Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

Well AOL bought it ... Milking something as long as possible instead of innovating is kind of their thing.

Yes I remember that the first time I used streaming music it was shoutcast.

It was really fantastic with hundreds of different music channels and podcasts. One radio station I was particularly fond off was called Atlantic sound factory. They had a goldmine on their hands and it's a shame they let it all go to waste.

I'm not so sure how successful that really would have been. There is a significant gap between Winamp falling out of favor and the rise of Spotify. The obvious winner in that gap wasn't any streaming service, it was Apple. The gap is basically defined as the period between when the iPod became ubiquitous and when the iPhone became ubiquitous. Granted, there is a few year period between when the iPhone was released and when streaming took over.

Spotify-like streaming services like Rhapsody existed during that gap but they weren't compatible with the iPod and even players they were compatible required a pretty cumbersome process in order to sync and listen offline. I think Rhapsody enjoyed a relatively brief period when smartphones became available and they could stream from there but it was a no-brainer to switch to Spotify once they launched in the U.S.

But I always had a few major gripes with it:

- The tiny interface was hard to navigate.

- The queue was ephemeral and much too easy to clear. Any time there were more than one person controlling the music someone would by accident clear out all selected songs when all whey wanted to do was add their selection to the queue. With no way to restore it.

My personal vote is iTunes 4.5 with Winamp 2 a close second.

lack of cross platform options inspired me to start reAMP:

https://github.com/conceptualspace/reAMP

it's still very much an experiment but the end goal is an open source player made with the same love of music that inspired the original winamp. some of the features im working on:

- smart shuffle algorithm: no repeats until playlist exhausted; randomized between artists so artists with many songs do not monopolize the playlist

- studio quality audio analysis (VU meter, oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, full track waveform, displays for bitrate, samplerate, channels, format, encoder)

- controls to loop, change tempo

- remote control via mobile with queuing and adding youtube URLs ('party mode')

- logarithmic volume control

Why do you feel the need to taunt ?

It lives on in a heavily bastardized form as iTunes and now the macOS Music app.

A friend recently played a set at an online party using two instances of VLC, went down great!

Those were the days though.

I listen to tunes with the Android version of Winamp.

> Asking a 10 year old to use Winamp to play an mp3

You still need an application of some sort to play media. Are you saying that the pre-installed ones on mobile devices and desktop (e.g. Windows media player) are so vastly better than Winamp that Winamp looks like a rotary phone?

> And ultimately mp3s lost out to streaming.

I'm sorry, but that's not a well-considered statement. Albums are still a thing; people still collect music that they like.

Streaming allows people who want to casually listen to music to use their device as one previously used a radio.

(Speaking of which, streaming has not even killed radio yet.)

A ten year old kid today can still understand that stream content won't always be there, and is inaccessible whenever you are out of mobile networking coverage, so you better capture your favorite material to your device.

I would've kept using Winamp if version 3 wasn't so bad, and I know many others like myself. So even if maybe eventually Winamp would've died for the reasons you mentioned, its initial problems were most definitely the result of what 'it did'.