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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: 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!