[HN Gopher] Webamp: Winamp 2 in the browser
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Webamp: Winamp 2 in the browser
Author : DyslexicAtheist
Score : 172 points
Date : 2021-04-14 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webamp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (webamp.org)
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Very nice! This would be a great lightweight alternative to
| ampache when the goal is to share a handful of songs and have a
| great UI.
| xahrepap wrote:
| One of my first practical pieces of software I wrote was for
| Winamp. I noticed at the time Winamp didn't support using the
| Media Keys unless it was focused. So I whipped up a simple
| application that listens to the media keys, then forwards the
| message to the Winamp process directly.
|
| I haven't used a media player since Winamp that I like as much as
| I liked Winamp. I really miss it.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| Wow. I was expecting the UI to feel dated/retro, but it still
| looks really good. And the window snapping behavior is still as
| satisfying as it always was. Timeless?
| kossTKR wrote:
| Yes, i was quite surprised too. I can't figure out if i
| actually like it more or if it's just nostalgia. It's like
| modern interfaces are way to flat and everything are is just
| floating in empty space with too much whitespace and not enough
| texture and depth.
|
| Is something very wrong with modern interfaces? Quite
| interesting..
| BackBlast wrote:
| Modern interfaces revolve around mobile and touch interfaces.
| The narrow/small buttons don't work consistently enough in
| this context and presents many usability and accessibility
| issues.
|
| I look at it and remember those days, and the system was
| quite usable with a high resolution mouse to be the primary
| interface. While I can use it on mobile, I would hate to try
| to do so under any kind of degraded condition. Cold fingers,
| inclement weather, driving in a card/bus/train.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Now you can really whip the llama's ass...on the web
| mjaniczek wrote:
| Very cool! I am particularly intrigued by the "full-colour"
| bitmap font approach you took. (I'm trying to get a Fallout 2
| font into my F2-inspired browser game, and so far I've managed to
| get PNG-in-SVG-in-OT working in everything except Chrome.
| Infuriating.)
|
| I want to ask, did you notice any performance hits when wrapping
| each character in its own <span> with background-image? Do you
| think that would scale for a page with up to ~2 screens of text
| at one time?
| captbaritone wrote:
| I'm a bit lucky here in that the number of characters on the
| screen at any given time is bounded, so at max we have maybe 50
| spans, which should not be a big deal.
|
| I'm not sure how it would scale. In general, if you employ
| windowing all UI rendering issues are bounded by the number of
| items visible at a time which can let you get away with a lot
| of craziness, but if the number of items on the screen is as
| much as the number of characters on the screen... that could
| end up being a bit much.
|
| I know a lot of things like that end up using shaders to render
| text, but that is a lot of added complexity.
| Jonnax wrote:
| Anyone know what happened to Winamp?
|
| They got bought by a company who said they were working on
| another version, and then nothing.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| An updated version got "leaked" about two years ago, then they
| decided to release that for real. https://winamp.com/
| FpUser wrote:
| Very nice. Also looking at Milkdrop visualizer and CPU
| utilization on 4K full screen it seems that they did based on
| WebGL. Great work.
| whyfy wrote:
| https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn This is the visualizer
| that they're using.
| rektide wrote:
| someone (podiki) submitted butternchurn to hn[1].
|
| this is 50% of the winamp2 experience. glad to see it again.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813265
| captbaritone wrote:
| We recently took on a project to use Wasm to speed it up a bit.
| Blog post here: https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-
| winamps-music-vi...
| podiki wrote:
| Yes, Milkdrop! Never seen anything nearly as good since then;
| lost many an hour staring at Milkdrop listening to music....so
| good.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Seems like you need to be on Chrome to see that.
| podiki wrote:
| I see it on Firefox just fine
| _joel wrote:
| Works fine here on Firefox
| heredoc wrote:
| nope, works well with firefox 78.9.0esr from debian stable
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Must just be incompatible with the default configuration of
| Safari then.
| captbaritone wrote:
| Safari does not currently support WebGL2, which is the
| blocker. They support it behind and flag, and it seems to
| work there, but until they enable it by default,
| Butterchurn will not work on Safari.
| udev wrote:
| That equalizer curve for the Rock preset is burnt into my memory,
| its shape, and color, and positions of sliders.
|
| Say what you want about the skeuomorphic design, but it really
| felt great to slide the volume a bit higher when at your favorite
| part of the song. It really felt like a piece of hardware in your
| hands.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I really miss having an equalizer actually. I just realized to
| day I haven't seen one for years!
