Replacing native Winamp code with modern code with frequent updates by one of the most prolific classic Winamp developers.
It's fantastic.
But does it whip the llamas ass?
Naturally
wacup! it really whips the ladspa's ass!
What a shame that it isn't open source.
I'll happily continue to use Audacious with a Winamp skin.
Well, given the very unorthodox nature of it as it is today, I don't know that Dr0 can legally open source it until he's finished replacing literally all legacy functions with new code, even if they wanted to. But I can understand your position.
Whether that's the case or not, I think it is secondary to the fact that he clearly says on the website that he definitely doesn't want it to go open source, for as long as he is working on it.
He defines that as wanting to be in control of the project so long as he has the passion to work on it solo. But it's somewhat implied that if he had to let it go, he may open source his work. I can understand that. DrO was one of the primary and most prolific Winamp plugin devs back in it's heyday as well. So if you ever used Winamp itself (closed source) you have already trusted his code on much more vulnerable OSes, imo.
I feel like he's earned the limited trust this requires.
And you can set the visuals to unlimited fps, which is fun on a good screen
That's so interesting!
Geiss support tho?
Unsurprising given that their repo's license was a contradictory mess
...That site's UI looks like someone saw the marketing literature for the Frigidaire produce preserver and said, "Yeah, that'll do."
lmaoπ
btw did you mean the background?
UI typically refers to the user interactable elements
The whole look n' feel. Not UI, then, maybe just call it overall design.
But it was the first thing I thought of as soon as I saw it. Even the cursive font, in pink...
The whole look n' feel. Not UI, then, maybe just call it overall design.
Even the cursive font, in pink...
ohhh yeah now that you mention it I can totally see it
The wavey font got me!
Especially the pink cursive font.
Lovely that it is open source, but dear lord that UI is a blast from the past ππ π΄π΅ποΈ
It's an Amarok fork, so yes
Oh that makes sense. I think I last used Amarok 20 years ago.
So that's why I thought: finally a viable Amarok replacement.
Most players out there seem to be built for like 40 songs?
Itβs ugly af. Hope some designer can volunteer to set them straight.
Strawberry doesn't support about a dozen audio formats I use, so until it's got wider support I have to pass.
You have support for .wav .flac .mp3 .opus, why would you use anything else?
Because hard drives aren't getting any bigger lately and I don't want to multiply the size of my videogame music collection by ten?
You are saving your music in a format more efficient than opus or aac? What format is that?
Chiptune formats for retro videogame music can be very efficient. Just picking two with particularly good music, I have a 21 KB (0.02 MB) file storing 28:30 of music and 4.72 MB of files storing 1:54:48 of music, both at source quality.
The catch is that they are designed exclusively to rip chiptunes from retro videogames as close as the format designers and player coders could manage to the original. So even the oversized ones like the 4.72 MB of files extracted from a 3 MB game are going to be far smaller than a general use format like opus. But you can't encode your own music in the format without going to massive effort to code it like you would an authentic chiptune, and you're unlikely to like the results.
Damn, may I ask how big your entire library is? At those sizes, you can store more music than I'll ever need in a couple of gbs.
Everything filed under "Chiptune", excluding the AT3 and MAB files which are effectively general purpose music formats, comes to 1.14 GB for 4211 items totaling 158:50:29. There are a lot of duplicates in there, because for a lot of these items it's more trouble to hunt down a replacement copy than it is to store a backup.
The catch, of course, is that it's all retro videogame music from bleep to bloop.
Can you name the format youβre using to store 1:54:48 of music in 4.72 MB?
Those are SPC files, and that particular example was one rip of Final Fantasy VI (III)'s soundtrack.
Unfortunately, it only handles music embedded in Super Famicom/Super Nintendo games. To convert your own music to SPC, you'd have to rewrite it for the SNES sound chip.
Also, it might be worth noting that Strawberry does support SPC AND VGM files since 2022.
Why don't they advertise these things? Can they be bothered to list all the formats they support somewhere?
Yeah it is interesting how they donβt advertise it. Who knows what else they have lol
Makes sense. Thanks!
