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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

My memory is fuzzy on this but didn’t most consider Winamp 2.x the best. Winamp 3.x was considered bloated. So to help rectify the problems of 3.x, Winamp release version 5.x (the best of 2 + 3). Though I recall many still used version 2.x even after the 5.x release.

Question: so when you say folks are trying to keep the "last version" alive, which version are you referring too since later versions weren’t loved.

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Winamp 2 was generally preferred. If I recall correctly, it skipped version 4 not because v2 + v3 = v5 but because nobody would want to download a Winamp 4 skin. Not kidding.

You're both right!

https://web.archive.org/web/20131219003849/http://www.winamp...

> What happened to Winamp 4? You're not imagining things. Yes, we skipped a version number for the following reasons: a) Winamp 5 combines the best aspects of Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 into one player. Hence Winamp 2 + Winamp 3 = Winamp 5! b) Who the hell wants to see a Winamp 4 Skin :P c) We think that a Fibonacci sequence for versioning might be pretty damn cool. d)We improved so much in Winamp 5 that we figured it warranted skipping a version. ;)

I still don't understand. What's wrong with Winamp 4 skins?

Edit: Maybe I have to sound it out. Is it because 4 skin sounds like foreskin?

You got it :)

They thought a Winamp 4 skin would leave a bad taste in people's mouths, so they scratched it.

Well that definitely blew up in their face.

Downvoting this comment is like kicking someones dog.

Snipped it.

NB four and fore are sound the same in some accents

Definitely true for American accents.

Thank you. This is what it took for me to realize why version 4 might be an issue. If I just saw "4 skin" I certainly would have gotten it. Somehow adding Winamp in front made it hard for me to interpret it the alternative way.

Thank you for so delicately pointing out the problem/joke here -- I hadn't noticed it, not even back then.

My question is: in what English accents do "four" and "fore" *not* sound alike?

This is the Horse-Hoarse merger. [1]

> Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents as well as some African American, modern Southern American, Indian, Irish, and older Maine accents.

If my understanding is correct, in some accents that don't pronounce their "R"s at the end of words, the vowel shape changes slightly while pronouncing "four," but "fore" is pronounced with a simple vowel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

Fascinating. Thank you.

It is extremely hard for me to even _imagine_ this, as apparently my native accents both contain this merger. This is a rare experience for me, but a previous occurrence was discussing the rhotic-R phenomenon.

Wiktionary sometimes comes handy in such musings, because it has IPA spellings and recordings of pronunciations, and marks the dialects—not always but frequently for more popular words.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fore

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/four

The IPA suggests that pronunciations of the two words are identical both with and without the merger, but I'm no specialist.

Just dug a little deeper, and I've arrived at this conclusion:

In accents with the merger, "four," "for," and "fore" are all always homophones.

In accents without the merger, "four" and "for" are never homophones.

And in some subset of these non-merged accents, "fore" may be pronounced identically to "four" (as listed in the IPA guide in your first link). In another subset, it may be pronounced identically to "for" (as implied by the "Homophones" section in that same link).

And now I have a totally different view on the smooth jazz band named fourplay

If memory serves, the latest unbloated version of WinAmp was called Winamp Classic, and its versions were in the 2.9x range.

5.x is just the 2.x base continued with newer plug-ins & newer apis for those plug-ins. Unchecking things during installation (e.g. choosing the lite install) or just removing the unwanted plug-ins was always an option to make a 5.x into a comparable 2.x install.

-dro

> not because v2 + v3 = v5 but because nobody would want to download a Winamp 4 skin

I wish the people who named Gimp image editor were this thoughtful! Searching for image masking info has caught me out multiple times :/

on multiple occasions when i've needed to know command line syntax I've googled 'man find'

While learning jQuery and figuring out how to retrieve elements of the DOM, I googled "how to get head".

Get the TLD for python.org wrong and it's less than work appropriate.

Or school appropriate. I made this mistake circa 2008 lol

"how to get head" expertsexchange

Not to mention the hard coded file names a certain Linux screen capture utility leaves behind…

IIRC, Winamp 3 introduced the new skin engine which supported transparency and was slow as molasses on contemporary machines. Moreover, 2.x switched to the new MP3 decoder at some point, and many people didn't like it, either ripping the old decoder from the old versions or stopping upgrading past a certain 2.x version.

(None of this is important today, I guess)

Winamp 3 was a complete rewrite from the ground up, built around the new skinning engine and the "Wasabi" scripting language. But as you say, it wasn't very performant, and it was also super buggy.

I believe there was some drama which resulted in the lead dev for 3 getting fired, and then the skinning engine (which was the most popular part of 3) was grafted onto the 2.x base for version "5".

I've been using my minimal Winamp install and the noerror skin for like 15+ years now. Still the best mp3 player on Windows IMO.

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/8a466a39534e4be0dc6ca5cc0d6f5a...

