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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

#131

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

"It really whips the lama's ass" What an era.

Winamp's goodbye might go in a similar fashion to Sonique's. Slowly and quietly. Sonique was a music player that was bought for about $20 million by Lycos (back in the dot com bubble days) and then shut down after it plateau'd in development and execs realized "dude, it's just a media player". It had a huge community (but no where near as big as Winamp's) and literally a TON (hundreds and hundreds of pages) of really amazing skins and visualization plugins. The site was shut down without much notice.

You can still download the lastest stable versions of Sonique on a fan site and it'll still work. I have a feeling that's how Winamp will be. Unless the developers release the source code.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#132

Post by amag »

caycep wrote: post #80
jaysonelliot wrote: post #74

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

In my experience VLC eats a lot more CPU for just playing the same songs. While I like VLC for movie-files, Winamp is nicer when it comes to music.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#133

Post by evanmoran »

The magic moment was when we all realized, pretty much simultaneously, that CDs and radio were obsolete. And this wasn't from some iterative Moore's Law like growth in hard drive size, it was sudden algorithmic brilliance that allowed music to be compressed small enough to be easily downloaded and shared. Suddenly digital distribution seemed inevitable and obvious. We could listen to whole collections of songs very, very fast. Old bands became popular, and we would sit around for hours playing song after amazing song for our friends. Winamp was the app that made it possible. The skins let us change its look to fit us better, and its music visualizations were an awesome backdrop for parties. A great app and a great time.

We live in the future.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#134

Post by mih »

jay_m wrote: post #124
caycep wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The main reason I use Winamp is because it has global keyboard shortcuts for controlling playback. I'm not sure if any other media players have that, if anyone knows of one that does I would love to know.

try foobar

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#135

Post by venomsnake »

bbx wrote: post #36

Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95, which is allegedly the best version out there. Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple . I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience. Me: Can't I pause that song by hitting space? WMP: No, there are no keyboard short…

Give AIMP a shot. Same as winamp2 but with built in flac and cue support.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#136

Post by znowi »

Oh, memories. I've been using Winamp for at least 10 years. I still have a Netscape skin for the legacy version (came out with Netscape Navigator, I believe). Yes, Winamp was the audio player back then.

I switched to Winamp lite when they started adding "bloat" features like media library, video playback, etc. It plays music and it does it awesomely. It's likely I'll be using it for 10 more years.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#137

Post by mathieuh »

rm999 wrote: post #100
jaysonelliot wrote: post #74

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 lo…

I think they complement each other rather than directly compete with each other. I have all my files stored locally, but I also have them all uploaded to Google Music so I can listen to them on my phone. Even if Google Music shuts down, I have local copies.
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