The even more efficient example was Mega Man 3. The standard rip format for NES music is far more efficient but also far more complex, requiring specialized skills to rip instead of a copy of ZSNES and a fast finger on the F1 button.
Edit: the standard rip format for NES music is NSF, but an expanded version NSFe is better if you can get it because it supports metadata like song names and lengths.
If it doesn't play Amiga era .mod files, is it really even a music player?
Funny enough, it does. Here's the full list of supported formats. Line 54:
Ten chiptune formats, two other videogame music formats (.at3 and .mab), WMA, IT, AAC, MP2, and MIDI.
Will strawberry let me play a folder as a playlist from the DE's context menus? Like right click > play in strawberry.
Nice profile picture!
Thanks!
most people don't noticeπ€
I mostly use mpv to play local music nowadays. (Most of the music I play is streamed using a Navidrome server with Feishin as the frontend.) Back when I did use a proper audio player on Linux, Harmonoid was my go-to.
I'm surprised they kept it up for so long honestly. It was very clear they had no fucking clue what they were doing. What with the nonsensical license that violated Github's tos, the Dolby Code they leaked, and the fact they kept every commit public for everyone to see.
And it's not like deleting will fix it now, it's been copied millions of times now.
Can someone explain me what's the business model of an app that's free for three decades? They claim to have 100 devs, how can they pay them?
They're sponsored by WinRAR. Those guys are loaded.
Is this real?
No, sorry, it's a jab about how no one paid for WinRAR either.
WinRAR did make piles of money by focusing on the commercial market. They really didn't care if home users went past the free trial period, but they did care if you were a business.
I don't know what WinAmp does, or ever did.
Real player is more of an alternative to winamp, I was surprised to see real.com. So no...
The current revived version appears to be tied to a content streaming platform for "creators," and also sells NFT's. The mothership certainly gets a cut of all of those sales. Just like seemingly every other techbro venture nowadays, their business model entirely revolves around being a "service," and the media player itself is apparently just a side hobby. (Note that this is basically exactly the same mutation that happened to Napster. That worked well.)
Otherwise, the answer is sponsorship by a corporate sugar daddy. Even the OG Winamp was sponsored by and then ultimately bought outright by AOL.
sells NFTs*
I just use Audacious with a winamp skin. Looks identical but actually FOSS.
Been doing this recently too. I've just got the default Winamp skin, but it's so nice to have that part of my childhood back.
I think I tried Winamp back in the day but never really understood it.
One has to admit it's good that they released the source code (while it was available) so users can learn what their software is actually doing on their computer. Better for yourself as a dev too: you will probably avoid including other people's work in yours. However, wanting contributions while retaining the exclusive right to distribute the software is anti-collaborative. I'm reluctant to say it might as well be proprietary again but since it doesn't meet the standard of software freedom then it's equally not worth trying on my computer.
In its day Winamp was the most comprehensive media player and users were super into its skinability which was a big deal at the time. Nowadays the "plays everything" throne is very firmly occupied by VLC, with a little cushioned stool next to it for Media Player Classic to sit on. However, neither of them offer the user interface experience that Winamp does/did.
Winamp was iTunes before iTunes. It was Spotify before Spotify. It did an excellent job of managing the hordes of totally legitimate MP3's we all had back in the day, and did so with an aplomb that nothing else seemed to manage. Really, its playlist and library management was top notch. Newer apps still piss me off because none of them do it the way Winamp did.
Side note, if you have an old iPod kicking around and don't feel like dealing with Apple's ecosystem, Winamp can still, to this very day, stick music on your device natively without having to install or use iTunes. Just saying.
But this source code release thing really baffles me. I have no idea what the point of that was supposed to be.
I'd say that mpv also has a place near VLC when it comes to playing everything.
Really, its playlist and library management was top notch. Newer apps still piss me off because none of them do it the way Winamp did.
It's why I still use winamp.
It's been a while since I've used Winamp, so I might just not remember, but what makes the library management so special?
It did an excellent job of managing the hordes of totally legitimate MP3βs we all had back in the day, and did so with an aplomb that nothing else seemed to manage. Really, its playlist and library management was top notch.
