Winamp shutting down

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/20/winamp-shutting-down/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget&ncid=rss_semi

I didn't even know there was something to shut down.

I have foobar2000 and XMPlay. Haven't used WinAmp since the early days of Windows XP.

So what exactly did winamp.com offer, besides downloading a media player?

Here's a possible explanation on techcrunch:

"In an interview with Ars Technica last year, Rob Lord, the first hire at Nullsoft and the first general manager of Winamp said that he believed that “there’s no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition.”

While AOL kept Winamp going – it released an Android version in 2010 and Winamp Sync for Mac, including a full player, launched in 2011 – there was never a clear sense of what was going on with the product. The Winamp blog, however, hasn’t been updated for the last year and judging from Ars’ portrait of the company’s fortunes from 2012, it seems like AOL never quite knew what to do with it."

For me, I haven't used Winamp for like 4 years, but I remember it was quite good in the early 2000's.

Winamp 2.91 is still my mp3 player of choice.

I haven't used Winamp since I switched to Linux well over a decade ago. But I've gone through XMPP, BeepMP, and now Audacious. The UI is nice and tidy and I like it :P

I still use winamp because VLCs shuffle is crap and windows media player is itself

That's pretty sad, if true. Winamp pretty much became synonymous with "MP3 player" on the Windows desktop, and even today I like its interface better (with the Modern skin) than any other media player. Very versatile, too, thanks to its plugins. From .VOC to .MP3, from .MOD to .S3M, from .YM to .ST, there was almost nothing it couldn't play. Also, best playlist management of any other player I've seen.

The only aspect that was seriously lacking IMO was support for Flash video formats: it kept hijacking FLV file extensions even though it simply could not play them. But if it's gone....back to having a bazillion dedicated players *groan*

Just listened Bach using winamp, shame if this is the end

Damn… Is the media player going away too? I really like Winamp's simple Open folder to play the songs within menu command. No library meta-folders to worry about (unless you wanted to).

Can't see it being a problem as long as oldversion.com stays online.

I used Winamp exclusively a few years ago. I even made some [pretty terrible] skins for it for my personal use. But I swapped out to Foobar2000 a while ago and haven't looked back.

Still, it is kind of sad to see Winamp die :(

Still using Winamp and don't see a reason to change.

printz said:

Damn… Is the media player going away too? I really like Winamp's simple Open folder to play the songs within menu command. No library meta-folders to worry about (unless you wanted to).

You can do this in Audacious (which is available on Windows as well as Linux). You just do Add on a folder.

I've been using Winamp for the past 8 years. Before then i used iTunes, but the releases back then were so excruciatingly buggy to the point that i decided to migrate to Winamp. Needless to say i've never looked back since.

Pretty sad news, at least to me anyway.

oh, crap.... so this means that winamp will not work? Since i still use it also on my VISTA pc right now....

It surprises me they kept updating it as long as they did. I'm not switching any time soon. I have the thing configured to play all kinds of chiptunes.

I still use WinAmp too. I just like how simple the interface is.

I've been using Winamp for years so this is bad news to hear. I'll continue to use it for as long as possible tho. The only Winamp plugins I use include Amp Randomizer 2 and one for Album Art. I also used to use a sound level normalizer jobby, but I've been to lazy to go find that again.

Mechadon said:

I even made some [pretty terrible] skins for it for my personal use.

That reminds me that I once made a shitty classic skin ages ago. I never released it, thankfully. lol

I switched over to XMPlay years ago. It supports WinAmp plugins, which was the only reason I used it.

I've always used Winamp out of habit, though it's pretty ridiculous on system resources. I guess it's time enough that I switched to something different anyway. A lot of people seem to be using Mediamonkey these days, I seem to gather? Might start using that.

Good riddance. I never was a fan of it.

I've been using MediaMonkey for several years now. While it does have its quirks it's one of the very few players that don't have a messed up user interface. Most seem to have copied all the badness that WinAmp introduced in some ways. I've been sticking to the old 3.x version though, it seems to work a little better than 4.x.

The last one I checked out was Audacious but that one clearly takes the cake for presenting an utterly useless interface where I can't even have my playlists permanently on screen. And on top of that it uses GTK+, meaning that nothing works as it should on Windows. It lasted 5 minutes until I deleted it.

Gez said:

I didn't even know there was something to shut down.

Apart from the registration server, users will probably lose access to the Gracenote metadata at some point. That for me was the final nail in MediaMatch's coffin after Yahoo decided to kill it off.

I love winamp I use it a lot, I also used to use it for converting usf/gsf and other format video game music.

walter confalonieri said:

oh, crap.... so this means that winamp will not work? Since i still use it also on my VISTA pc right now....

Of course it will keep working. It just won't get any updates.

I love Winamp. Sad to see it shutting down.


:(

I'm fine with that, Winamp is a very fast and easy media player (as it is) and I like it a lot for how quickly I can assemble playlists. I'm sure other media players may even be able to do it better but I'm comfortable with pretty much everything about Winamp and see no reason to change.

sad :(

I have been using Winamp for along time and still do. Its just fast, no messy interface and plays most things.

What do people recommend as alternatives? I play a lot of movies in Winamp too and also work with a lot of Quicktime formats.

I keep hearing of Foobar? Maybe I should check it out?

Up until last month, I had been using Winamp as my main audio player since early 2005 or so, though I had been using it for things WMP couldn't play since about 2003. I only switched from Winamp to Foobar in an attempt to quell a problem I thought might be exclusive to Winamp, but it turned out that wasn't the case. I decided to stick with Foobar since I spent the time setting it up and felt that it would serve me well and I've ended up liking it thus far.

Regardless, R.I.P. Winamp. You served me well for ~10 years, and I don't regret it.

I used to use Winamp when I was too cool for WMP. Then, one day, I forgot to install Winamp after wiping my computer and accidentally discovered that I didn't really need it.

The world kind of left MP3 apps in the dust; I almost never listen to music that isn't on my phone now, and the music that is on my phone is in the cloud somewhere.

I still use Winamp though. Why? Because the plugins are bananas. I have yet to find a player anywhere that plays:

* Genesis
* Gameboy
* SNES
* PSX
* PS2
* NES

Like the chipamp collection does. Don't say "AUDACIOUS YOU FUCKIN IDIOT", its support blows and breaks every new commit.

I've taken to using Winamp to rip these chiptune formats to high-bitrate MP3s and storing them on Google Music. The waste and loss of fidelity kind of kills me, but so be it.

(also that guy is an idiot; no one likes iTunes, they're just forced to use it because Apple gets a hard on forcing people to do stupid things)