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

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

#81

Post by adra »

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.

I remember fondly writing a winamp clone in school with a team project. We scraped together a rough plugin based player, input and output plugins (a super limited network streaming variant), etc.. good times grinding on a neat project. Yikes, that was like 25 years ago.

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

#82

Post by boomskats »

thefourthchime wrote: post #58

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.

I had to re-read your comment because first time round I thought you were suggesting it was JF's codebase they hated. Everything else he's ever worked on has been phenomenal (especially Reaper, from the very start).

So was that at AOL?

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

#84

Post by babypuncher »

koito17 wrote: post #63
babypuncher wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata all at once. A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used t…

> A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case,

I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy to customize almost any way you want. There's even a scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current layout.

As for the functionality they find it lacks, well, there's probably a component for that.

Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of functionality out of the box that other media players don't have, like the very robust features found in the "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.

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

#86

Post by swatcoder »

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.

It may carry downstream license obligations of its own, that prohibit/complicate public release.

Relatedly, they might be hoping that one of the people looking at it might be willing to buy out or take over contractual responsibility for any components that can't be relicensed to traditional open source. Basically, parading the source around like a debutante because other channels to find buyers haven't panned out.

Or it's just real-world commercial code and is kind of embarassing by the standards of public open source projects.

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

#87

Post by chubot »

Wow, for me Winamp was one of the first "enshittified" pieces of software.

I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

I remember I used to use http://oldversion.com [1] to download the previous one

Ever since then I have been wary of "improvements" that make software worse, which has been happening a lot recently.

I'd be really interested in seeing the source code to the original. I didn't know much about programming then, and to me that would be similar to reading the original source code of Doom (which I've done a bit)

[1] this site still seems alive? But doesn't even have https?

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

#90

Post by lmm »

chubot wrote: post #87

Wow, for me Winamp was one of the first "enshittified" pieces of software. I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something I remember I used to use http://oldversion.com [1] to download the previous one Ever since then I have been wary of "improvements" that make software worse, which has been happening a lot recently. I'd be r…

> I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

Winamp 3 was a major regression that sparked a backlash (in particular it had a new skin engine that probably was a priori better, but broke compatibility all existing skins, which wasn't popular; also performance, which had been a major selling point, was worse), but I don't remember there being any change of ownership or monetization effort. I think it was just a genuine well-intentioned rewrite that ended up worse than the original, like Netscape 4 or KDE4.

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