This is why I'm still on the eternal search for a replacement. Library management was really, really good in Winamp. I use Strawberry these days and it's absolutely great at playing stuff but the playlist management is just 'good enough'.
If you're running Windows you can still use old versions of Winamp.
On Linux, I dunno. I'll bet you it'll run in Wine.
Yep, I still use 5.666 on Windows, but I use Windows very infrequently anymore. I switched to Linux as my primary OS earlier this year and only use Windows for games that don't work right in Linux. And thanks to Valve that's becoming pretty rare these days.
I haven't tried getting Winamp to work in Wine but there's probably a guide out there somewhere! Good suggestion, thanks.
Honestly, for a modern PC I can't imagine Winamp is all that taxing of a program to run. I think the biggest bugbear will be its fairly tight integration with the Windows shell for file management and enqueuing things from an Explorer window, and maybe the external device integrations which would rely heavily on the Windows API and possibly WDM.
The video player in Winamp is also completely non-functional in Wine the last time I tried it, as it relies on DirectShow in Windows which has very iffy Wine support. That may also be why it's marked as silver.
It's too bad as I really liked using Winamp as a video player in Windows, despite it's quirks.
I think I tried Winamp back in the day but never really understood it.
What was there not to understand? It was a basic music player with playlist functionality, a plugin infrastructure to support playback of pirated music in underground formats like MP3, at the price of completely free and no ads (the website had banners but not the player).
Not sure what I could have expected from it back then. I just recall it being recommended online and ended up just using Win Media player (with the cool graphical effects).
MilkDrop is the best visualizer out there, hands down. Been using it forever at this point, and the crazy part is every so often I see some visualization that I've never seen before.
However, wanting contributions while retaining the exclusive right to distribute the software is anti-collaborative. Iβm reluctant to say it might as well be proprietary again
As you describe it, that is proprietary -- no "might as well be" qualification necessary. Just because you can read the source code doesn't make it Open Source; you've got to have all Four Freedoms for it to count.
the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
Is it not actually four or are they counting some of these as the same thing?
Change and improve sounds pretty much the same to me, as in the process is modifying it, only the intent changes.
kicked by the llamas ass
I'm using foobar2000. Should I be using something else?
Foobar is still the best there is, although the classic style interface might not appeal to younger people.
Still miss foobar which isn't on Linux, though deadbeef is fairly similar at least. Never got the hang of all the beautiful themes/skins users put together for foobar but it was still my go to music player. Excellent layout customisation, tagging and conversion UI, as well as as nice range of plugins
I really like deadbeef, coming from fb2k as well. Someone recommended it to me two weeks ago, and I've immediately recognized the similarities.
Foobar's Dev should have just taken their project open source imo. Although I suspect winamp's lawyers would have jumped on that.
I use Audacious with the original classic winamp skin (which it supports natively).
I think QMMP also supports the winamps themes, and they both work well in Linux (which is all I run these days).
I'm an old soul so I use music bee with the Tron skin, it's very 2000s
I used VLC before and ill continue using VLC
VLC UX kinda sucks, but it does everything I need it to.
Agreed, considering VLCs functionality it can look ugly as hell
What sucks about it? I just use it because it seems to play literally any video format
The UX.
The functionality is great, and like you said, it can play pretty much anything. But the UX feels like it's stuck in the late 90s, and the following are more ugly and painful than they need to be:
playlists
streaming
converting file types
It can do a ton of stuff, but none of it is particularly intuitive, because the UX sucks. But it works great at the basic functionality I need, which is playing pretty much any video format.
i use musicbee for audio. vlc for video. musicbee is the most like mediamonkey used to be and free. got into vlc because of its better support of the unusual video formats
Same even my school used vlc wayy before I knew floss software
I use audacious. It's perfect.
I am proud to be one of the 2.6k people who illegally forked winamp
Milkdrop is in Kodi these days, so my winamp love affair is more nostalgic than anything real
vlc my beloved
Is it still possible to get the source code? I never knew it was available.
Well, that really sucks the llama's ass.
Uhhh
WACUP
https://getwacup.com/
Replacing native Winamp code with modern code with frequent updates by one of the most prolific classic Winamp developers.