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Mark this: Skeumorphic design is coming back, hopefully not in
| the form of Neumorphic design [1], but it is going to make a
| comeback. Unfortunately, designers will latch onto the worse of
| both - there is already a huge interest in neumorphic design
| which is basically flat material UI x skeumorphism, but the
| combination is worse than the individual parts.
|
| Just today, I was reading comments praising Coinbase UI. It is
| just cliches piled on top of cliches by designers. Everything
| that happened between 2010-2020 made UI worse in many ways.
|
| Winamp UI was whimsical, functional and successful.
|
| [1] https://www.justinmind.com/blog/neumorphism-ui/
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Somebody will start adding colour, then a little texture here
| and there, then some nice satisfying sound effects and we'll
| be back where we should be!
|
| Hrm, I wonder if you can activate a phones rumbler from the
| UI for tactile feedback.
| akiselev wrote:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...
|
| Safari iOS does not support it sadly.
| peder wrote:
| This type of design would work well with "shape-changing"
| displays: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/03/21/apple-
| patents-sha...
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| I don't really see what's wrong with it.
|
| It's not far off from 90s UIs but with more circular elements
| and less gray. Those UIs are viewed as very functional in
| retrospective.
|
| However, I thought then and still think now that it's a bit
| ugly.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Lack of borders.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| Such happy memories. I am using QMMP on my RPi4 these days and
| using CherryMusic to also offer the same giant directory of music
| to my other devices over HTTP, whilst running a classic
| WindowMaker desktop for lightness and speed. It's the pinnacle of
| computing in my opinion! xfe, xfimage, pluma, geany, qmms. Happy
| speedy computing!
|
| I loved the old Winamp where you could set it to be always on
| top, and then simply Alt-Shift-Tab on Windows and know that it'd
| focus Winamp, then use B, C, V whatever.
|
| I used to use xmms on Linux for a while I think but I couldn't
| seem to find anything like what I remember in the repos.
|
| Anyway, interesting project and like the milkdrop implementation!
| I seem to remember Goom as some plugin?
| crumpled wrote:
| I know some low budget radio stations use winamp to output their
| playlists, mostly because of the shoutcast plugin. It's crazy,
| but it kinda works.
| squarefoot wrote:
| They might find idjc really helpful.
|
| http://idjc.sourceforge.net/index.html
| crumpled wrote:
| I've checked it out and run it on various things. It might be
| a better choice, but pretty much only because it's current
| and maintained.
|
| The use case is a little different. IDJC has a lot of
| features for live DJs who are doing stuff. If you just want
| to run a playlist, winamp is actually a little more usable,
| and the shoutcast plugin also streams your audio input
| device. Our live DJs just press pause and do their thing with
| records and CDs, then they kick the playlist back on when
| they finish. For remote broadcasting, we just use BUTT. IMO,
| both BUTT and Winamp are easier than IDJC for most volunteer
| DJs
|
| I'm a tech volunteer for our local LP-FM station.
| xivusr wrote:
| Works great! Now if only I could find the Yaxay3 skin :-(
| marcodiego wrote:
| Is it possible to make it run out of the browser like an electron
| app?
|
| Sorry for suggesting electron but it could be the ultimate multi-
| platform winamp clone.
| brian_herman wrote:
| No but you can try this it works great on my machine!
| https://getwacup.com/
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Ewwwwww
| ugh123 wrote:
| There's a related project that forks and wraps it as an
| electron app.
|
| The source code shows it's pretty much just a react app, but
| slick!
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| You can use Audacious https://audacious-media-player.org
| captbaritone wrote:
| As a novelty, we actually already tried that:
| https://desktop.webamp.org/
|
| Note: Nobody thinks this is actually a good idea, but it's
| kidna fun.
| cheschire wrote:
| Chromium Edge reports this download as unsafe with the
| message:
|
| This app might harm your device Microsoft Defender
| SmartScreen reported that this app is not commonly
| downloaded; you should only open files you trust.
|
| Name: webamp-desktop-web-setup-0.3.0.exe Publisher: Unknown
| captbaritone wrote:
| Probably good advice
| cheschire wrote:
| It's fine, that's what Windows Sandbox is for!
