And it’s available on Linux!
I had no idea that xmms died and got forked. Thanks for the tip
I love it on the surface. It sadly has major issues with scaling and the window controls not allowing you to drag it about (at least on Wayland).
it’s immersive
WinAmp making their source code ‘source available’ instead of open source, and then dropping this phrase:
The release of the Winamp player’s source code will enable developers from all over the world to actively participate in its evolution and improvement.
Yeah I don’t think so
Yup, as much as I like Grayjay, I’m not going to help development much because it’s “source available” instead of open source. There was an annoying bug I wanted fixed, and I was willing to go set up my dev environment and track it down, but they don’t seem interested in contributions, so I won’t make the effort.
Likewise for WinAmp. The main benefit to it being “source available” is that I can recompile it and researchers can look for bugs. That’s it. They’re not going to get developers interested.
Even if they accept patches, contributing still sounds like a bad deal. It’s free labor for some company. FOSS at minimum means the right to fork, precisely what “source available” seeks to deny.
Leaving aside the question of winamp vs comparable programs, does anyone even care about desktop music players any more? I’m a throwback and use command line players, but I thought the cool kids these days use phones for stuff like that.
I understand there is some technical obstacle to porting Rockbox to Android, but idk what it is and haven’t tried to look into it.
I look at ‘source available’ software as the right to review the code yourself to ensure there’s no malicious behavior, not for community development.
You mean if you build it yourself? I guess that is something, but it is still conceivable to sneak stuff in. Look at that xzlib backdoor from a few weeks ago.
Yep. I will happily contribute to something with community ownership that I believe in. I will not, under any circumstances, provide free labor to a private entity.
It’s simple. They want the free labor provided by the community with the ability to keep all of the profits they can potentially reap from said labor.
Oooooh they were just looking for free labor! Pass
What are some projects which have “source available”? Can someone get the source and upload or will it violate some NDA? And what kind of licence is associated with this?
Unreal Engine is a major example, you get access to a private repo containing the engine’s source code but you’re bound by an agreement regarding what you can do with it IIRC. Of course anyone is allowed to apply for access though
For example terraform changed their license to a non open-source license, and everyone hated it. Then a fork was created, which used the code before the license change which was still licensed under an open source license. The fork “OpenTOFU” is now ‘owned’ by the Linux Foundation
https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-announces-fork-of-terraform/
Same for redis, there is also a fork called Valkey now, which is also ‘owned’ by the Linux Foundation:
https://redis.io/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-licensing/
It’s a little bit sad to me that Winamp collapsed just a year or two before smart phones really took off because it’s interface and customizability were pretty well suited to the app format of smart phones. And now that the code and design are owned by a company that’s being run by greedy morons there is likely never going to be anything resembling the original available for the phone app market.
I just use VLC on my phone these days. It works, no bullshit ads, and no glitches.
VLC is always respectable. I’ve been using AIMP. It lets you import folders as playlists and there’s not an ad in sight, so it won me over.
I personally use Metro. I’m a sucker for that material you look.
its* interface and customizability were
OMG, I CANT BELIEVE I FORGOT TO TAKE OUT THE APOSTROPHE WHEN I VOICE TO TEXT MY COMMENT!!! IM THE ABSOLUTE WORST!
That does not whip the llamas ass.
Alright, Winamp. You can go be forgotten forever now.
Fondly remembered forever. As it was around 2000…
Maybe someone can explain to me why Winamp is still so popular?
I have used Winamp 2, 3 and 5 around 2000ish, and it was a fine player, but nothing really special. After Winamp I think I switched to MediaMonkey, which IMO was easier to manage my music collection. Then I used VirtualDJ, which supported cross fading between music with synchronized beats. I think I also used foobar2000 a bit.
Winamp was an okayish player, but there was much more powerful software around at that time. It this just nostalgics or is there really something that people miss today that Winamp provided or still provides?
- Better interface than Windows Media player
- 100s of cool and edgy skins
- Nice looking graphic equalizer
- Nice music visualizer
- Easy to make playlists
- Tiny looking player which gelled with the early-mid 2000s vibe
And most importantly, it really whips the Llama’s ass. TBH, there aren’t a lot of serious reasons. It was just slightly better than the default music player. I personally feel the skins played a significant part.
I wasn’t that much a fan of the skins and found the interface of winamp very small and fiddly.
The milkdrop plugin however was rather nice though.
ProjectM is a thing :)
Yeah, but we are talking 2000-2005 or so.