It's fantastic.
But does it whip the llamas ass?
Naturally
wacup! it really whips the ladspa's ass!
What a shame that it isn't open source.
I'll happily continue to use Audacious with a Winamp skin.
Well, given the very unorthodox nature of it as it is today, I don't know that Dr0 can legally open source it until he's finished replacing literally all legacy functions with new code, even if they wanted to. But I can understand your position.
Whether that's the case or not, I think it is secondary to the fact that he clearly says on the website that he definitely doesn't want it to go open source, for as long as he is working on it.
He defines that as wanting to be in control of the project so long as he has the passion to work on it solo. But it's somewhat implied that if he had to let it go, he may open source his work. I can understand that. DrO was one of the primary and most prolific Winamp plugin devs back in it's heyday as well. So if you ever used Winamp itself (closed source) you have already trusted his code on much more vulnerable OSes, imo.
I feel like he's earned the limited trust this requires.
And you can set the visuals to unlimited fps, which is fun on a good screen
That's so interesting!
Geiss support tho?
Unsurprising given that their repo's license was a contradictory mess
Anyways I'd recommend using Strawberry instead
It's an actual Free and Open Source music player:
...That site's UI looks like someone saw the marketing literature for the Frigidaire produce preserver and said, "Yeah, that'll do."
lmaoπ
btw did you mean the background?
UI typically refers to the user interactable elements
The whole look n' feel. Not UI, then, maybe just call it overall design.
But it was the first thing I thought of as soon as I saw it. Even the cursive font, in pink...
ohhh yeah now that you mention it I can totally see it
The wavey font got me!
Especially the pink cursive font.
Lovely that it is open source, but dear lord that UI is a blast from the past ππ π΄π΅ποΈ
It's an Amarok fork, so yes
Oh that makes sense. I think I last used Amarok 20 years ago.
So that's why I thought: finally a viable Amarok replacement.
Most players out there seem to be built for like 40 songs?
Itβs ugly af. Hope some designer can volunteer to set them straight.
Strawberry doesn't support about a dozen audio formats I use, so until it's got wider support I have to pass.
You have support for .wav .flac .mp3 .opus, why would you use anything else?
Because hard drives aren't getting any bigger lately and I don't want to multiply the size of my videogame music collection by ten?
You are saving your music in a format more efficient than opus or aac? What format is that?
Chiptune formats for retro videogame music can be very efficient. Just picking two with particularly good music, I have a 21 KB (0.02 MB) file storing 28:30 of music and 4.72 MB of files storing 1:54:48 of music, both at source quality.
The catch is that they are designed exclusively to rip chiptunes from retro videogames as close as the format designers and player coders could manage to the original. So even the oversized ones like the 4.72 MB of files extracted from a 3 MB game are going to be far smaller than a general use format like opus. But you can't encode your own music in the format without going to massive effort to code it like you would an authentic chiptune, and you're unlikely to like the results.
Damn, may I ask how big your entire library is? At those sizes, you can store more music than I'll ever need in a couple of gbs.
Everything filed under "Chiptune", excluding the AT3 and MAB files which are effectively general purpose music formats, comes to 1.14 GB for 4211 items totaling 158:50:29. There are a lot of duplicates in there, because for a lot of these items it's more trouble to hunt down a replacement copy than it is to store a backup.
The catch, of course, is that it's all retro videogame music from bleep to bloop.
Can you name the format youβre using to store 1:54:48 of music in 4.72 MB?
Those are SPC files, and that particular example was one rip of Final Fantasy VI (III)'s soundtrack.
Unfortunately, it only handles music embedded in Super Famicom/Super Nintendo games. To convert your own music to SPC, you'd have to rewrite it for the SNES sound chip.
Also, it might be worth noting that Strawberry does support SPC AND VGM files since 2022.
Why don't they advertise these things? Can they be bothered to list all the formats they support somewhere?
Yeah it is interesting how they donβt advertise it. Who knows what else they have lol
Makes sense. Thanks!
The even more efficient example was Mega Man 3. The standard rip format for NES music is far more efficient but also far more complex, requiring specialized skills to rip instead of a copy of ZSNES and a fast finger on the F1 button.
