From BetaNews

I had started with winamp years ago. it served me well. its an end of an era. sad to see it go.... :-(

Ugh. That basically leaves Foobar2000, iTunes, and Windows Media Player.

Foobar2000 is the only one that supports Ogg Vorbis and WavPack, but I don't like its minimalist GUI. Not that I want it to be fancy or anything, but it's just too bare. iTunes has a nice interface, but it's a bloated resource hog. WMP is... well... WMP, 'nuff said.

Ugh. Here's hoping someone ports amaroK to Windows!

Too bad for the people paying for Winamp 5 hoping that new features will be added.

Anyways, not much that I care, as I am a foobar2000 user.

Well, you paid for faster ripping and CD burning. I don't think they ever hinted paying users should expect other exclusive features down the road.

There is more than mainstream. If you search yourself instead of waiting that others tell you about it.

- Lyx

edit: yes, i do consider fb2k to be in the mainstream-area already - quite impressive considering that contrary to the other big players there is no marketing.

Quite a sad turn of events for winamp users like me However, there isn't that much to improve I guess. Winamp 5 struck the right chord between 2 and 3. It plays all my audio and video files with no dramas. Skins development by third parties is still happening (for now).

It would be nice to see AOL realize that it has dropped the ball and just release the source.

The world already has most of the source to Winamp3. Fresh programmers need not be infected by the internal workings of Winamp 2/5, much less the plug-in SDKs.

Too much stuff there can't be opened. Starting with the MP3 decoder (licensed from FhG). Who wants the sources of an MP3 player if the MP3 decoding sources aren't available?

Well other plugins are around that could be used instead the FHG one. Take otachan's in_mpg123.

On the other hand Winamp isn't dead since it is extendable with extensions, so it can be improved this way.

And rumors don't stop that there is already an 5.06 alpha release available to the Winamp Beta list. With an optional Fullscreen GUI like Media Player and with the iTunes plugin bundled (optional) and with updates to the nifty Jump to file feature.

Maybe even AAC+ streaming would be possible since that was on the todo list before the 5.05 release had to be pushed out (the skin security bug, you remember). But this my private speculation.

So there could be room for some teaking releases. Maybe they can find some people to update and maintain the bundled plugins again.

Winamp 2/5 API is not one I would recommend continued use of, unless you want to develop for a wide audience that may or may not see any growth in the near to distant future, without regard for your own sanity or taste. *Insert Happy Multi-Instance OOP Zealot Mantra here.*

I remember writing down in bio class freshman year of high school what three computer programs i use most often (besides Games and IE) and they were Winamp, Napster, and Word. Sad to see the only one left is the MS product.

Do you really need it when your product is hosted at a site with 15,000+ registered users (+ countless non-registered browsers). Then factor in that everyone here is interested in getting the best out of their audio and the player itself does everything it's designed to do, extremely well.
No Marketing Required.

I don't agree. You can hardly take a step in any direction without tripping over a media player. Nero's got one, ATI's got one, Musicmatch's got one, RealAudio's got one, even Irfanview's got one (sort of). Not to mention most of the audio-oriented P2P clients.

I suspect your average user just double-clicks on an MP3 file, and whatever player has most recently stolen the file association plays it. As long as it plays, most people don't care what's playing it.

Jim K.

Or just keep using Winamp. A good prog is a good prog even if its not being developed anymore.

Good enough for most people. In fact, certainly good enough for plenty of people still using 2.91 because they didn't like 5.x.

Justin Frankel created Winamp, left, and came back. Who owns Winamp? If AOL owns it, that is sad. The consequences of selling out.

That's precisely my case! But I'm still considering to step into F2K...

I would have switched a long time ago but I can't get the Adapt-X plug-in to work with it. I like the minimalist Gui and quality focus of foobar but I also like the Waves Linear Phase EQ so Adapt-X is required.

Lol, like you wouldn't have...

A sad day in the history of PC music. I do think that this leaves very few major players. Winamp has a big foot in the door when it comes to the number of PC's its installed on. WMP & iTunes are the only real big players now. Then you've got Real, foobar, and a bunch of other secondaries. Then finally you've got the minority players (eg. players that come with sound cards/grpahics cards).

Nothing is gonna change over night, but one day no doubt www.winamp.com won't be accessible any more and John/Jane Doe won't be able to download his favourite media player. This leaves him with two options, search for an alternative, or use what he's got (for most people, WMP). This could send more users towards WMP, increasing Microsoft's Monopoly on the software industry. Or people could find iTunes, and give apple a fighting chance.

Either way, nothing is gonna change anytime soon.

Its a shame, i remember using winamp when it was first created, infact the first version i used was 1.21. winamp was the only media player i used up until version 3. this really ruined winamp for me, and its when i feel winamp really finally lost its luster. even when version 5 rolled around i was so disinterested that i didnt even bother to try it up untill about 2 months ago. However, by that point it didnt matter because i was addicted to foobar2000 :B.

even though i dont use winamp anymore, i still love it. it set standards for its time, and those standards were pretty high. I hope the (original) developers of winamp do well with themselves, and arnt so strapped for money that they are forced to sell their porsche's

I know they all have a lot of money, I think they sold Winamp for 20 million. If they didn't they would still be working on it.

Does anyone know justin frankel's email address? I want to find out what he is doing now. No doubt he will move on to bigger and better things. Nullsoft did have some open-source projects: http://www.nullsoft.com/
Maybe he can improve foobar2000. He is a great programmer.

Ahem, I think Foobar2000 is pretty well off with the people that program it at the moment.

Anyone know what happened to Wasabi? It seemed interesting but I never really heard anything from it.

I believe his latest project is this. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of him or his friends. As for him working on foobar well, I sort of would doubt that would happen. Maybe some of the plugin people from winamp would be interested in developing plugins for foobar now though. If you are really interested in what he is doing you can read his .plan BTW, I believe Winamp was sold for $100 million.

Winamp might have been corporate AOL for the last few years and sold for $100mil, but with Justin it never really lost its soul; the software was virtually spam-free and there were often inflammatory posts by the staff against the RIAA etc. It was one of the last bastion of the free internet of the 90s, and ironically with AOL money it was stronger (resources/streaming media/music) and weaker (patent issues/creative freedom) as well. Sonique is dead, and so is winamp.

Leaving foobar to face the giants. Peter is as at least as great as a programmer as Justin or Tony Million ever was. In many ways foobar is a different product than winamp, with its emphasis on music only instead of other media. Music-wise foobar has already surpassed everything out there. No, I don't think foobar will ever take the place of winamp in areas other than music since it was never meant to, the default for standalone video has been WMP with homemade codecs for a while now (since divx and now xvid) so the impact is likely minimal there; but streaming music and video is now in doubt (shoutcast always had the best quality even if it was undermarketed and utilized, I'm not impressed with either WMP or realplayer at this point).

Sad to see an old friend go after close to 7 years now, even if I have long switched to foobar for music.

It was alive as an open-source project:
www.wasabidev.org/
docs.wasabidev.org/
http://www.wasabidev.org/changelog.php
It seems to be dead now.

I believe this was the last version:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Au...yer-Build.shtml

Holy thread resurrection, batman!