Winamp Bids a Final Farewell In December

synobal

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Jun 8, 2011
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Winamp might of once been good but it's been crap for ages, I'm not sad to see it go.
 

Kinitawowi

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Nov 21, 2012
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Aww, fuck.

Love Winamp, always loved Winamp, still love Winamp, never got round to finishing my Rainbow Islands Winamp skin or my playlist cleaner Visual Basic app and now I guess it won't matter. Its insane array of customisations, including plugins and skins and its own built in things made it infinitely superior to every other MP3 player out there. When I had an iPod, I always preferred to use Winamp plugins (ml_ipod FTW) over iTunes for music synchronisation.

Still, I suppose it was a Web 1.0 application in what is now a Web 2.0 dominated world; iTunes seems to own all these days and the rest is people playing single tracks in the background from YouTube. It's a far cry from Geiss visulisations and OpenNap plugins for Napster.

Farewell, Winamp. You really did kick the llama's ass.
 

Atmos Duality

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Mar 3, 2010
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Eh, I still use it for a few things. As mediocre as it's gotten over the years, it's still lightyears better than fucking iTunes.
 

Tigurus

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Apr 14, 2009
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But but...Winamp is the only one that actually fits perfectly on my second screen together with skype, steam and the like :(
Nothing can replace Winamp.
 

Summerstorm

Elite Member
Sep 19, 2008
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I am still using the old Winamp 2.8: super-light-weight all needed options.

Ah well... it's not that it will vanish for me now...
 

Psychobabble

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Aug 3, 2013
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Zachary Amaranth said:
Winamp was always kind of mediocre, and in this day and age it seemed like it had aged terribly.

Still, I wonder what happened.
Well it's first stumble came from being bought up by AOL over 10 years ago. My personal opinion is it was aces until those dicks got their hooks into it. The new management had to monkey with the formula of what worked and just sucked the life out of it. I think it was their idiotic idea to team with the spyware ridden Wild Tangent. And to make matters worse the proto-hipsters at AOL fought tooth and nail with Justin Frankel at just about every opportunity until he finally decided to jump ship in 2004. Since then the product has been pretty much running on inertia. Kind of the same thing that happened to Netscape.

Sad to see Winamp dying but I'd love to see someone buy it away from the fuckheads at AOL and make it big again.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

Muse of Fate
Sep 1, 2010
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This is pretty surprising to me as Winamp always seemed to have a huge community with all the skins and plugins. I stopped using Winamp so many years ago though as that Enhancer plugin that's over 10 years old was the only thing that didn't make MP3s sound like shit. jetAudio just blows any music player out of the water with its BBE sound enhancements, you won't ever go back to another player after hearing a MP3 on jetAudio. And, I'm not even an audiophile, the sound difference is just that big.
 

Nimzar

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Nov 30, 2009
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Wow... This is kinda unexpected for me. Good thing the internet is an archive and nothing is ever truly lost. Lack of future development kinda sucks, but honestly I haven't updated it since I installed it. (And turned off all the online features).

I like it because its compact view is great and its RAM footprint is small.
 

Vigormortis

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Nov 21, 2007
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Welp. As sad as I am to see it go, I knew it was inevitable. And not for the reasons you may think.

I knew it was doomed simply because of the incredibly piss-poor excuse for "management" AOL lauded over the company since acquiring it. AOL, pure and simple, mishandled that brand for years.

Though I'm almost certain it'll never happen, the best thing AOL could do with the brand right now is make it open source. If they did I'd be willing to wager that the modding community would craft Winamp into the best all-around player on the 'net within the span of a few months. If that long.

Just imagine: a Winamp player, sans the bloat, with an even wider range of supported formats and podcasting tools.

Making it open source could lead to that. Letting it just drift into history helps no one.

Either way, I'll be nabbing the final version from their site and keeping it on one or more of my backup drives.

Farewell Winamp.
 

