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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[bthylafh]

Ach, Winamp is a sad story. They were so /good/ in the 2.x days, before the bloat and before AOL couldn't decide what do to with it. I still have a few Winamp skins ("TubeAmp" was my favorite) that Audacious can use, but on Windows I have switched entirely to Foobar2000.

I was one of those people who switched back to 2.xx from 5.x, running 2.95 for a *long* time before I got tired of something-or-other not working right and going to Foobar. I still have some of the Winamp hotkey commands imprinted in my brain; it's mildly annoying that FB doesn't have a mod to switch its hotkeys over to Winamp's.

Interesting parallel to ICQ: they're another (former) AOL acquisition that's basically died in the USA but popular in foreign parts.

 

[bthylafh]

AOL and mismanagement is practically synonymous.

Maybe to somebody that was still in diapers in 1988. Before the DotCom boom, AOL was a big-time innovator.

In what way? I was in grade school in '88 but never used AOL, having gone the Compu$serve route for a couple years until my town finally got an ISP in early '97.