Bye bye Winamp?

[Dubh Aingeal]

"BetaNews is reporting that the doors at Nullsoft have been closed: 'The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.'" The Register also has a story.

[Fierce Critter]

Hmmm... wondering if I should have updated when I had the chance, or if it's a non-issue now...

[Jarodaka]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

AGH!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I really like Winamp, btw.

[JaneDead]

i really like winamp too. it is what i use. :(

[Jarodaka]

I use iTunes on my work machine, but Winamp's playlist editing, usability, and speedy UI response are the best. I've also used Musicmatch, WMP (blech), and Real Jukebox (ahahahahaha), and they are quite poor.

And, OMG, the plug-ins! Perhaps those who left Nullsoft will start a new 'music media' oriented company.

[Daniel]

This sucks, but isn't a big deal. I used Winamp 3 for a very long time before upgrading to 5. I notice no huge differences, and I use it all the time. The program will be available on p2p forever, so... whatever. How much support does it really need?

[Scary Guy]

How much support does it really need?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Someone is going to need to port it over to the 64 bit systems, unless it's emulated or something. Or else it will go the way of Winplay 3.0

[nodrew]

Honestly, 64-bit is 2 years off and I'm sure by then it'll have opensource maintainers and be located on sourceforge.net.

Though me personally, I stopped using Winamp about 8 months ago as I discovered I-Tunes, and I really like the way it will manage your whole library. Now I can just search the songs in my library as opposed to on a file level. Winamp was very slow at managing large libraries. Anything more than 3000 songs was generally impossible to do.

They will be missed however, as they were the best full out "media player" (no pun intended). Though, they'll be back, just not maintained by a corporation any longer. Unless of course, AOL in their new dealings with Microsoft, was paid as part of a contract to shut down the Win Amp program so that there would be less competition again WMP. I wouldn't be surprised if it was buried in a legal document somewhere.

[Jarodaka]

Someone is going to need to port it over to the 64 bit systems, unless it's emulated or something.  Or else it will go the way of Winplay 3.0

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Really? All those people with Athlon64 and Opteron processors can't run any of their old software? Huh. Somebody should tell AMD.

[nodrew]

Actually, the Athelon64 has a built in 32-bit emulator that allows me to use it with my 32-bit copy of Windows XP. This is why no one uses the Intel Itanium at home (which is 64-bit only) but the Opteron and Athelon64 are making huge headway.

Longhorn (Microsoft's 64-bity OS) is supposed to have a 32-bit emulator though.

[Jarodaka]

Longhorn (Microsoft's 64-bity OS) is supposed to have a 32-bit emulator though.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, there is emulation available. I guess Winamp doesn't need to be recompiled anytime soon.

[nodrew]

Yes, but it uses a different arcitecture from the standard x86, so thus has a huge difference in its use of registers and the likes when accessing the processer. This was one of the big complaints about Intel and the Itanium, which was that Intel had decided to start fresh with a new design. One that if everything was compiled to use it, would work much better, but had no ability to run older software.

The IA-32 device drivers will be part of certain operating systems from Microsoft, but currently are not, as the arcitecture is less than a year old and XP is a little over 3. If someone were to build an Itanium based computer right now and attempt an installation of anything from Microsoft, other than Server 2003, it would fail, as the OS would not know how to use the new IA-32 compatability mode.

*Sorry for the thread derailment.*

[Fierce Critter]

Ya'll are just doing this to make us not-techhie users feel inadequate...

[nodrew]

No, this is just how us techies compare penis sizes. :grin:

That and we're naturally insecure about our intelligence and must prove it any chance we get, heh.

[Fierce Critter]