Bye Bye Winamp

Briosafreak

Briosafreak

Lived Through the Heat Death
The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamp's abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

For its part, AOL says it remains committed to Winamp, stating it is "a thriving product that AOL continues to support and will continue to support."

But without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.
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So any good alternatives out there?
 
Most (or certainly many) people who use winamp are trying to get away from WMP.
Personally, I use WMP 10, but I can see why people would not want to.

I had no idea that Nullsoft were affiliated with AOL, I thought they were completely independant.
 
Windows Media Player 10 is a good media player...if you want a media player that hogs system resources, doesn't let you set thread priority, doesn't support plugins, auto-updates, constantly tries to access the internet, loads slowly, loads unreliably, accesses CD-ROM (or equivalent) drives on load, and doesn't work in Windows 9x.

I didn't know AOL OWNED Winamp, but I was aware they were buddy-buddy (current versions of the AOL software ask you if you want to install Winamp), but then, AOL is also buddy-buddy with Real (ugh). Someone needs to explain to me the necessity of installing TWO media players that support streaming media.

Oh yeah, I forgot to answer your question. If open-source is your cup of tea, try the X Multimedia System. Yeah, it's *nix only, so if you're not geeked-out yet you're going to have to get that way.
 
AOL is the Devil incarnate, I swear. It's going to swallow up everything it can find. In ways, they're worse than Microsoft.

I use Winamp solely. Windows Media Player is bloated and too damn flashy. I can just stick Winamp at the top of the screen minimized into a bar and ignore it if I so choose. Plus it has the Pipboy skin...
 
Foobar. I've been using it for a few months now and I don't think I could go back to Winamp or another player.

Since they don't have any pictures on their website, here's what it looks like:
Foobar.png


Very minimalistic, but once I got used to it everything else just seemed needlessly cluttered. I haven't been able to find an equalizer plug-in yet but that's the only downside so far.
 
Since I multitask to the limit of my system as it is, with several instances of IE, windows explorer, Word, etc, open at once, I don't use my computer as a media player in and of itself. If I want to listen to music I use my Sony Minidisc player. Better than having the music skip every time I load a page in IE or something. Windows Media Player is relatively inoffensive compared to the blatant spyware-disguised-as-product that REAL puts out. It demands to be updated and you can't turn it off (like you can in WMP), it puts up all sorts of news and shit that WMP never bothers me with (provided you never, ever open WMP as an EXE but rather cause it to start by accessing an associated filetype), and actually has the gall to imitate the kind of chat program that I can't stand. Since I have a few .RAM files I found a copy of a very old form of realplayer that's relatively small and inoffensive compared to the horrible system hog they're pushing now... but the thing keeps trying to update to that piece of shite. Why do I need *three* media players to use all media types? Microsofts' and Apple's are OK, but they don't like eachother and I think I've said enough about REAL already... Ugh.
 
The best mediaplayer out there is without a doubt VLC. If VLC can't play your file, probably nothing can.

As for music, I don't see any reason to stop using WinAmp. I'm still using the old version, all it needs to do is play MP3s.
 
Sander said:
As for music, I don't see any reason to stop using WinAmp. I'm still using the old version, all it needs to do is play MP3s.
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yeah, this way you get to keep that nice lil' pipboy skin 8)
 
PsychoSniper said:
Montez said:
Foobar. I've been using it for a few months now and I don't think I could go back to Winamp or another player.
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DLing it now.
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I also downloaded it, do I need to inform everyone?
Should I issue a press release?

PS: I also downloaded the VideoLAN player advocated by Sander, should I issue a separate statement, or can I piggyback them?

Please inform me ASAP, so I can inform my press department.
 
WMP is a waste of resources. I'd recommend WinAmp still. If you're feeling geeky and want something really lightweight go for FooBar2k.

MPC is still the best substitude for WMP 6+. It's resource friendly and comes without all the flashy bloat. Pretty straight to the point and excellent if you just want to play a single file.
 
Sander said:
If VLC can't play your file, probably nothing can.
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Wait, what do you mean? Does this prog. come with every possible codec, or does it just operate on the codecs you already have? Like, if i didn't have quicktime on my computer, and if i got VLC would it play .mov files?
 
Yes.

EDIT: Meaning that it doesn't depend on your pre-installed codecs.

PS: Foobar2000 rocks. I love the ability to have it start playing automatically exactly where it left off when you start it.
 
Dammit. A shame about WinAmp. But hey, the current version should be good enough to last for another few years. I hope they release the source code once they stop supporting it, though.

As for Windows Media Player 10, I would rather be stabbed in the kidneys, devoured by a hundred rabid lions and sexually violated by an HIV-positive crack-whore than use that clunky piece of Microsoft crap as a replacement for WinAmp.
 
does foobar have a minimalistic view where it slims down to the size of the header bar in normal windows? What I like with Winamp is in that form, I can change the vol, play settings, song, and a few other quick things.
 
MadDog -[TO said:
-]does foobar have a minimalistic view where it slims down to the size of the header bar in normal windows? What I like with Winamp is in that form, I can change the vol, play settings, song, and a few other quick things.
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I'm not familiar with that feature in winamp, but I think foobar can do the same. You can resize the window so that only the play and volume controls show if you want, or you can minimize it to the task bar (the icon section, can't remember what it's called) and control it with hot keys.
 
Montez said:
MadDog -[TO said:
-]does foobar have a minimalistic view where it slims down to the size of the header bar in normal windows? What I like with Winamp is in that form, I can change the vol, play settings, song, and a few other quick things.
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with that feature in winamp, but I think foobar can do the same. You can resize the window so that only the play and volume controls show if you want, or you can minimize it to the task bar (the icon section, can't remember what it's called) and control it with hot keys.
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Or you get the FoxAmp extension for Firefox which allows you to control any media player (well, any of the 15 players it supports) from a bar at the bottom of your browser windows. I think it only works in Windows tho.
 
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