The 1990s seem to have reached that point at which they are once more considered cool, and ephemera of the decade has become sought-after. One of the unlikely software hits from the period was Winamp, the MP3 player of choice in an era when time spent on dodgy file sharing sites or peer to peer sharing would snag you almost any music you wanted. Decades later its interface is still widely copied, but now you can try the original again as its source code has been made available. It’s not what we’d call open source though, even though they seem to be making an effort to imply as much with phrases such as “opening up its source code“.
If you’d like to have a go with it you can snag a copy from this GitHub repository, and you’ll need a particular version of Visual Studio 2019 to build it. Any celebrations will be muted though by paragraph five of the Winamp Collaborative License, which prohibits distribution of modified versions or forks, and stipulates that only the official maintainers can distribute it. This doesn’t sound like open source to us, indeed it seems they’re just looking for community maintenance for free, which probably isn’t too surprising from a brand which went all-out to join the NFT bandwagon a couple of years ago.
So have a look for nostalgia’s sake if you want, but we’d suggest going for something more community driven if you want to do anything with it.
Header: Christiaan Colen, CC BY-SA 2.0.
back when i had win9x and win2k winamp was great, i switched to Linux when winxp was released,
Audacious is plenty good,
+1 for audacious yo.
Literally the only “issue” I’ve ever had is I have some music from an actual DOS game in “Loudness” (*.lds) format and the AdPlug plugin for it requires real Windows and real Winamp… or a media player in Linux that is so old it no longer installs.
I just almost never listen to it. I’m no programmer, I’m a user.
https://github.com/Greedysky/TTKMusicPlayer can do *.lds….
Maybe droidsound e can play it? I can’t say I’ve ever tried to play a song in that format with it but given how many other formats it does support I definitely wouldn’t be surprised if it could play it though
QMMP can use Winamp 2.x skins and works pretty good!
Chiptune support out-of-the-box. Very interesting.
This code has historic and educational value. It’s great that we can study it even if we can’t re-release it.
Not historic, just nostalgic. And code in proprietary software rarely has any educational value once it’s released – more often than not you start asking yourself how they even made the spaghetti work.
If they aren’t releasing the code for version 2.99 then they are just releasing code for the versions that nobody likes anyway.
Winamp “lite” was OK up to version 5. I’m using version 5.623.
Version 6 is where it jumped the shark.
never stopped using winamp. even with some questionable design decisions and bloat. but its installer lets you simply not install said bloat if you dont want it. frankly i dont really care if it never receives another update, its stable and it works. the license terms kind of suck and it doesnt allow for a proper native linux port, but it looks like you can run it under linux anyway from a google search.
the nft thing kinda didn’t make sense though other than to add yet another format supported. its one of the features you can opt out of in the installer. but im still on 5.666 and never saw the need to update it further. dont fix what aint broke.
They accidentally included the Shoutcast server source as well as proprietary Dolby code. Whoops!
quick, archive it before they notice.
Honestly there is a loop hole here about distributing forks. Do your modifications and improvements but release only your new code and a patcher/installer that requires the user to download the source or have this “open source” version installed. It’s not elegant and you will make your users jump through some hoops but they can’t stop you from just distributing new code that works with theirs.
Or just don’t bother with propriatary crap with dubious value beyond nostalgia? It’s not open, not even in quotes and there are better alternatives.
So cloned the repo just to take a peek and it’s nearly three gigs of garbage with a mere 27 commits! Clearly these fools have never used version control.
i dont even think git was a thing back then.
i dont even think git was a thing back then. even svn only came out in 2000.
RCS and CVS were around back then, though.
Don’t forget Visual SourceSafe.
🤓 and Clearcase. i used it in the 90s when it was from Atria. Pretty good integration.with Solaris back then.
Heh, one of the items in their “BuildTools” folder is a TortoiseSVN installer. Moving history from SVN to Git isn’t trivial but it’s not brain surgery either, and you can get it wrong as many times as you like.
“Any celebrations will be muted though by paragraph five of the Winamp Collaborative License, which prohibits distribution”
Ya, like who listens to that. The software police gonna come knocking on my door. LOL
I used win amp a few times but I prefered Real player with the headbanging sheep.
Surprised if I could find any of those files.
Hey look! Another “open” software license to deal with (WCL).
Still, at least we have source code for some causal reading.
I heard that winamp “really kicks the llamas ass”… Oh man, the 90’s. Miss those days.
You heard wrong my friend, it WHIPS the llamas ass
*whips
I often think that Mod4Win meant to Amiga tracker music the same what WinAmp meant to mp3s..
Both had an interface that was standing out..
And both essentially started out in the days of good old Windows 3.1, I think.
Winamp 1.55 needs Win32s extension, though, I believe.
Or OS/2 Warp with ODIN, the Win32 compatibility layer? ;)
Speaking of OS/2, does anybody remember PowerMOD?
I’d bet you can get around the license garbage by distributing only patches or diffs. Then you aren’t distributing their source or modifications of it but some floating ephemeral bit that hooks up with it.
I always felt sorry for the poor llama :-(
I still use winamp to this day. Love the milk drop visualizer. And recently not had much trouble from winamp itself which is surprising.
Don’t care, using it for 2decades.
Apart from vizualisations what was so great about winamp ?
And if you’re after the vizualisations, there’s projectM for that.
Or am I missing something ?
At the time, for me, it had an easy user interface to pick the CD’s I wanted to listen to. The play list was very good.
