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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[MonkeyPaw]

...nor were they as tightly and efficiently programmed as Winamp. Even today, the Mac version of the Winamp installer is only 4.2MB; by comparison, the iTunes Mac installer comes in at a whopping 170MB.

Did you really just compare Winamp to iTunes?

I won't deny that Winamp is a preformant application, but you're comparing apples to oranges. Remember that in addition to (most) of the features of Winamp (I don't believe that iTunes is skinnable....at all....), iTunes also has to manage movie and TV show libraries, ebooks, ringtones, and applications, provide an online store of each of these formats, syncronize with iPods, iPhones, iPads, and iTVs, provide network music streaming, syncronize contacts, calendars, email, and notes...

True, but back in Winamp's heyday, iTunes was also a simpler program that didn't have to do all those things. For whatever reason, it also had to install QuickTime too, even before movie support came to iPod. That was back in dialup era, when a 40MB download sucked. What also made Winamp great was the speed that it opened and the light footprint. No one had GBs of RAM back then, and storage wasn't exactly cheap. HDD capacity was the biggest limiter to your music collection, and you don't want big music players taking up music space.

As a broke college student, Winamp was a critical application on my cheapo rig. Seemed like that dumb "Try AOL" icon showed up after installing just about anything back then. To be fair, I did like AOL IM for keeping up with gaming buddies. Ah, back in the days when it was Ben Folds Five.

 

[MonkeyPaw]

If everyone would just buy their music with Amazon.com already we could stop all the nonsense at once. DRM free, cheap, and NO GODDAMN ITUNES.

I would SO much rather give my money to Amazon and help fund space exploration than itunes and fund a new spaceship style HQ. Wouldn't you?

Now, there is an iPhone in my pocket....but hey, all the MP3s are from Amazon.

Why an iPhone if you don't want to support Apple an iTunes? I'm stuck with an iPhone for work, but we don't use iTunes at all at home.