Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself

15 years on, Winamp still lives—but mismanagement blunted its llama-whipping.

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[DarkReality]

I'm using Winamp 2.91 and will not upgrade. I forget what it was about 2.95 (the last 2.x IIRC) that I don't like.

It's worth noting that the last few versions are simply unusable. You go through the setup (after it's installed) and it never launches Winamp, it just closes. Running it again resets the startup. There's no media player there, just a dumb questionairre. Even if I accept the free trials, it doesn't let me use the music player. I've searched online and there are no valid answers. I just assumed AOL abandoned it in some weird way, shrugged, and went back to 2.x where it actually worked.

In my opinion, there's nothing better for music. It plays music, plays it well, and stays out of your way. I never found a single skin I liked. The original is fine.

 

[DarkReality]

Wondered where WinAmp went. I had a crashed install with it years ago and decided to dump it. This article tells me it was a legit product. Wow. I thought I'd been dumped on. Turns out I had been. Digital version of getting 3 or 4 of those damn AOL CDs per week in the mail. One year I cut them up into shapes and used them as tree ornaments at Christmas. They were especially interesting after being nuked in microwave for 4 or 5 seconds.

When I started seeing AOL crap popup during install (virus scanner caught file names and popped them up on screen) I shut down the install by disconnecting RJ45. Shut down the processes running during install, cleaned out registry and folders. I wondered if I had made a bad decision BUT now I know why it was a good idea.

Thanks ARS. Good read.

What does A.R.S. stand for? I once saw an article author ask a commenter this, but I never saw the reply.

Pulled your networking cable? If you read the installation of many freeware programs, they have an opt-out for bundled stuff. Winamp's was AOL since AOL owned them, and IIRC it wasn't even the full client, just a desktop shortcut that took you to their website. If you chose not to opt out, you could have simply deleted the shortcut. No need to go to all that trouble. I don't like AOL either, but I'm okay with using something they threw money at and saying no to their website link.

Also, those AOL CDs made good coasters. Take a used CD/DVD recordable stack's spindle and put 'em on that, leave it on the bar, in the kitchen, living room, porch, or wherever.

 

[DarkReality]

Thanks ARS. Good read.

What does A.R.S. stand for? I once saw an article author ask a commenter this, but I never saw the reply.

Ars doesn't stand for anything. It's "Ars Technica"--it's Latin-derived for "Art of Technology."

Oh, I know what "Ars" is, it's when it's written as an acronym, i.e. in all caps, like one would write USA or HTML, that I wonder what the letters stand for.

 

[DarkReality]

"really whips the llama's ass" - AHHAHAHAHAH! Wow, whatta blast from the past, thanks for that! I'd completely forgotten about how cool I thought that was when I was in university.

Relevant for nostalgia (YouTube link to the Winamp startup sound). In later versions, metadata was added, and the artist was "DJ Mike Llama" and the song title was "Llama Whippin' Intro".

My wife had never even heard of Winamp when I moved in. She used Internet Explorer for the web (5 or whatever was in Win98) and Windows Media Player for music. In 2005. I am not kidding. She didn't see the appeal of Winamp until I dug up the intro sound somewhere. She loved it after that.

 

[DarkReality]

I think the biggest knock against iTunes, greater than the fact that it's a buggy piece of shit on Windows (and I've even seen Mac users complain about it), is the fact that it cannot edit metadata. It's perfectly happy to let you try, but it only updates a proprietary database that is shared with iOS devices and nothing else. iTunes wants your music to be presented beautifully on iOS products, which is great if you're in the whole Mac cult and you don't buy any non-Apple stuff, but no metadata in other media players and on non-iOS devices is just artificially making the Apple stuff better. Which is actually most of Apple's business model. Steal, undercut, make 'em love ya for it. If iTunes could actually edit metadata in the file itself, it would be just another library-based media player, but it isn't even that.

Winamp 3.x was crap. Always was.

There never was a Winamp 4.x series. The official explanation was that 2+3=5 so the next version would be 5.x. Winamp 5 made a lot of folks happy by letting you make it look like Winamp 2.

LOL at the AOL shills suggesting everyone use the new Winamp but offering no solution for the setup loop bug. Put up or shut up.

Also, I'm almost surprised it hasn't been said. Winamp 2.x was never able to properly handle VBR (variable bit rate) MP3s. Some it handled fine. It played nearly all of them impeccably, and that's okay. The base functionality was there. Sometimes the total time display was off or would fluctuate. They may have fixed that in 5.x or even 3.x. It never bothered me too much, but I found it annoying that Winamp couldn't lock down the total running time of a song until you played it all the way through. I mean, really?