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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 PartTimeZombie on Monday February 12 2018, @02:36AM (20 children)
I might be the only who didn't really like Winamp. I always thought it was gaudy and it ran really badly on my PC. I can't for the life of me remember what I used to listen to MP3's however.
To be fair, the 1990's were hardly a golden age for computer multimedia. does anyone else remember having to download Realplayer to watch something online?
Oh, and I checked, Realplayer still exists which seems really weird.
I might be old.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @02:43AM (1 child)
The rest of us had DOS apps that could do most of its features for a number of years.
As to music: Go look up the chiptunes archives on textfiles.com and scene.org. Like the music industry in general there was stinkers, ripoffs, and original amazing works. You just have to go and find them.
Personally I didn't get into winamp when it came out, however XMMS turned into my goto music player well into the mid '00s. The web radio support in it was good enough for me to spend a couple years getting introduced to british music via Virgin Radio's UK streams, including Estelle when she was still up and coming, before being reintroduced to her when Steven Universe came out :)
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday February 12 2018, @11:28AM
Really? I got WinAMP back in 1997, which came on a CD full of MP3 tools that came on a magazine cover talking about the new MP3 phenomenon. The same CD also came with tools for ripping CDs and other players, including a couple of DOS ones. Even with the DOS players, my brand-new 133MHz Pentium computer was using around 70% of its CPU playing a single MP3. Anything more than a couple of years older would have needed hardware acceleration to be able to play them back. The hard disk I had at the time was a huge 1GB. That didn't give much space for music, even at 128Kb/s (one album was over 5% of my total disk space). It wasn't until I got a 4.3GB disk a few years later that ripping music seemed like it might be a good idea and not until I got a 20GB disk in 2001 that ripping all of my music seemed plausible.
We had module players for a few years before then, but WinAMP came at about the time that MP3 ripping and playback became feasible on home computers.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @02:54AM (5 children)
I can't speak to how it ran on your PC (it ran just fine on mine, FWIW), but "gaudy" it definitely was not. Not out of the box, at any rate. You had plenty of gaudy options to choose from in the many, many skins available, but those were 100% optional. The basic WinAMP UI was pretty vanilla.
Maybe you're thinking of one of the many other audio players that were around at the time. There were plenty of options available and many tended toward gaudy in order to distinguish themselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @03:07AM (3 children)
Might be talking past each other. WinAmp 1 and 2 used basically the same skin (2 was a shinier version of 1), as seen here [wikimedia.org] but WinAmp 3 threw that out the window with modern [wikimedia.org] version. It was so bad that they sort of did a backport of the skin to 3 (which didn't quite look right due to the GUI changes) and then made version 5 (the best parts of 2 + the best parts of 3) default to the "modern" skin but asked on first run if they wanted the "classic" one instead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by chromas on Monday February 12 2018, @05:11AM (2 children)
They skipped 4 so we couldn't have Winamp 4 skins 😢.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @12:17PM (1 child)
I always thought they went to 5 to signify merging the best(?) bits of 2 and 3, since 3 was utter trash to use and bloated. Personally I reverted to 2.91, I still have it installed although I don't use it now.
But your explanation makes more sense.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:29AM
They actually offered up both explanations, but yours was sort of the 'official' one. One cool thing WinAMP does (as does Foobar2000) is read archive files, so when I buttpirate a 'discography' rar, I don't even have to unpack it to load it into the player.
If you want a WinAMP2-alike (with skin support, even), there's XMMS [xmms.org] and several descendants, such as QMMP [ylsoftware.com], Beep Media Player(x) [beep-media-player.org] and Audacious [audacious-media-player.org].
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday February 12 2018, @06:40AM
QCD, later Quintessential Media Player. Still use it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 12 2018, @03:01AM (5 children)
Yeah, I remember Realplayer. What I remember most clearly about Realplayer, was that it was a resource hog. Winamp played music, in the background, while I did whatever it was that I intended to do on the computer. The little jingle about the llama's ass was funny, and it made me like Winamp even more. We need more ass-whipping in the computer world, as well as less resource usage.
I also remember that later versions of Winamp began using more and more resources, with zero improvement in performance. The llama whipping crew lost control of their work, and the corporate world took over. That was the end of Winamp.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday February 12 2018, @03:31AM (2 children)
IIRC, we had a post on this article [arstechnica.com] which discusses how and why Winamp turned to shit.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday February 12 2018, @07:33AM (1 child)
I wonder what happened to WASTE? An encrypted, private P2P network. Seemed like a great idea then, and an even better one now. I know AOL pulled it, but it was open source and published online, so i always thought i would get forked and live on.
Yet, i never heard about it again. Anyone know what happned to it?
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday February 12 2018, @04:33PM
Defunct (2008), although their code is still available on a Sourceforge repository.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday February 12 2018, @09:44PM
+ 1 Informative
I must have stumbled upon Winamp when the resource hog part was happening.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday February 13 2018, @12:08AM
What I remember most about RealPlayer was being suckered into trying RealJukebox. First they "upgraded" their products to an early version of spyware (that was easy to disable) which was bad enough, but what swore me off their (whatever the parent company was called) products forever was my first introduction to the pain of proprietary formats and DRM*. My Windows 98 install got hosed at one point and I tediously saved all my various media and other files to external media (I think it was 3.5" floppies back then) using DOS, then reinstalled Windows. I downloaded and installed RealPlayer and RealJukebox again but discovered that none of the hundreds of .mp3's I had ripped from my CD's using RealJukebox would function because the new version had a different security code than the original. Uninstalled both programs and used various substitutes from then on, one of which was WinAmp.
*and not having backups!
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday February 12 2018, @03:23AM (1 child)
Right now, today, my girlfriend uses Winamp to manage her music collection and music players. She switched from Windows Media Player to itunes when WMP wouldn't work with her ipod without an expensive plugin. She switched from itunes to Winamp when she found out that itunes would not load the music files off an old ipod onto the computer, but Winamp would. This was all years ago but she still uses it because it has worked for everything she needed, and it has followed her from computer to computer several times (each time she asks me why music she downloads doesn't magically show up, and I have to go reconfigure the directories that Winamp is to "watch".)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @06:46PM
LMAO!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @05:52AM
https://i.imgur.com/hChheBK.jpg [imgur.com]
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @02:32PM
Yes, you're the oh so cool guy that hated the thing everyone else loved. F off.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 12 2018, @05:03PM
Real Alternative is what I've been using, if I've needed Real Player compatibility. I wouldn't knowingly install RealPlayer, especially the modern version. Real Player always seemed like a bad implementation of Flash to me. Any place you could have made use of Real Player, a real video without the real media encoding or Flash seemed to be more appropriate.
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: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday February 12 2018, @10:15PM
> I can't for the life of me remember what I used to listen to MP3's however.
I used a program called - if memory serves - MAPlay+. No, I didn't much like WinAMP's UI either. If it's not the standard widgets I get twitchy.