If memory serves, the update from 2.x to 3.x was the one were suddenly skins no longer worked and they decided to base the program around a db instead of the file system. Which is not that bad (though still strictly inferior to file based) in modern cell phones, but at a time when computers were a lot slower and everybody had organized their music library around files instead of metadata it was a bloody disaster.

That reminds me of this classic JWZ : https://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

(Note: you want to copypaste that link, not click it)

I clicked it and it is NSFW. :-/ Why does JWZ hate HN?

Well, I did warn you...

JWZ's hate of HN is long-running and due to a combination of factors, but I reckon his real annoyance is the amount of traffic this site can send to his little servers.

I dunno... Libraries were a revolution for me. If I remember correctly, that was around the time I briefly switched to iTunes for its library features. The ability to start typing and instantly see a list of song matches was great. The problem with the WinAMP library was that it wasn't that good. If course iTunes turned into a bloated mess too, and I ended up on foobar2000 for years.

Foobar2000 is even available on iOS -- although it doesn't really fit all that well in the new stramiong-focused ecosystem I guess.

I currently use 2.95 and see no reason to update. But I listen rarely mp3's in the last years.

Foodbar 2000 FTW. https://www.foobar2000.org/

Tiny, fast, simple, does the job.

There's an Android version too, which is my go-to audio player, because of its simplicity.

Both FOSS.

Fairly certain that fb2k has never been FOSS or can you point to where that's not the case as that'd be far more interesting than the point of this thread.

-dro

Oh! My bad. I mistook the SDK and projectM source download links for the app itself.

I apologise for the misleading comment.

Is all good.

-dro

Haven't tried Foodbar :)

I use Foobar on my PC daily but didn't even know it was available on Android, so thanks! Musicolet is also a great Android player without all the BS (ex: can run mp3 files copied to the device with no internet connnection)

Blast. Didn't even notice. Sorry!

Yeah, but does it really whip the llama's ass?

In case you don't know, WinAmp borrowed that meme from the late, schizophrenic musician Wesley Willis.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2lepog/til_t...

"McDonalds is a place to rock, It is a restaurant where they buy food to eat, It is a good place to listen to the music, People flock here to get down to the rock music." - Rock 'N Roll McDonalds

"Batman beat the hell out of me and knocked me to the floor, I got back up and knocked him to the floor, He was being such a jack off" - I Whupped Batman's Ass

"This beast killed as many as 100,000 people / It's wings can flap like a bird / It can break a glass / It can also stab you in the ass" - The Chicken Cow

I didn't realize until today that Wesley Willis was also a visual artist[0], and surprisingly good.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wesley+willis+art&t=brave&iax=imag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM

>> see no reason to update

You will when you get a 4k monitor.

Winamp has a built-in function to double the pixels, so it's actually quite usable on 4K as-is.

It only works for the main window. The library window doesn't work with it.

It does with WACUP

-dro

Same here, using Winamp 2.95 on a HiDPI screen as my main audio player.

The best feature that it seems no other player has reproduced yet is being able to hit the J key to do an instant search for a song, with 0 latency: the search narrows down the songs as fast as you hit the keys.

But I've noticed that there are now a few files that sound scratch when played, perhaps they're 48 kHz or something...

Same thing in Clementine, except you don't even have to press J. Just type your search when the window is focused and the filter bar will catch the keys.

This can be disabled too.

I just installed 2.95 last night after uninstalling 5.x. 5.x doesn't have [Q] to enqueue within a playlist. I have no idea why anyone would remove such a basic feature... maybe the advent of the "media library" management (at the time a new concept) made them decide to remove it.

I had to install milkdrop separately to WinAmp, but honestly, after reinstalling Windows 98 every 72 hours back in the bad old days, it kinda felt natural. Nostalgic.

Winamp is highly modular. Most functionality is in plugins, and you could only install the plugins you want. For example you could exclude the media library, modern skins, and video playback. So, 5.x doesn't have to be bloated.

I have been running Winamp 2.95 for coming up on 20 years now. So you would be correct on that count.

Despite how powerful modern computers are, I still notice how much lighter 2.x is than 3.x.

I'm actually not too familiar with it, I was too young to use the original Winamp back when it was released, and can only remember playing around with the skins, along with RealPlayer on Win98

I'm guessing they went with version 5, since it looks like versions after that might have been a full rewrite?

If you want a fun read that wastes a few hours, poke around the interwebs for the story of Justin Frankel and WinAmp. There's been some recent posts on HN about how "the Internet is played out". Not sure if I agree, but this guy definitely belongs in the mythos of web 1.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel

5.666

Yes I loved Winamp 2.x - the transition from tapes to mp3 was great for me. My car had a tape player and not a CD player and it was more fun to make tapes that’s cds imo

I have long felt that, given the problems of the Python 2→3 migration, the Python devs should have done the same. :-)

https://pypi.org/project/six/ ;)

Oh, nice. :-D

WinAmp 2 was the last "real" version, before the AOL buyout of Nullsoft took its toll.

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