Edit: the standard rip format for NES music is NSF, but an expanded version NSFe is better if you can get it because it supports metadata like song names and lengths.
If it doesn't play Amiga era .mod files, is it really even a music player?
Funny enough, it does. Here's the full list of supported formats. Line 54:
Although like .spc, it doesn't support seeking, you have to listen to the whole file in order or restart for the beginning.
What formats?
.xcf
Where do you even get an audio file with a .xcf format?
save from gimp!
You get your music from GIMP?
is joke.
We used to pipe all sorts of π© to
/dev/dspjust to know how it would sound π€you downvoted me?
Idk but I imagine that guy did find it somewhere.
Ten chiptune formats, two other videogame music formats (.at3 and .mab), WMA, IT, AAC, MP2, and MIDI.
Will strawberry let me play a folder as a playlist from the DE's context menus? Like right click > play in strawberry.
Nice profile picture!
Thanks!
most people don't noticeπ€
I mostly use mpv to play local music nowadays. (Most of the music I play is streamed using a Navidrome server with Feishin as the frontend.) Back when I did use a proper audio player on Linux, Harmonoid was my go-to.
I'm surprised they kept it up for so long honestly. It was very clear they had no fucking clue what they were doing. What with the nonsensical license that violated Github's tos, the Dolby Code they leaked, and the fact they kept every commit public for everyone to see.
And it's not like deleting will fix it now, it's been copied millions of times now.
Can someone explain me what's the business model of an app that's free for three decades? They claim to have 100 devs, how can they pay them?
They're sponsored by WinRAR. Those guys are loaded.
Is this real?
No, sorry, it's a jab about how no one paid for WinRAR either.
WinRAR did make piles of money by focusing on the commercial market. They really didn't care if home users went past the free trial period, but they did care if you were a business.
I don't know what WinAmp does, or ever did.
Real player is more of an alternative to winamp, I was surprised to see real.com. So no...
I'm thinking no.
The current revived version appears to be tied to a content streaming platform for "creators," and also sells NFT's. The mothership certainly gets a cut of all of those sales. Just like seemingly every other techbro venture nowadays, their business model entirely revolves around being a "service," and the media player itself is apparently just a side hobby. (Note that this is basically exactly the same mutation that happened to Napster. That worked well.)
Otherwise, the answer is sponsorship by a corporate sugar daddy. Even the OG Winamp was sponsored by and then ultimately bought outright by AOL.
sells NFTs*
I just use Audacious with a winamp skin. Looks identical but actually FOSS.
Been doing this recently too. I've just got the default Winamp skin, but it's so nice to have that part of my childhood back.
I think I tried Winamp back in the day but never really understood it.
One has to admit it's good that they released the source code (while it was available) so users can learn what their software is actually doing on their computer. Better for yourself as a dev too: you will probably avoid including other people's work in yours. However, wanting contributions while retaining the exclusive right to distribute the software is anti-collaborative. I'm reluctant to say it might as well be proprietary again but since it doesn't meet the standard of software freedom then it's equally not worth trying on my computer.
In its day Winamp was the most comprehensive media player and users were super into its skinability which was a big deal at the time. Nowadays the "plays everything" throne is very firmly occupied by VLC, with a little cushioned stool next to it for Media Player Classic to sit on. However, neither of them offer the user interface experience that Winamp does/did.
Winamp was iTunes before iTunes. It was Spotify before Spotify. It did an excellent job of managing the hordes of totally legitimate MP3's we all had back in the day, and did so with an aplomb that nothing else seemed to manage. Really, its playlist and library management was top notch. Newer apps still piss me off because none of them do it the way Winamp did.
Side note, if you have an old iPod kicking around and don't feel like dealing with Apple's ecosystem, Winamp can still, to this very day, stick music on your device natively without having to install or use iTunes. Just saying.
But this source code release thing really baffles me. I have no idea what the point of that was supposed to be.
I'd say that mpv also has a place near VLC when it comes to playing everything.
It's why I still use winamp.
It's been a while since I've used Winamp, so I might just not remember, but what makes the library management so special?
