[HN Gopher] Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its sou...
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Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code
Author : captbaritone
Score : 181 points
Date : 2024-05-16 20:56 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.winamp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.winamp.com)
| ssahoo wrote:
| Good. Love the reimplementation in HTML https://webamp.org/
| semireg wrote:
| This satisfied whatever cravings I still had. Thank you!
| yazzku wrote:
| It's fantastic. I can easily spend hours on the skins website.
| https://skins.webamp.org/
| tech-no-logical wrote:
| wow, I even found the skin I used way back when... very cool
|
| https://skins.webamp.org/skin/d77a144cdb775a0937617389b6e0e4.
| ..
| captbaritone wrote:
| Hey! That's my side project. So glad to hear people enjoy it.
| LocutusOfBorges wrote:
| Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it's still
| nice to see.
|
| Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is
| being released under - and it's only available following email
| enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering,
| at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it
| has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.
| bcraven wrote:
| I use the community update of Winamp, WACUP, and it's
| excellent. I've tried other media players but always come back
| here.
|
| I'm not even one of those people who likes the shitty
| visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.
|
| https://getwacup.com/
| QuercusMax wrote:
| It's windows-only? Weird.
| Lammy wrote:
| Weird? It's _Win_ amp lol
| xnx wrote:
| With the source code someone can port it to make Linamp.
| callwhendone wrote:
| don't forget Macamp.
| nathell wrote:
| Remember that before Winamp, there was DOSamp! I used to
| use version 0.8. Playback was jerky on a 486DX2/66 but
| once I upgraded to a Pentium, it was smooth sailing.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| There once was xmms
| kbenson wrote:
| Before that it was called x11amp, and after that it's
| been succeeded by a fork that ended up being Audacious,
| apparently.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Qmmp is still being developed:
| https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/
| m00x wrote:
| Who's gonna build TempleAmp?
| kbenson wrote:
| Yeah, if you want something similar for other systems,
| try x11amp.
|
| (Yes I know it's not called that anymore and I'm showing
| my age).
| stuaxo wrote:
| It's Windows only for now.
|
| The architecture of Winamp is made of various plugins.
| WACUP is replacing them bit by bit.
|
| Once everything is replaced then porting could be possible,
| though it's been only built for Windows so there must be a
| lot of Windows-isms in there.
| Dwedit wrote:
| There have been Linux-based clones of Winamp for a long
| time, such as XMMS (which directly supports Winamp skins).
| pessimizer wrote:
| They seem to be just as cagey about the licensing. Not that
| there's any obligation for people to be FOSS if they want to
| give software away, but the intentional avoidance of the
| question is always instructive. Just say that it's not FOSS,
| it's fine.
|
| > Will it be free ?
|
| > Yes WACUP will be free to download & to use.
|
| > This is an independent project & due to the amount of time
| & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and
| other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst
| I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this
| time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where
| the future will take me & this project.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Have you checked out foobar2000? To me, it always felt like
| the true successor to Winamp.
| koito17 wrote:
| foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac
| for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet
| uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for
| granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata
| all at once.
|
| A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or
| foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case,
| it's in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used
| to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more
| likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box
| functionality and layout extensibility.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I find it amusing that modern foobar2k theming is based
| around Javascript.
| babypuncher wrote:
| > A few of my friends complain that the layout "sucks" or
| foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use
| case,
|
| I see these complaints too, and I find them funny. The
| layout is what you make of it. I don't care for any of
| the layout presets presented in the "Quick Appearance
| Setup" dialog, but the default UI component is very easy
| to customize almost any way you want. There's even a
| scratchbox feature that lets you experiment with building
| a whole UI from scratch without messing with your current
| layout.
|
| As for the functionality they find it lacks, well,
| there's probably a component for that.
|
| Frankly I find foobar2000 comes with a ton of
| functionality out of the box that other media players
| don't have, like the very robust features found in the
| "Tagging" and "File Operations" context menu entries.
| leeoniya wrote:
| you'd have a hard time replicating this UI [1] or other
| winamp skins in foobar2000, so i'm not sure i'd call it a
| successor except in the sense that it can play anything you
| throw at it.
|
| [1] https://getwacup.com/screenshots/
| babypuncher wrote:
| I consider it a successor in that it's compact with an
| emphasis on user customization and community-designed
| plugins/components. Like Winamp, most functionality you
| get out of the box is provided by bundled plugins, and
| they can be replaced with alternatives.
|
| Out of the box, you could certainly customize it to have
| a similar layout to winamp even if none of the dressing
| looks at all the same.
|
| My layout[1] is certainly very different than Winamp, but
| still conforms a lot more to the basic shape of Winamp
| than the usual giant screen-filling squares that are
| iTunes, Windows Media Player or the Spotify desktop
| client.
|
| 1. https://i.postimg.cc/R0JzVTK8/image.png
| davidgerard wrote:
| I was surprised to find how many people still use Winamp now.
