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.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.
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.Arnoxthe1 said:OK... But why would I have used it over VLC? What made Winamp so great as to get a heartfelt obituary?
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*
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.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.