I don’t think it’s actually still popular, but I’m just talking out of my ass here. I remember it made some waves a few months ago about finally having a new release after so long, and my feeling was a shitload of nostalgia brought it back into the internet spotlight, regardless of how many people are actually using it.
I gave it a spin again, purely for nostalgia. I could find no compelling reason to use it over my actual preferred player, foobar
It’s still popular because it was popular.
Also, it was simple and modular.
It was largely succeeded by monolithic and enshittified versions of iTunes, which have zero appeal these days. So it’s still remembered fondly for not enshittifying and not trying to build a walled garden.
I can use it to update my ipod.
Time to make Linamp
It really lips the whamma’s ass
…gross.
There was x11amp at one point. I forget what it’s named now.
Is it important? It was a cool program 30 years ago but it’s just a playback UI right?
It’s not the old program anymore, and it already leaked a long time ago. It was obvious that the new one wouldn’t be open.
The new one is just a web UI with options for streaming music. There were talks of the old original Winamp going open source though, which bought nostalgic memories to many. Eithercase, with so many music players on both Windows and Linux, I doubt Winamp would a niche case to fill.
But do any of them Whip the Llama’s Ass?
I wonder how well XMMS would work on mordern Linux
I have the old one (5.x) installed and use it regularly. Is it still available for download anywhere? Would love for that one to be officially open sourced.
There’s WACUP: https://getwacup.com/
Oh, now that is interesting. Thank you for that piece of information!
It’s at best abandonware, but the source will never be released officially as it now belongs to a random megacorp.
It looks like their May 16th tweet stated source code would be made available to developers, and they are clearing up some ambiguity in this new one.
Guess I’ll stick with foobar!
Same… I’ve had Foobar set up the way I like for about a decade now.
Been wanting to flip to the x64 version, but USF components (N64 music) doesn’t play.
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Why would you want to switch? Legitimate question. 32-bit version seems to be working just fine, I doubt a music player needs the extra juice a 64-bit version provides.
Same reason for switching every other app to 64-bit I suppose; logical evolution.
I absolutely don’t need to though. Especially for something light weight like a music player.
For me it’s more future-proofing: there’s a chance 32-bit support may be dropped by either the Foobar dev or windows itself at some point.
How is foobar2000 not on Linux?
There are other WinAmp-like apps - including ones that can use old WinAmp skins in classic now etc - such as QMMP or Audacious
Well, it is on Android…
But the main app is tightly integrated into the win32 api–moving it to linux would basically require a complete rewrite. DEADBEEF is an example of something like this. Parallel values and ideals, but open source.
There are wine-bottled versions out there. Of course, whether or not output is bit perfect would depend on the wine settings. Bottling it, of course, defeats the point of the program being highly modular/extensible.
Also, you have to remember that a lot of proprietary formats have proprietary encoders/decoders that are incompatible with the GPL.
Shipping Windows binaries are much less of a hassle for the dev than than trying to reverse-engineer everything they need or figuring out how to manage dependencies with different licenses across different package managers and distros with different goals.
tl;dl foobar2000 is an excellent sum of its parts; like Winamp was back-in-the-day. You start changing parts and you get a different sum.
Does xmms fit the bill?
Edit: oops. It had its final release in 2007. Shows how much I use Linux for multimedia lately! Around 2000 this was my go-to. I had it hooked up to an Inspiron laptop in my car with a usb game controller to switch tracks and stuff.
talk about burying the lede. the title should’ve been: WINAMP STILL EXISTS (also not going open source)
And now I’m curious how Winamp actually makes money.
**Edit
Just went to the website, it’s a subscription Spotify knock off now. Still doesn’t explain who are the people that actually pay for this.
The same ones who still pay for AOL
For those that don’t know, they are going to release something called FreeLlama which might be FOSS (no public info as to what the license actually will be).
Winamp says that they still want to control ‘what features’ go into winamp and it’ll remain proprietary. I assume they really just want people to contribute interesting things to FreeLlama and then put the contribution into Winamp.
The license probably won’t be FOSS because they probably aren’t going to want anyone contributing to own copyright to the code that they are committing.
It is odd because FOSS contributors aren’t really known for being OK with this sort of thing in the past, so I doubt they’re going to get much out of it. Maybe it’s a Hail Mary and they’ll end up blaming people for not freely giving up their devtime and creativity to a company that wants to make money on it.
probably because it’s a piece of shit and so they would have to rewrite it