It whipped the llamas butt till VLC came. I liked the skins but the versatility of VLC whips the Winamp’s ass. In my cheapo Samsung my JBL cans sound like da bomb and my old Philips cans sounded even better. ‘Spose the phone’s DAC shares part of the merit.
For me (at the time) I liked that it was small on the screen, and went even smaller. Alternatives were full screen applications that required a full context shift to look at. It always capable and felt snappy too.
What was great about it now or then? Then, it was one of the first alternatives to Fraunhofer’s WinPlay3, the first MP3 player we ever saw. It was also relatively low CPU usage, so you could still use most of your Pentium 133 for gaming, etc.. Later, of course Justin Frankel have us Gnutella and P2P for sharing.
It’s hard to put a fine point on it, maybe nostalgia blinders, but it worked and it worked well. I liked the equalizer feature, and it was easy to create and modify playlists. At some point when I got a used iPod Classic, it was nice to be able to use WinAmp to manage my library on the iPod instead of dealing with iTunes.
I’m sure there’s more. Little things that you don’t even think about until you try to do something in another app and the feature isn’t there.
Addons (input, output, other formats, visualization, blinkenlights)
playlist with good search and queue ability
hotkey support (global = even in background)
customizable interface (one window, multiple windows, design etc.)
Guess there are several other options “today” but back around 2000?
https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm
Just a lame MilkDrop replacement?
Give me an AVS replacement and we can talk.
forgot some points:
~ ICQ away message with currently playing song.
~ current song in the tray-/taskbar
~ controls in the traybar
one of the best MP3 decoders at the time
nice handling of multiple audio devices
volume normalization (replay gain)
gapless play (for albums broken into individual files)
remove silence on beginnings/ends (adjustble threshold)
could rip CDs
convert entire playlist to WAV without playing (fast) and burn on CD
export playlists as text/html for CD covers
good ID3 tag support and editing from the playlist
per track EQ with auto-loading
could export per-track EQ simply by copying the track EQ files to another computer
Seriously, for such a small and unobtrusive program, Winamp was always the one where you thought “It would be nice if… oh, I wonder if Winamp does it? Yes it does.” – and all the others were “Nope, it doesn’t.”.
Everything else wanted to be Winamp, but nobody else bothered to put in the effort.
Looks like MusicBee supports the original AVS plugin:
https://getmusicbee.com/addons/visualizer/367/advanced-visualization-studio/
Need to check that out…
Musicbee is great, however it is fully closed source. Winamp may have a restrictive license, but you can at least see what’s in it now.
To me a music player is a music player. I didn’t much care for the look of 80s era stereo equipment in the Winamp UI, but the Milkdrop visualizer was awesome, even though I never had a PC that could render the patterns very well back in the day. But there’s some good news:
1) MilkDrop is now a stand alone program that will sync patterns to any audio on your Windows computer (including notifications, if you don’t turn them off). https://github.com/milkdrop2077/MilkDrop3
2) My 2017 vintage HP Prodesk 600 G3 PC with a GTX1660s craphics card cost all of $300, connects to my 77″ OLED TV and plays music from my server via squeezelite-X. MilkDrop produces incredible 4k graphics at 60 fps and it syncs to music better than it ever did before. I just added an SMSL SU-1 DAC to get better quality audio than the PC can deliver and now it’s perfect.
One of the 1st all around apps. Small, free, everyone had it. If you just wanted to play music it did it well, want it to look cool, pretty easy to do that too. Want to delve deep and do fancy routing and things with plugins you can do that too. ..but it always retained the ability to just install and do its job, simply and without long load times and complications.
For me, it was light on system resources, small download, and better than windows media player. If you could think it, someone had made a skin of it, and the skin library was easy to search. Built in equalizer. Had easy access to music streams/online radio streams. I don’t remember if windows played mp3 by default back in the day. You had to download codex for almost everything back then. Even dvds didn’t play without a download on windows. Winamp supported so many media formats.
I never liked winamp. I had a particular set of mp3’s that had to transition without any pause or delay, (mike oldfield, sounds of distant earth). I could never get winamp to do that. I had a player called NAD that did it just fine tho…
I used Winamp for a long time but went over to Foobar2000 many, many years ago. Free, with a large collection of free plugins. A true “swiss army knife” of a program. Not just a player but a ripper that can tag the resulting files from online databases, and with the FooUPnP plugin it can also act as a DLNA server and client.
Fb2k is my go to anymore. It handles everything sound file so well that it’s good as even just a utility outside of playback.
Tagging, replay-gain, conversion, repair, organization, etc.
Still my daily driver and turns out some stuffs I made in the early 2000s are still shipped with it!
(ape plugins for avs)
Stopped using Winamp in the early aughts when Linux became my daily driver, but still have a lot of nostalgia for this highly-skinnable mp3 player of days gone by. Anybody else remember mp3.com? The more important question is: does it still whip the llama’s ass?
Just because one doesn’t like the license does not make it NON-OPEN_SOURCE
So sick of these open source tards complaining, hey they open sourced it so you can look at it, cool, but nay say the nay sayers.
They didn’t open source it, they made the source available. The latter is a normal English sentence, the former is meaningless without a generally agreed on definition.
What is it with people defending corporations these days? It’s clear the term is used for free marketing. Not to mention in this case it’s a worthless dump of unmanageable mess, full of hacks and reinvented wheels with no docs or comments.
So no, nothing cool about it. Another lame company looking for free labor.
The best thing is the Licens is writing by a AI
for any one wand to check you need copy the license to https://www.zerogpt.com/