinks and releasing it would end up in multiple vulnerability discoveries.

As @thinkpad20 said. I bet there are a lot of people that would fix things, provided it is not systemic design errors that would require global refactoring.

The original developers all departed in 2003/2004, winamp has been maintained / extended by whomever AOL could find to work on it for about a decade now. That doesn't bode terribly well for the current state of the code base.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#97
post #66

Brings up a great question: What are the alternatives to Winamp? (No iTunes please)

Tomahawk. http://www.tomahawk-player.org/ Foobar2k. http://www.foobar2000.org/

Thanks for the Tomahawk recommendation - it was very nearly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately it does not support the Mac Play/Pause/etc keys. I'm staggered that such an otherwise well put together application lacks such basic functionality.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#98

I always used Winamp on Windows, so when I switched to Linux I tried basically every single open-source alternative that worked with my workflow: Per-song ratings, a nested Genre/Artist/Album/Song library browser, global hotkeys, able to handle a collection of >100 GB and a useful playlist/queue system. For anyone else looking for the same thing: the one that I ended up choosing was http://gmusicbrowser.org/ . See ht…

I did the same thing, ended up with cmus: http://cmus.sourceforge.net/

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#99

Brings up a great question: What are the alternatives to Winamp? (No iTunes please)

Clementine is a great multi-platform open-source clone of Amarok 1.4.x. A little different from the old Winamp/XMMS "tape deck" feel, but very responsive and light with many modern features.

Another vote for Clementine. Nice, clean audio player, with the right number of features.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#100

I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes. At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported. This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me. Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world.

> This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud

Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud. You can have a consistent music library and can use any player client-side. Personally I prefer the spotify "all-you-can-listen" model, but I have a bunch of MP3s that aren't on spotify that I seamlessly stream from dropbox (either to winamp or the spotify client, which allows you to sync local files).

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