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Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

about.winamp.com

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Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#51

Post by TulliusCicero »

LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #3

Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it's still nice to see. Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.

Literally just yesterday I was staring at Winamp's basic visualizer because I was trying to make something similar in my Godot game.

I'm still not sure exactly what I'm missing, as I have the "gist" of the visualizer working, but it just doesn't look as smooth as Winamp's. I think I need slight persistence and the little effect with the 'caps' that slowly fall down for each column (right now mine looks too jittery).

Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#53

Post by cellularmitosis »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #47
renegade-otter wrote: post #12

I remember as a hobbyist Windows programmer (Borland C++ Builder) I was really envious of the skills required to build something like Winamp - especially the UI. Back then, advanced learning resources and examples were effectively non-existent or at least, hard to find and stitch together.

(Borland) Delphi also made creating non standard form shapes; the secret was in leveraging the win32 api, which was really easy to do in Delphi. Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm

Strange that they didn't include a single screenshot on that page.

Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#54

Post by dale_glass »

yazzku wrote: post #15
renegade-otter wrote: post #12

I remember as a hobbyist Windows programmer (Borland C++ Builder) I was really envious of the skills required to build something like Winamp - especially the UI. Back then, advanced learning resources and examples were effectively non-existent or at least, hard to find and stitch together.

The fact that you can re-skin it at runtime with such a wide variety of skins and load such a variety of plugins puts modern software to shame.

You can reskin a lot of modern software, it just went out of fashion.

Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#55

Post by babypuncher »

bcraven wrote: post #7
LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #3

Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it's still nice to see. Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.

I use the community update of Winamp, WACUP, and it's excellent. I've tried other media players but always come back here. I'm not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly. https://getwacup.com/

Have you checked out foobar2000? To me, it always felt like the true successor to Winamp.

Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#56

Post by ndiddy »

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO.

https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-site-design/46...

Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#57

Post by omoikane »

GGO wrote: post #14

why wait this long (until Sept 2024) to opensource the code?

It's also weird that the timestamp on the press release is "Dec 16, 1".

There are 5 press releases total on that site, 2 from 2023, 2 from 2024, and this one from year "1". It just seems very strange.

Re: Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

#58

Post by thefourthchime »

About 20 years ago, I almost got hired on the Winamp team. They were busy working on Winamp 3, which, from what I gathered, was a pretty much total rewrite using modern C++.

The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I wonder which source code they'll open up. Maybe both.

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