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Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

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Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#331

Post by kepano »

Before I knew the word “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse[1], still shows up on their site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish. It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would use.

Saddest to me, is that I can’t think of today’s equivalent, a widespread and useful app that encourages its users to tinker and easily modify the interface.

[1] http://www.winamp.com/skin/impulse/142212

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#332

Post by decode »

criley2 wrote: post #316
MetaCosm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AHK ( http://www.autohotkey.com/ ) -- Global keybindings for any app you want.

Out of curiosity: I use AHK to do basic testing automation for a windows application that I have literally zero ability to control programatically (to achieve actually good automated testing). Anyone have a better option for this kind of use case?

AutoIt is a popular choice:

http://www.autoitscript.com/

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#333

Post by adamwong246 »

fletchowns wrote: post #205
smrtinsert wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much lost when moving to the cloud. Off the top of my head: You tie your data to one provider instead of simply physical media, you lose discoverability (will your kids browse your album choices 30 years from now?), exporting/importing quality is at the mercy of the provider (for example Amazon dropped several dozen mp3s when I migrated a few gigs to Google), and of course you place your data at the mercy…

That's why you run your own "cloud" music service. Personally I use Subsonic, and it is amazing. http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

MPD ftw

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#334

Post by jlgreco »

cookiecaper wrote: post #81
washedup wrote: post #50

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.

I use to love Amarok back in the 1.4.x days, but after Amarok messed everything up with 2.0, I swore it off and wrote my own XMMS2 client. Clementine wasn't out yet and I decided that the only way to get something that I wouldn't hate would be to write it myself.

These days I just use zsh and mplayer though. Apparently all of my use-cases sum up to "play one or more albums, perhaps shuffling them first". I've given Clementine a shot, and it is quite like Amarok use to be, but now it all seems like clutter.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#335

Post by holms »

I don't know about you guys, but I've this news just ended my teenage years =( I've used winamp to store my 2TB music collection for like 10 years. yeah back then to get 2TB from 120gb hdd's was something big, but anyway, even after dragging and dropping the whole 2TB directory into winamp, it processed track by track, without destroying my ram, and my CPU. I've had a zillions (Around 10gb, it's 1-2kb per song) of modular music from: atari, c64, nds, n64, sega, ps1,2,3 and etc and etc. All of these was supported by winamp plugins. This was working perfectly, sorted in my winamp by categories/genres and various other methods. I've been really enjoying this player for all my geeky life. And now it's going way =( They could at least release and opensource. That classical design is masterpiece, I don't know any player you can beat winamp's design, unless it's xmms player in linux, which is probably also dead for a long long time. Although I'm currently residing on OSX, and I'm using iTunes to sort all my stuff, it's still not so great as Winamp. All I need is proper music indexer, and all possible music format support. What could be better is having transcoding software together with this cute player, and I'd be happy till the end of my life lol. Now I have to use only ALAC instead of FLAC, and ofcourse mp3. For converter I'm using XLD, for video VLC or mplayerx, for converting videos Handbrake. C'mon Winamp was universal tool! I belive some plugins could provide transcoding.

LET'S CRAWL WINAMP SIDE AND SAVE A HISTORY OF GREAT SOFTWARE.

Lol i think this should be in computer museum or something =/

Winamp, I'll miss you so much, I know that "justin can't code it" sometimes, but I still love all your team, your product, your efforts, Thanks for being with us with our teenhood!!!

P.s and what about winamp shoutcast? this was only ultimate radio solution in the whole web!!

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#336

Post by mikejsiegel »

kepano wrote: post #331

Before I knew the word “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse[1], still shows up on their site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish. It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would u…

Perhaps Tumblr to a certain degree? I've met some young front-end guys that cut their teeth making Tumblr themes. I suppose what you can modify with Tumblr Themes is more limited than winamp skins.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#337

Post by fddlr »

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…

I use Windows 7 WMP every day because the media keys on my laptop only work with that and I have never ever encountered any of those problems you are talking about.

- I can pause/unpause with space.

- The song order remains after I drag in the folder.

- Right after the very first start (i.e. on clean win7), it asks you if you want to see ads of songs of similar artists you listen to.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#338

Post by notJim »

sandGorgon wrote: post #41
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…

Did you ever try Foobar 2k - its arguably a better replacement for Winamp on windows

Agree about Foobar. It's about the only app from Windows that I miss when using OS X.

Anyone have a Mac player they use with similar philosophy/featureset to Foobar?

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#339

Post by npsimons »

criley2 wrote: post #316
MetaCosm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AHK ( http://www.autohotkey.com/ ) -- Global keybindings for any app you want.

Out of curiosity: I use AHK to do basic testing automation for a windows application that I have literally zero ability to control programatically (to achieve actually good automated testing). Anyone have a better option for this kind of use case?

I've used AHK for the same things - it's about the best free/open source thing I've found, besides just adding a scripting language to your program.

Re: Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

#340

Post by Helianthus »

eksith wrote: post #325
Helianthus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has an amusingly childish policy of hellbanning individuals it deems inappropriate or otherwise objectionable--hellbanning hides the banned account's comments to everyone unless you set "showdead" to true in your account preferences. Some users have started kindly informing the hellbanned posters that, for whatever reasons, don't seem to notice that no one ever responds or upvotes their comments. If I may get on m…

That's all well and good, but let's take a look at what the trigger was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5615120 . If you ran a community -- and realistically there's nothing stopping you from doing so -- would you tolerate that kind of nonsense? I know I wouldn't want to hang around there if you did. You're right (to continue going slightly meta), it's a policy of elitism, but in the same vein as Wikipedia. They…

If the mountains of downvotes don't do the trick you can ban accounts directly. Hellbanning is cowardly and ineffective.

This isn't Wikipedia, it's a discussion forum--and the discussion pages on Wikipedia are moderated fairly and openly.

I didn't mean that quality as a whole was fictional, I meant that the notion of quality this policy is attempting to enact was fictional/unattainable.

Flame wars still happen. People still complain about the nastiness of HN comments. It's a discussion forum: angry conversation is what it's for.

Hellbanning does absolutely nothing to improve 'quality of discourse,' it just makes this place nastier.

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