This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
OK, I'm confused.
I have seen 2 different articles that claim WinAmp is NOt going to be open sourced. At least in the common sense. But rather kind - of - sort - of - but - not - really.
Here is a https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/winamp-is-not-going-open-source-heres-what-it-is-doing-and-why/ ZDNET article about it.
The only thing I don't like about the new WInamp is the NFT library, Hotmix and Fanzone things they added to it. But I guess the new owners had to try and make their money back somehow. Plus they're easily ignorable.
Very cool but even 15 years ago or so when I moved to Linux, I was already over Winamp and using Foobar... Loved it
No mention of license in this article. Are they going to be releasing it through a git of some kind?
Man. I still use winamp to this day and I've been using them since they came out.
It's the only music player that organizes the music in a way that makes sense. I love the library interface.
Mac Port! Mac Port! Mac Port!
this is cool but what is the point now given all the options today and the way we listen to music now?
Even back then the real power of winamp was in plugins. You can't get away with the truly hacky crap and windows anymore.
The only thing I really cared for back in the day was visualization and the aggressive crossfade plugin.
What use do we have today for a music focused media player? Is it common for people to use mp3, flac or wav for playing music? I feel like music streaming services hold the market here.
I like winamp back when it was an alternative for the basic windows media player to listen to all my music but I dont keep mp3s anymore so I don't know if I can see the point.
Was it anything more than just a music player with eq and skins? Did I miss the point back then?
Maybe I just don't have the vision that others have and will be pleasantly suprised when someone comes up with a good use case and develops it.
I have a big library of music, mostly MP3 or OGG and don't really see myself pivoting solely towards streaming services where access to songs could be revoked at any time or could be changed/censored like movies or series sometimes are on streaming platforms. I do use YouTube for listening to new music and when I like it enough, I buy it to download (or acquire it in a different way if it's not available).
Don't know about others, but I still have music in both mp3 and flac err I listen to sometimes.
Mostly they are rips off CDs that just aren't available for streaming anywhere, but also just music I bought as digital before streaming really was a thing.
I use musicbee and MP3/FLAC.
My music collection is to large and keyed to my tastes to throw away, and I don't want to pay for Spotify.
My music library is hosted on my server, automatically synced locally on fixed devices and played from local files most of the time. Streaming services combine the advantage of sometimes disappearing, altering, removing content with the other advantage of needing an active internet connection at all time. That's neither a good thing nor an efficient thing when the alternative is cheap and works all the time from everywhere.
Of course, I know this is not the most common use case; most people usually don't care about any of this (and usually complain when something break). But it exists.
I've been building my music collection since I was ripping CDs by hitting play, recording in Win95 Sound Recorder and running the .wav through LAME (nowadays EAC to flac, of course). I see no need to pay a subscription to listen to my music, when I can just use that same money to buy and own the albums* and not worry about them disappearing.
* also means more money goes to the artist
Also Navidrome + Symfonium means I can still stream to my phone so the only benefit Spotify etc has is new music, but YouTube (+ uBlock) gives me that.
I'm not sure what can be brought to Winamp that'll make it better through open source. Maybe it'll be a default alternative for Linux distros? That'd be cool.
But, Winamp to me is just a program I use that plays video game soundtracks that are different formats aren't MP3 or WAV. Like Super Nintendo with .SPC for example.
AIMP has predominantly taken the mantle on my system as default media player, it's just feature rich and long won me over the day my PC suddenly rebooted and the song I was playing was just on pause with that program! Winamp couldn't do this, whenever I re-opened it, song stopped playing entirely, gotta play it again.
Its maybe a small thing, but being packaged in linux repos would be huge for me
Being able to type
$sudo apt install winamp
Would be so cool
There are likely lots of improvements that can be made under the hood. I'm willing to bet that it depends on several aging libraries that could probably be swapped out for something better.
First: Surprised it still exists.
Second: More surprised there are Apple AppStore and Google PlayStore links on the bottom.
Before finding MediaMonkey Winamp was all I used. I like sticking to things I understand well.
Nice. It's still my favorite music player.
Finally! Couple weeks back I downloaded it again for the first time in probably 10 years and it really made me wonder why they basically fucked it up and abandoned it