| callwhendone wrote:
| took them 20 years to figure out that they can't monetize their
| media player
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Literally just yesterday I was staring at Winamp's basic
| visualizer because I was trying to make something similar in my
| Godot game.
|
| I'm still not sure exactly what I'm missing, as I have the
| "gist" of the visualizer working, but it just doesn't look as
| smooth as Winamp's. I think I need slight persistence and the
| little effect with the 'caps' that slowly fall down for each
| column (right now mine looks too jittery).
| foxandmouse wrote:
| have you looked at the ProjectM: https://github.com/projectM-
| visualizer/projectm
| swatcoder wrote:
| It may carry downstream license obligations of its own, that
| prohibit/complicate public release.
|
| Relatedly, they might be hoping that one of the people looking
| at it might be willing to buy out or take over contractual
| responsibility for any components that can't be relicensed to
| traditional open source. Basically, parading the source around
| like a debutante because other channels to find buyers haven't
| panned out.
|
| Or it's just real-world commercial code and is kind of
| embarassing by the standards of public open source projects.
| xxpor wrote:
| I'm skeptical this will be a fully free license based on the
| cagey language in the announcement :/
| pquki4 wrote:
| Very weird. They provide a very specific future date for this,
| and avoided using the term "open source". I can't recall any
| other company doing this. Most of the time, companies provide a
| github repository at the same time they make such
| announcements. Even for twitter, Elon Musk promised the
| algorithm would be opened, and then some time later it was just
| there. While generally it is a positive thing to see code being
| available, I wouldn't think too much into it until I can see
| the license and the code.
| TillE wrote:
| > I can't recall any other company doing this
|
| Years ago Microsoft used to do stuff like this, notably
| releasing .NET Framework under its Reference Source License
| (you're allowed to look at the code, but that's about it).
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| TIL: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
|
| https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-
| source/2023...
| 0x1ch wrote:
| The dozen people still using Winamp rejoice...
| dark-star wrote:
| I'm one of those 12 people apparently. I don't know, I still
| listen to mp3 music on my PC almost every day... And I have yet
| to find another player that is as fast and lightweight as
| WinAMP
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| foobar is great
| jerhewet wrote:
| Not lightweight, but I've fallen in love with MusicBee
| (https://getmusicbee.com/) and it's been my only music player
| for at least the last 10 years. Love everything about it.
| devindotcom wrote:
| i'm with you my brother
| hodder wrote:
| It really whips the llama's ass.
| yazzku wrote:
| Certainly whipped my ass after hearing that intro again 20
| years later.
| nuxi wrote:
| it's Wesley Willis, all the way down...
| solardev wrote:
| Maybe now we can finally add RealVideo support to it.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Let's all take this moment to celebrate 22 years and 230 days
| of RealNetwork's strong commitment to fucking ugly clunky
| software.
|
| https://www.bonequest.com/1099
| xyst wrote:
| til: Winamp is still alive and kicking
| tflol wrote:
| As if they arent already ruin everything I love as I use it, they
| are now reaching into my past and threaten to ruin things there.
|
| Will winamp be gamified? Will AI be integrated into the UI? Will
| the interface be clunky and slow? Will random shuffle change to
| "shuffle we want for you"? Will every part of the UI turn
| enouremous with no option to go back? Stay tuned
| kibibu wrote:
| So don't update it. It's not a subscription
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I remember as a hobbyist Windows programmer (Borland C++ Builder)
| I was really envious of the skills required to build something
| like Winamp - especially the UI. Back then, advanced learning
| resources and examples were effectively non-existent or at least,
| hard to find and stitch together.
| yazzku wrote:
| The fact that you can re-skin it at runtime with such a wide
| variety of skins and load such a variety of plugins puts modern
| software to shame.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Dockable UI, fast, stable, form and function. Really a
| masterclass in software design to this day.
| pjbk wrote:
| I think those of us who use the REAPER DAW and its
| customizable themes are the main beneficiaries of that
| functionality.
| bredren wrote:
| It was really cool.
|
| Skinning was pretty easy to do. The packaging format was a
| zip archive with a renamed extension. You could do a lot with
| a little photoshop skills and trial and error.
|
| So many people used it that skins would get a lot of
| distribution, too.
| dale_glass wrote:
| You can reskin a lot of modern software, it just went out of
| fashion.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| (Borland) Delphi also made creating non standard form shapes;
| the secret was in leveraging the win32 api, which was really
| easy to do in Delphi.
|
| Here's an example:
| http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Strange that they didn't include a single screenshot on that
| page.
| drekipus wrote:
| Very common for older projects
| adra wrote:
| I remember fondly writing a winamp clone in school with a team
| project. We scraped together a rough plugin based player, input
| and output plugins (a super limited network streaming variant),
| etc.. good times grinding on a neat project. Yikes, that was
| like 25 years ago.
| GGO wrote:
| why wait this long (until Sept 2024) to opensource the code?