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Unless this includes Winamp's modularity and plugin
| architecture then it would not be a Winamp clone
| evan_ wrote:
| Have you tried re:AMP? https://re-amp.ru/
| jakearmitage wrote:
| You can use XMMS, it supports old Winamp skins.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Sorry for suggesting electron but it could be the ultimate
| multi-platform winamp clone.
|
| That however would defeat best Winamp's feature: being light
| and fast, which is the number one reason why I kept using the
| classic one ignoring all following versions until my last day
| on Windows. Today I use qmmp under Linux, which is close enough
| (has been ported to Windows too).
|
| https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/
| fractalf wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, will try this out as it seems to have
| waveform support (a must for me).
|
| I've been using Nulloy for a while, also pretty nice and
| minimal https://github.com/nulloy/nulloy/
| crumpled wrote:
| You could just download and install Winamp, couldn't you? I
| know for a fact that it runs in Wine.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| winamp 2 had at least one exploit that I got burned by a few
| times. Which is why I finally upgraded to 3, back whenever
| that was.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yep, MP3's contain a lot potential places to launch
| exploits from. No reason to use a vulnerable player.
| ultimoo wrote:
| I'm not a desktop or a ui engineer by trade so I don't
| understand the contention with Electron. I know slack uses it
| and _seems_ to work fine but I have heard similar phrasing
| around "sorry for suggesting electron" and I'm curious to learn
| more about the cons of electron.
| flatiron wrote:
| Pros: you run your web app as a local app without
| reprogramming your app.
|
| Cons: you are literally running a web app in a browser and
| not a native app.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Many Electron apps are sluggish and use more resources than
| necessary for the problem they're trying to solve.
|
| For example, IRC was doing most of the things Slack (desktop
| client in Electron) does, but 20+ years ago when computers
| were a thousandth (or less) as powerful. IRC clients were
| snappy to load and interact with, didn't use a gigabyte of
| RAM, and didn't eat a CPU core.
|
| From https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/:
|
| > Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and
| thus has a userland driver for the Xbox 360 controller in it,
| can render 3D graphics and play audio and take photos with
| your web camera.
| anthk wrote:
| Also, before Slack there was Jabber and MSN/AIM, and with
| Kopete you could do the same you can do today in slack but
| by using 1/10 of resources.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Simple: you're running an entire web browser and all its
| requirements like network support, image decoding and other
| support features to interpret a javascript program for the
| task of playing an mp3 that should be way lighter than
| running a browser.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| Also, there's a lot of overhead compared to running a new
| tab in a browser. It's basically an entire browser for a
| single tab.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| The reason a lot of people groan when we hear Electron is
| that it requires modern-ish hardware to do the same exact
| things that worked fine on hardware from 25 years ago.
|
| The reason a bunch of people use it anyway is because they
| have to be cross platform, and target the web.
| denysvitali wrote:
| And because UI toolkits are generally not that good.
| Especially the cross platform ones
| sparker72678 wrote:
| I'm sure some (most) of it is just nostalgia, but Winamp, to me,
| represents the pinnacle of internet culture.
|
| A free, infinitely-customizable piece of software, playing a
| simple and open-ish format (open for everyone who wanted to use
| it by figuring out how to use liblame), sharing files of dubious
| origins, ...
|
| I guess basically I liked the internet better when it was just a
| bunch of shady pirates running amok.
|
| Except, I'll keep my fiber internet.
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _WebAmp: WinAmp 2 in Your Browser_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17583997 - July 2018 (41
| comments)
|
| _A Reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16333550 - Feb 2018 (208
| comments)
| [deleted]
| captbaritone wrote:
| Hey! Project author here! Happy to answer any questions.
|
| This project is open source and the code, and instructions to use
| it on your site, can be found here:
| https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp
|
| Webamp's ability to render classic Winamp skins led to a
| collaboration with the Internet Archive where we preserved ~70k
| (and counting) classic Winamp skins.
|
| I also built the Winamp Skin Museum (https://skins.webamp.org/)
| where you can infinite scroll through those 70k skins and try
| them out in your browser with one click.
|
| Most recently I've been experimenting with improving the
| visualizer's performance with an in-browser Eel-Wasm compiler.
| Blog post here: https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-
| winamps-music-vi...
|
| The project has given me lots of enjoyment over the years, and
| I'm glad to see that others are enjoying it as well.
| blue_cadet_3 wrote:
| This is great! I see there's Winampify but I can't figure out
| how I would connect my Spotify account to it. Any ideas?
| captbaritone wrote:
| Try opening one of the folders.
| blue_cadet_3 wrote:
| Oh nice! haha I kept trying different buttons on the player
| and settings, never thought to just click a folder. Thanks
| for this!
| airstrike wrote:
| Have you considered spinning off the visualizer as a separate
| project? I'd love to it running on its own, on top of any audio
| I may have playing on the background
| amelius wrote:
| I never understood the llama-whipping.
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/11/a-brief-history-of-the-wi...
| Black101 wrote:
| It would be nice if you could play a youtube playlist in this
| interface... probably the best media player ever ;)
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