Winamp 6, due out in 2019, aims to whip more llama ass
Rejoice, llama-whipping fans, a new version of Winamp is set to be released in 2019, according to a Monday report by TechCrunch. Alexandre Saboundjian, the CEO of Radionomy, said that the upgrade would bring a "complete listening experience."
[...] The Belgian company that bought Winamp from AOL in January 2014 hasn't really done much with it since buying the remnants of the property just months after AOL finally pulled the plug.
Related: "Whipping the Llama's Ass" with this Javascript WinAmp Emulator
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If you were an early Internet kid you'll recall a little app called WinAmp that was, in short, the best MP3 player ever made ever. The little program looked like skeuomorphic stereo receiver with a full range of equalizer sliders and included an important MP3 that explained WinAmp's primary mission: whipping the llama's ass.
A programmer named Jordan Eldredge has created an homage to WinAmp in JavaScript. The widget allows you to create a standalone music player on any web page and it can be styled with themes straight out of WinAmp history. You can try it out here and download the code here.
"The original inspiration was a realization that Winamp skins were implemented in a very similar way to CSS sprites," said Eldredge. "I spent many hours as a teenager playing with Winamp skins. In fact, it was the first constructive creative work I did on a computer."
The emulator uses the Web Audio API to simulate almost everything WinAmp could do in its original incarnation.
Story at TechCrunch
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:10AM (2 children)
From wikipedia
Feeling old.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:44AM (1 child)
Tell me about it, the days of waiting half an hour for the fastest Sun Workstation I had (SPARCstation 2) to encode 5 minutes of audio to 256K mp3 using l3enc..the ratio FTP servers lurking in various universities...(for my sins, I was responsible for uploading most/all of the King Crimson found on these servers in the early days)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 16 2018, @07:18AM
I encouraged downloads but no one could actually play them.
http://mike.soggywizards.com/music/geometric-visions-the-rough-draft/1%20Emergence%20-%20Michael%20David%20Crawford%20-%20Geometric%20Visions%201994%20-%20q4.ogg [soggywizards.com]
http://mike.soggywizards.com/music/geometric-visions-the-rough-draft/2%20Recursion%20-%20Michael%20David%20Crawford%20-%20Geometric%20Visions%201994%20-%20q4.ogg [soggywizards.com]
http://mike.soggywizards.com/music/geometric-visions-the-rough-draft/3%20Sahara%20-%20Michael%20David%20Crawford%20-%20Geometric%20Visions%201994%20-%20q4.ogg [soggywizards.com]
http://mike.soggywizards.com/music/geometric-visions-the-rough-draft/4%20As%20Yet%20Untitled%20-%20Michael%20David%20Crawford%20-%20Geometric%20Visions%201994%20-%20q4.ogg [soggywizards.com]
Please Drop Them Into Your Shared Folder.
A vocal album is coming sometime in the next few months.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:37AM (5 children)
Why would I need a new one? v2.95 still works. It's quite small to.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:59AM
Running on my Win 10 desktop at work, at this very moment.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Tuesday October 16 2018, @07:43AM (3 children)
Why would I need any MP3 player? I listen to music via youtube now.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 16 2018, @10:39AM (2 children)
Mostly because it's easier to queue up a day's playlist, crank the volume, and get busy doing household chores than it is in youtube. For individual songs or stumbling around though, you're absolutely right.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
Youtube automatically makes playlists for you. I just click on one of the mixes it presents and giv'r.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:42PM
Google shall not be the boss of my playlists, thanks just the same. I'll create them myself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:37AM (12 children)
The reason to use Winamp is precisely because it isn't a "complete listening experience":
I don't have to sign into it.
Winamp doesn't molest my library.
Winamp doesn't upload files it finds.
Winamp doesn't try to sell me things.
Winamp stays out of the way and plays the music I want it to.
If I wanted to use iTunes/Spotify/whatever else, I would be using them.
I have run into a problem with my library size and content with Winamp and largely now use Qmmp.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:43AM (5 children)
Which is nothing to do with the experience of listening to music
> Winamp doesn't molest my library.
Which is nothing to do with the experience of listening to music
> Winamp doesn't upload files it finds.
Which is nothing to do with the experience of listening to music
> Winamp doesn't try to sell me things.
Which is nothing to do with the experience of listening to music
> Winamp stays out of the way and plays the music I want it to.
Which is the essense of the complete experience of listening to music - all the prior things are not "complete", they are "unnecessary additions".
I *do* want the complete listening experience, which is the music files I specify being decoded and squirted out to the speakers. End of.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:56PM (3 children)
While what you say is true. The fact is that a lot of music apps are doing all of those things. With the side benefit of doing the last thing on your list.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 17 2018, @08:01AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:24PM (1 child)
What you're thinking of is last.fm, which is basically Twitter for music and about as useless. Every maintained music player (except WMP, though I don't think you can call that "maintained" anymore) can post to last.fm since it's just a matter of making an HTTP request with an authentication token.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @07:35AM
Last.fm was useful, once upon a time, several years ago...
