Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application’s source code will be open to developers worldwide.
Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.
↫ Winamp press release
Nice, I guess, but twenty years to late to be of any relevance. At least it’ll be great for software preservation.
But what’s up with the odd language used in the press release, and the weirdly specific date that’s month from now? They really seem to want to avoid the term “open source”, which makes me think this is going to be one of those cases where they hope the community will work for them for free without actually using a real open source license. You know, those schemes that always – no exception – fail.
Thom Holwerda,
Reading this, I was thinking the same.
I remember winamp really whipping the lama’s ass, haha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NROWOIMCu6M
… “from every direction”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kzj0fa5kiU
(There was a 3D? version with a special opening)
(Ah I see that was also included in your original link)
So that’s why articles about MP3s and P2P downloading (in magazines etc) were sometimes accompanied by seemingly irrelevant pictures of Llamas (which I identified as goats back then), 25 years later I know the answer.
Note: I started downloading MP3s during the Windows Media Player 7.0 era, which was good enough to the point that I didn’t feel the need to install another player (much less a freeware player back then, since back then freeware often came with caveats), so never cared about WinAmp and wasn’t exposed to the WinAmp ads until today.
“Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version,” explains Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp.”
Nah that is code visible,. It’s very clear from the verbiage that they are not setting anything free. For FOSS they wouldn’t use owner as a term. With FOSS you can be the steward, but owner implies asymmetrical rights.
That just means you can’t build it and distribute it as Winamp… the same is true of Firefox Haiku etc etc…. lots of projects have trademarks on top of open source code.
There’s lots of ambiguity in their press release, it could mean everything from “visible source” to releasing under an open-source license and keeping the trademark and merge rights.
Reminder to all that the current owners of the winamp brand tried selling NFTs and have been trying to con musicians into joining some creator programme that ultimately boils down to music NFTs. The final licence on the code will tell if this gesture means anything or not, but I wouldn’t trust anything this company says until the goods are actually delivered.
Yeah same. I wonder how back the source code repo will go though. I’d kind of like to go back and modify the version from 1998 to try and get it to work with out skipping on a Pentium 66 with 4 mb and windows 95. Was upset it didn’t work with every mp3.
Bill Shooter of Bul.
You could always build an mp3 accelerator using a raspberry pi. Not sure if windows 95 would have the appropriate usb drivers, but the PI could act as a usb gadget. You could mount your “mp3 accelerator” inside the case. Heck you could accelerate other formats like AAC too! Not sure what the point would be other than for laughs.
I mean, thats kind of cheating. Its back to something I was working on back in the late 90’s. I needed to play Mp3’s on a computer I had access to, but only some of them could play without skipping due to cpu maxing out. I could decode them to wav files then play, but the conversion process was way too slow and there were disk space issues. I found a library that could play them, but it was worse than winamp. It seemed like you should have been able to decompress the audio file to disk in some format then read it back in stead of trying to do it all in memory and running out of buffer as the song played. Or possibly increase the buffer even if that meant using swap. It seemed like it would be an easy change.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
You’re not wrong, but then do you want to be right or do you want it to flawlessly play all the latest formats. For the record though I was half-joking if that didn’t come through.
I had similar experiences, although I haven’t kept any computers going back that far. Even if I did I’m not sure I’d have the will power to work on it, haha.
If you are willing to transcode offline, why not use a modern mp3 transcoder like ffmpeg? Surely that would get you the quality you want.
I’m not sure if there are any streaming mp3 radio players that supported windows 95, but that could be another solution. Host an internet radio on a modern machine and stream it to windows 95 that way. Whether this is “cheating” or changing the scope is up to you 🙂
Bill Shooter of Bul,
The “most” cheating would be using that raspberry pi as a sound card, and programming an mp3 hardware coded onto it.
Some Pi models can be used in the “target”? mode attaching to a USB host. And windows had a multimedia graph API that could connect codecs, including hardware ones, and with a mp3 container support too, it would even work in “wav player”
That being said, the resources are probably better spent somewhere else.
Alfman,
Wouldn’t internet radios themselves use a codec like mp3 in the first place?
Though thinking back, I think real player used to work okay on Windows 95. By okay I mean I would occasionally be able to stream a “phone quality” track every now and then…
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Sure, but mp3s did work on the hardware of that era that Bill Shooter of Bul is talking about (in winamp no less).. But if you played an MP3 with too high a CBR or VBR, it would be too slow by the tiniest of margins and end up with jerky playback. Say a computer could just about handle 128kbps mp3 at 100% cpu, when you could select the perfect encoding for the internet radio, a constant 128kbps, for example, to ensure that the CPU would be able to handle the load without regards to the source material.
Real player did work, although I thought the server end of it required commercial software. I don’t remember it ever becoming open source.
Alfman,
Real was much earlier than RTSP days, so anything they used was most likely propriety (I remember playing with their server software at one time, but cannot recall the details).
Anyway, someone suggest the open sourced an early codec (cook):
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/xpo4bc/realplayer_how_we_used_to_watch_our_videos_and/ this might be a starting point for that hypothetical raspberry pi server project.
You’ve sure got me beat on holding a grudge…
I think you need to try mpg123 or mxplay instead of Winamp. CD Quality MP3 decoding on a 486 DX2-80.
https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/
http://www.fareham.org.uk/music/mpg123/index.shtml
Or even install the in_mpg123 decoder plugin for Winamp:
https://shibatch.sourceforge.net/download/in_mpg123_118src.zip
And let’s not forget the old DOSamp:
https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/dosamp.php