Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows.

Alphane Moon@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 614 points –
About Winamp - Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows.
about.winamp.com

Would be funny if Winamp gets a second life ~20 later.

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It doesn't say what license they are going to use, so it may not be open source. The wording is very weaselly.

This is news from September and linked blog post from December. Nothing happened.

Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application's source code will be open to developers worldwide.

Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application's source code will be open to developers worldwide.

The date is given on the page, which hasn’t lapsed yet.

They’re probably spending intervening 10 months cleaning all the embarrassing comments out of the code before the initial commit.

IMHO, it sounds like it'll be "Source Available." Especially

Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version.

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Audacious is already an open-source audio-player, that can display these 98,000 .wsz Winamp Classic skins, today.

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With this initiative to open the source code,

The wording is quite evasive. They didn't say directly "With this initiative to open source" but "to open the source code." They do however mentioned collaboration and contribution.

I'm quite confused what license they would use.

qmmp does pretty well with the winamp skin, but it would be a treat to run the real winamp on linux

I would love Winamp on Linux. I just switched off Windows this year and I haven't been able to find a media player I liked yet. I haven't tried qmmp though.

It was honestly the one thing I still have never found a feature parity Linux alt for after years; it will always bug me no matter what other "it's basically the same" suggested player I use instead.

That said, currently I'm making do with Quodlibet, and I have no major complaints. But nothing is an exact replica enough for me not to constantly compare it to Wimamp & complain.

If I'm correct Justin sold WinAmp and then created Reaper AKA the best DAW ever made.

If Justin/anyone at Cockos is reading this: please open-source REAPER. You really would be doing the audio community a huge service.

Can they open source their original code? IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMAS ASS!!!

Now the question is - are they open sourcing the original Winamp, or the awful replacement?

I wonder how long it will be before someone ports it to Linux

There isn't much point of that, XMMS was basically that — a faithful reproduction of Winamp for Linux between 1997-2007. Since then there's been a ton of forks — XMMS2, BMP, Youki, Audacious etc.

Audacious is still around, sort of (last release a year ago) and it's basically Winamp, it can use Winamp skins and has plugins.

I'm sure all of those programs are great, but in the modern world I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't ever just use VLC.

XMMS! I was trying to remember what I started using when I switched to Linux. Couldn't leave my favourite theme behind. Thanks!

Any of them compatible with Winamp plugins? Because that's my reason for sticking to the past.

imagine if we all leave vlc for winamp again

that poor llama

Does Winamp play videos? I can’t remember right now, but ppl could implement if it doesn’t, right ? I miss the old 2.x skins and the playlist and the plugins

I have a feeling it did because I remember watching early rtsp multicast streams of the anime initial D found through winamp in like 1999 at 240p. It's so long ago that I'm not even sure that's a correct memory.

I did too around that time. I could use realtime to stream my tvtuner on a pentium 90MHZ and play it with winamp on another device.

I still use, Jesus, version 5 or something. Nothing has managed to be as handy as old winamp.

My only windows machine left still runs Winamp. It may be old, but at least for playing my offline library, I really don't know what they could possibly change. For everything else, I wouldn't use Winamp anyway.

I install it every time I reinstall Windows. It's not like the native music player is any better than this program that hasn't been updated in 10 years.

At some point, the creator said "I don't need to update this anymore.....what am I going to do? Make it BETTER???"

It's been too many years since I've dabbled in code licensing so I'm a bit in the dark as to what this implies, but if this results in a Linux fork that's capable of running Winamp plugins...

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