On December 20th, AOL will finally put down Winamp. It was like watching an evil duke lock a beautiful princess in a tower, but (since no hero came to save her), she lasted years before starving to death.
I’ll miss it. Nowadays I use VLC or maybe MediaMonkey to play MP3s, but I loved how easily Winamp made .m3u playlists, and how beautiful its MilkDrop visualizer was. Especially back in the days before Napster.
My first MP3 was Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas. Not on winamp, on the original Fraunhofer windows MP3 player application, back in maybe 1994. It took like 20% of my CPU to play that MP3 on my pirated windows 95 beta.
What was yours?
The first MP3 I ever played was through Winamp. It was still one of my first installs on a new machine up until a couple of years ago…now I use VLC when I’m not just streaming something. It’s time the llama finally got a well-deserved rest.
Wow, my first mp3 player.
Now that streaming is a thing I rarely listen to mp3s anymore, but I only use foobar when I do. Still, end of an era, I guess.
I wasn’t aware that AOL was still a thing, let alone WinAmp. No stories to tell, though I remember using WinAmp.
It was my defacto mp3 player for many many years until the constant use of ipods on my computer made iTunes more convenient, if not in any way better. Since I normally just listen to all my music on shuffle in the background anyway, it doesn’t matter much what software it is, but damn if Winamp didn’t have some sweet skins and visualizers back in the day :(
I remember using WinAmp but it got quickly bloated, or maybe they started charging for it. I can’t remember. I ended up using CoolPlayer, a lean, mean, tightly-focused MP3 Player (what WinAmp started out as).
My first MP3: Depeche Mode Barrel of a Gun
Maybe not dead. Rumor is that Microsoft is looking to buy WinAmp and Shoutcast.
Winamp isn’t worth a heck of a lot, but ownership of the central Shoutcast index certainly is. I don’t see MS as being a better shepherd than AOL, but they’ll probably keep it on life support for a couple years before killing it or shopping it elsewhere.
Winamp was a good example for these that have the feeling to bloat applications ( Netscape too ). Its a bad thing that it die, was a walking cautionary tale.
For me? VLC. I am open source dude, so what else is there on town? mplayer?, I tried media player classic. But is 2013, so if you watch movies, its probably from inside a XBMC or something, not directly with a player.
iTunes killed Winamp, like so many other things, by forcing MS and others to provide native MP3 playback. There was a time when almost any media playback in Windows requires either some third party program or installation of optional software. Or at least this is how i remember things.
I used winamp for years to field my home shoutcast service… Nowadays I use the synology audio station to stream and control my music in real time, over SSL. Even has a lyric plugin.
Noooo!!
I still use it.
I think my first mp3 was Queen’s “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions”. That is, the two songs were encoded in the same audio file. My roommate hosted it on his computer until the next term when I finally bought a PC for myself. Those were the days, when tending a music collection meant making hard choices. “Well, I’d like this Smashing Pumpkins bootleg, but the solo goes on so long it brings it to 8 megs easy. Guess I’ll go for the album version instead, that’s only 3 megs.”
So speaking of outdated music players with crappy user interfaces, when is iTunes closing down?
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Apple discontinues iTunes on the Windows platform.
So you think they’ll give up their music and media business on windows entirely? That seems highly unlikely.
I imagine the majority of that business is on iOS and Apple TV anyway. Apple can still have a storefront you’d access from the web.
If Apple isn’t going to make iTunes a pleasant experience on Windows, they should kill it, IMO. Steve Jobs didn’t want it anyway.
Me too. Is there some Geek Geezers home we should be reporting to?
Their devices depend on it utterly for connections, even in Windows. (Which is one major, major reason I won’t buy Apple idevices)