| captbaritone wrote:
| Note that they don't actually say "open source" anywhere.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Winamp has a ton of proprietary licensed library code (codecs,
| Gracenote API, etc) that all has to be replaced with open
| source equivalents before the code can be released. I believe
| the skeleton crew that they had working on maintaining Winamp a
| few years ago started on some of this work, but I'm assuming
| that the whole codebase needs to be audited to make sure that
| they're legally in the clear.
| omoikane wrote:
| It's also weird that the timestamp on the press release is "Dec
| 16, 1".
|
| There are 5 press releases total on that site, 2 from 2023, 2
| from 2024, and this one from year "1". It just seems very
| strange.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| llama
| yumraj wrote:
| is there a good Mac port that supports newer, especially loss
| less, codecs?
| captbaritone wrote:
| The closest I've seen is https://re-amp.ru. Not sure about
| codecs
| sn0n wrote:
| Can we get a Godot port for winamp on all the systems? Kthnx. ^>^
| foxandmouse wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I thought of winamp, I moved on to
| foobar2000 and then to streaming services. Even with this
| announcement, there's no mention of a licence... Too little too
| late, maybe if foobar2000 became open source but I'd doubt it.
| Lammy wrote:
| This leaked a couple years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29379346
| drc86 wrote:
| I knew those quotation marks were going to ruin my elation when I
| clicked the headline.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Kinda late. Maybe it would've been cool in 2006 when I still used
| Windows.
|
| But what I really want to know is: will it really kick the LLaMAs
| ass now with AI features?
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm surprised they _haven 't_ announced any AI features yet.
|
| It seems like every 5 years ago there's a big "Winamp is BACK"
| announcement paired with some new nonsense related to whatever
| the big tech buzzword of the day is. Last time it was
| blockchains.
| devindotcom wrote:
| Currently dating myself by playing Portishead's Dummy in Winamp
| 5.66...
|
| Looking forward to this code being lightly maintained for minimal
| compatibility with future OSes. I dislike change!
| ndiddy wrote:
| Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial
| difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the
| skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main
| focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for
| HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the
| community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats
| letting it die IMO.
|
| https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-site-design/46...
| peppertree wrote:
| Still waiting on KaZaA open source. Kids these days don't know
| what it's like trying to download a music video and end up
| watching someone getting beheaded.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| About 20 years ago, I almost got hired on the Winamp team. They
| were busy working on Winamp 3, which, from what I gathered, was a
| pretty much total rewrite using modern C++.
|
| The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by
| Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was
| very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I
| wonder which source code they'll open up. Maybe both.
| boomskats wrote:
| I had to re-read your comment because first time round I
| thought you were suggesting it was JF's codebase they hated.
| Everything else he's ever worked on has been phenomenal
| (especially Reaper, from the very start).
|
| So was that at AOL?
| loceng wrote:
| I just remembered I used to hangout in an IRC chat with the
| creator of Sonique as a pre-teen when I first started to teach
| myself to code - Sonique being the main competitor to Winamp way
| back when.
|
| Strange how memory works.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I used to love Winamp for internet radio/tv.
|
| Maybe plug-in NewPipe or similar instead and fork it?
| babypuncher wrote:
| For anyone looking for a _slightly_ more modern alternative, I
| recommend foobar2000[1].
|
| It's not quite as pretty out of the box, but it makes up for it
| with some insane customizability. It also has a very robust
| ecosystem of components, and works very well in Wine.
|
| 1. https://www.foobar2000.org/
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The weaselly wording doesn't make me optimistic, but I hope it's
| an open source license.
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| I still use the old Winamp on all my devices. Winamp: old or new
| is being open sourced? If it's the old one, wonderful! WACUP team
| are now able to develop a ARM version.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Questions for the experts: should anyone use this, compared eg to
| something more modern like VLC?
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/ already exists, though.
| chubot wrote:
| Wow, for me Winamp was one of the first "enshittified" pieces of
| software.
|
| I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version
| sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or
| something
|
| I remember I used to use http://oldversion.com [1] to download
| the previous one
|
| Ever since then I have been wary of "improvements" that make
| software worse, which has been happening a lot recently.
|
| I'd be really interested in seeing the source code to the
| original. I didn't know much about programming then, and to me
| that would be similar to reading the original source code of Doom
| (which I've done a bit)
|
| [1] this site still seems alive? But doesn't even have https?
| lmm wrote:
| > I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next
| version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in
| ownership or something
|
| Winamp 3 was a major regression that sparked a backlash (in
| particular it had a new skin engine that probably was a priori
| better, but broke compatibility all existing skins, which
| wasn't popular; also performance, which had been a major
| selling point, was worse), but I don't remember there being any
| change of ownership or monetization effort. I think it was just
| a genuine well-intentioned rewrite that ended up worse than the
| original, like Netscape 4 or KDE4.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Hope it's the source for Winamp 2.x (not 3 or 5)
| riffic wrote:
| didn't it leak some time ago? did AOL ever spin nullsoft back
| out?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Oh my God. My favorite piece of software of all time. Would love
| to read it's source.
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(page generated 2024-05-16 23:00 UTC)