Revolutionary

Pub Club Am Broken
May 30, 2009
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I'm really sad now, I'm going to have to create a folder with the winamp .exe, and create a backup on a USB.
Farewell winamp, you really did whip the llama's ass.
 

shiajun

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Jun 12, 2008
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What? I still use Winamp to this day. Since I've never had an iPod I've never had to go near iTunes, and I've ditched Window Media Player because of plugins and format support that just doesn't happen elsewhere. I've got this huge video game music that can't be played anywhere else. Damn it.
 

Atma057

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Nov 20, 2013
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The only reason I used WinAmp as long as I did was global hotkeys. Finally the bloat just got too heavy and I had to change. I found AIMP which has global hotkeys, and looks/functions very similar to WimAmp 2.x, just more powerful and no bloat.

It's still being pretty regularly updated too! If anyone is interested, find it here:
http://www.aimp.ru/
 

Arnoxthe1

Elite Member
Dec 25, 2010
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OK... But why would I have used it over VLC? What made Winamp so great as to get a heartfelt obituary?
 

RJ 17

The Sound of Silence
Nov 27, 2011
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Arnoxthe1 said:
OK... But why would I have used it over VLC? What made Winamp so great as to get a heartfelt obituary?
Nostalgia, mostly. It's been around for a very, very long time...most people probably used it as their first method of playing mp3's on their computer waaaaaaaaay back in the day. Still, I moved on to VLC a long time ago and honestly, until this article popped up, I had forgotten all about Winamp.

But upon seeing this article, I said to myself "Ohhhhhh yeah, I remember that. Damn, it's been AGES since I ever used that...I honestly can't believe that it was still around to begin with."

So yeah, like I said, the purpose of this article would mostly be for nostalgia, though I'd imagine there's still some people out there (likely on this site) that still use it. The fact that it's finally going the way of the dodo, though, would likely mean that its string of users was growing rather short.
 

Alcaste

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Mar 2, 2011
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But...I use winamp. And winamp remote. And plugins to listen to listen to video game music. This is a shame :(
 

Kuredan

Hingle McCringleberry
Dec 4, 2012
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The best thing about Winamp: it's not a big fat turd of a resource hog like iTunes. How many versions of iTunes does it take before you fix memory leak issues? Winamp itself is very non-intrusive and if that wasn't enough, they make a "Lite" version. I love the fact that takes up a minimum of screen space and that I can use keyboard shortcuts while in other programs to control it. I have been using it since 98' on Windows and Linux and it makes me sad that it's going away. Download while you can!
 

UNHchabo

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Dec 24, 2008
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Moosejaw said:
Agggggh no! To this day I still have Winamp, I find it vastly superior to iTunes in the way it lets me actually use keyboard shortcuts in my gaming applications. It's also small and tidy. Been using it since '98 when we had our old Pentium 2 Gateway.
Dr.Awkward said:
But, but, but Winamp is one of the few players with awesome plugins! How else are going to listen to old VG music? Through... MIDI? *shudders at thought*
Tastum said:
I still use it because the Classic skin's interface is very compact and I'm used to its flow. Even in a 20px strip I could reasonably control it, leaving more of my 3840x1080 for IM sessions, my IDE, my browser window, etc.
You guys should check out Foobar2000 [http://www.foobar2000.org/]. It's very customizable, and has a pretty robust plugin interface, so there's plenty of third-party development. I use it to listen to chiptunes, as well as the rest of my music collection. It supports keyboard shortcuts natively.

I used to use Winamp Classic back in the day, but I switched to Foobar about 5 years ago and have been happy since. If you took my interface and removed the left-hand panels, then only had an Artist/Title column, and the Duration column, you'd basically have Winamp Classic.

Here's a screenshot of what I use:
 

MrPhyntch

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Nov 4, 2009
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I'm probably just asking to get shot, but I've never seen anything wrong with Windows Media Player. I've never had the need to install anything else except for on fresh OEM installs on home builds or Linux. I just don't really see the point when a perfectly functional (and not terrible-looking) media player is already shipped with systems. Is there anything i'm just not getting here?