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Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#13
I still use it every day!

Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music.

My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it is no longer possible to run on Windows, probably.

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#14

I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…

I'm in the same boat. I worry, though, that the move to streaming means that the days of controlling my own music library are numbered.

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#15

I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…

Same here.

I wish it was open sourced. That way we could fix the bugs and make sure it runs on newer operating systems.

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#16
post #2

What's going on at Ars Technica? Between this (a straight-up repeat from 2012 with no obvious reason to bring it back now), and reblogging Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian articles from the same time frame (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-... and http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/ ), have they cut their budget for new writing?

[deleted]

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#17

I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…

pirated != space shifting.

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#18
post #15

I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…

Same here. I wish it was open sourced. That way we could fix the bugs and make sure it runs on newer operating systems.

I stopped using it because it had a slow memory leak. I monitored the process in windows and it grew 4kb every second or so.

But yeah... fun times.

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#19

I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…

[deleted]

Re: Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

#20

I still use it every day! Of course this means most of my music is pirated (I tend to buy a physical album and then download a well-ripped or digital copy) but I've found it hard to move to other ways of managing my music. My own way of organizing and collecting makes sense to me and pretty much no one else, but that's fine since hardly anyone else ever wants to use my computer to play music. I'll use Winamp until it…

While I've surely "pirated" plenty of audio files in my day, I wouldn't say the majority of mine are like that. Most are ripped from the hundreds (no exaggeration) of CDs I bought new and used all through high school and college or purchased from Amazon, etc.

Still, pirated or not, I like having a space on my NAS for my traditional Music/Artist/Album/[track]_[title].mp3 folder structure. Pointing Winamp at it works fine for the majority of my listening at home.

Of course I've come a long way from running an unlicensed Shoutcast station in the early 2000's (it was nice having a friend who worked at a small hosting company who gave me the space to host the server and all the bandwidth I could need to stream to my massive audience of maybe 5 or 6 people at once ;)) but I still love listening to streaming "radio" in the car without any need for subscriptions or any hardware other than my phone. I've been doing it since I had a Palm Treo, but the move from a max data rate of ~256k/sec to LTE has certainly helped.

Only thing I really miss these days in Winamp is a way to cast to Chromecast/Chromecast audio in other parts of the house. Not sure if anyone's hacked together a plugin but I haven't really looked.

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