This is why I'm still on the eternal search for a replacement. Library management was really, really good in Winamp. I use Strawberry these days and it's absolutely great at playing stuff but the playlist management is just 'good enough'.
If you're running Windows you can still use old versions of Winamp.
On Linux, I dunno. I'll bet you it'll run in Wine.
Yep, I still use 5.666 on Windows, but I use Windows very infrequently anymore. I switched to Linux as my primary OS earlier this year and only use Windows for games that don't work right in Linux. And thanks to Valve that's becoming pretty rare these days.
I haven't tried getting Winamp to work in Wine but there's probably a guide out there somewhere! Good suggestion, thanks.
WineDB has it marked as silver.
Honestly, for a modern PC I can't imagine Winamp is all that taxing of a program to run. I think the biggest bugbear will be its fairly tight integration with the Windows shell for file management and enqueuing things from an Explorer window, and maybe the external device integrations which would rely heavily on the Windows API and possibly WDM.
The video player in Winamp is also completely non-functional in Wine the last time I tried it, as it relies on DirectShow in Windows which has very iffy Wine support. That may also be why it's marked as silver.
It's too bad as I really liked using Winamp as a video player in Windows, despite it's quirks.
What was there not to understand? It was a basic music player with playlist functionality, a plugin infrastructure to support playback of pirated music in underground formats like MP3, at the price of completely free and no ads (the website had banners but not the player).
Not sure what I could have expected from it back then. I just recall it being recommended online and ended up just using Win Media player (with the cool graphical effects).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilkDrop
MilkDrop is the best visualizer out there, hands down. Been using it forever at this point, and the crazy part is every so often I see some visualization that I've never seen before.
As you describe it, that is proprietary -- no "might as well be" qualification necessary. Just because you can read the source code doesn't make it Open Source; you've got to have all Four Freedoms for it to count.
Is it not actually four or are they counting some of these as the same thing?
Change and improve sounds pretty much the same to me, as in the process is modifying it, only the intent changes.
kicked by the llamas ass
I'm using foobar2000. Should I be using something else?
Foobar is still the best there is, although the classic style interface might not appeal to younger people.
Still miss foobar which isn't on Linux, though deadbeef is fairly similar at least. Never got the hang of all the beautiful themes/skins users put together for foobar but it was still my go to music player. Excellent layout customisation, tagging and conversion UI, as well as as nice range of plugins
I really like deadbeef, coming from fb2k as well. Someone recommended it to me two weeks ago, and I've immediately recognized the similarities.
Foobar's Dev should have just taken their project open source imo. Although I suspect winamp's lawyers would have jumped on that.
I use Audacious with the original classic winamp skin (which it supports natively).
I think QMMP also supports the winamps themes, and they both work well in Linux (which is all I run these days).
I'm an old soul so I use music bee with the Tron skin, it's very 2000s
I used VLC before and ill continue using VLC
VLC UX kinda sucks, but it does everything I need it to.
Agreed, considering VLCs functionality it can look ugly as hell
What sucks about it? I just use it because it seems to play literally any video format
The UX.
The functionality is great, and like you said, it can play pretty much anything. But the UX feels like it's stuck in the late 90s, and the following are more ugly and painful than they need to be:
It can do a ton of stuff, but none of it is particularly intuitive, because the UX sucks. But it works great at the basic functionality I need, which is playing pretty much any video format.
i use musicbee for audio. vlc for video. musicbee is the most like mediamonkey used to be and free. got into vlc because of its better support of the unusual video formats
Same even my school used vlc wayy before I knew floss software
I use audacious. It's perfect.
I am proud to be one of the 2.6k people who illegally forked winamp
Milkdrop is in Kodi these days, so my winamp love affair is more nostalgic than anything real
vlc my beloved
Is it still possible to get the source code? I never knew it was available.
https://git.cbraaten.dev/AtRiskRepos/winamp
What is this "AtRiskRepos" thing? π
It's a place for software that comes from a broken home and would otherwise be hanging out on the street in high-crime areas.
No idea. I found the link over at Hacker News from this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41861376
At risk of un open sourcing their code, taking their ball and going home
And rightly so! Save the Llamas!
Llolma