I fed it several months worth of music listening, and by exploring what it deemed my 'nearest neighbours' were listening to and picking artists I'd never heard of, I discovered a fair number of bands I'd have otherwise ignored, but as I then discovered a number of blog sites run by people with similar eclectic musical tastes to my own who provided me with a better signal to noise ratio when it came to artists I'd never encountered before, I switched off the 'scrobbler' and stopped using their site.
A couple of months back when I was purging my unused accounts, I logged in to last.fm, a quick check of who it thinks are people with similar tastes to mine are listening to was informative, there was a lot of what I'd regard as 'commercial pop', and, rather weirdly, a number of messages about goth/metal (including one for a dating site) not genres I listen to a lot of...so, interesting, says I..and put a stay of execution on deleting the account. As I've now currently got the time, I think i'll investigate if they're 'gaming' these 'similarity' matches for commercial gain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @08:33AM
It can be trivially demonstrated a gui isn't necessary for a complete listening experience.
Unnecessary additions is what this game is about. Their use of Complete Listening Experience is unquestionably different than yours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:50AM (4 children)
What does a UI have to do with listening to music? Try mplayer or mpg123.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 16 2018, @10:40AM (3 children)
Drag and drop's easier for making a large playlist. GUIs do have their limited uses.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:45AM (2 children)
I just switched to mpd (https://www.musicpd.org/), which allowed a choice of cmdline, API, or GUI interfaces, and has a library, playlist, and the basics I needed.
Indeed after winamp went away (the original, before Justin and NULLSOFT got bought out and left development), I switched to that, and have been happy ever since. It was one of the main things that helped me migrate away from windows completely.
Although I admit, for a long time, I used XMMS, because it was a clone, and the skins were compatible. Audacious nowadays still supports winamp 2 skins, which is quite nice, but not the later 3+ ones. I found the ability to completely decouple the UI from the actual player was quite powerful.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:19PM (1 child)
That approach has its merits and downsides but running a (possibly second) system daemon for playing audio fundamentally disturbs me. It very much belongs in userspace by my way of thinking.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:41PM
I agree I found it odd at first, however my desktop was always on, so rather than have to fire up the media player all the time, just have in the background, library updates are handled by cron, hosted on my file server via NFS share, any new media placed on the server gets synched quickly.
Also, I could pause a song, and come back to resume it tomorrow without thinking about starting up the player, finding the song again (if the playlist is still loaded), hitting play, etc... It was just seamless
Then there is the fact I can have multiple interfaces at once. The GUI for when I am setting up the playlist, or casual listening, then the cmdline for when I am hacking on something and don't want to move out of the shell, to the keybindings to the media keys on my keyboard, for hardware control. Then there is the mpd client on my phone, which allows me to control the music from wherever I am in the house (useful when I am doing chores to music and don't want to go up the stairs to change the song).
Indeed, as I found myself using the above system more and more, I actually moved mpd to a rasberry pi, and just keep it permanently hooked up to the hifi, so now the "media player" is just another unit on the hifi. My next goal is to build it into an old hifi deck with a VFD display, and then it will actually look like a piece of hifi equipment, and be an always on system for playing music.
However I do see the need for standalone players too. My laptop has a subset of my music collection, which I take when I am out of the house. There the benefits of a networked music player are not so strong, so I actually use audacious (with the XMMS winamp2 skin), for that comfortable retro feel (I am so used to the winamp interface I still think it is the "right" way a music player on the PC should look like, despite it being really just a skeuomorphic design of analogue controls).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 16 2018, @10:43AM
Agreed on Qmmp. It's a damned fine spiritual successor to Winamp.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday October 16 2018, @01:38PM (3 children)
I am quite pleased with mixxx, as whatever file you throw at it gets analyzed (most importantly gain, but bpm is useful too), has crates (akin to tagging, it has playlists too ofc), master gain and eq. The big problems with other players is the gain difference between tracks, sometimes even when replaygain is enabled or recognized. Most notably, it stores everything in a plain sqlite3 db, so importing/ exporting playlists to other text based formats is less buggy. I DJ on it, for more complicated playback work I have been using mpv so I can have an eq curve for each track and a big ass play time display.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday October 16 2018, @01:41PM (2 children)
Now that I think of it I should list mixcloud among my music players. Like spotify, but complete mixes, no ads. It is also legal as they pay they royalties (I guess they sell listener data to make up for it or something)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:36AM (1 child)
I thought the whole point of a dj was the human reading the crowd and picking appropriate tunes. How do you get gigs as a bot?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday October 17 2018, @06:50PM
I have IR sensor for reading the crowd.
Account abandoned.