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Winamp Releases Source Code, Asks For Help Modernizing the Player 90

Posted by msmash from the whips-the-llama's-ass dept.
Winamp, the iconic media player from the late 1990s, has released its complete source code on GitHub, fulfilling a promise made in May. The move aims to modernize the player by inviting developers to collaborate on the project.

The source code release includes build tools and associated libraries for the Windows app, allowing developers to provide bug fixes and new features. However, the license prohibits distribution of modified software created from this code.
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Winamp Releases Source Code, Asks For Help Modernizing the Player More

Winamp Releases Source Code, Asks For Help Modernizing the Player

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  • Modernize? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:08PM (#64817611)

    Does it still play mp3s? Leave it alone.

    • the fate of modern software (Score:4, Funny)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:10PM (#64817617) Homepage Journal

      But ChatGPT could provide song suggestions and of course upload your playback history to the cloud to share with friends and any marketing agency willing to pay for the data.

    • Re:Modernize? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fabioalcor ( 1663783 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:18PM (#64817641)

      Yes.
      Winamp is peak music player. Any "improvement" will actually be enshittification.
      At most, make it work with the music stream services du jour. Otherwise, leave it as it is.

      • Winamp is peak music player. Any "improvement" will actually be enshittification.

        Disagree. As does one of the people who worked for Nullsoft who left the company and proceeded to produce a far better music player : foobar2000. Winamp did get enshittified. It is not peak music player.

        • foobar2000 looks like its trying to be an iTunes knockoff. It isn't open source and requires Wine or similar compatibility layer to run on Linux.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tronster ( 25566 )

            WinAMP isn't "open source" according to the licensing terms. (e.g., "No Distribution of Modified Versions")

            The original WinAMP was Windows only; foobar2000 supports three times as many OSs: Windows, MacOS, and iOS.

            And I'm not sure what about foobar2000 is inherently "iTunes", except that a MacOS version exists as well. There are features in it that if "Music" (formally "iTunes) had, I wouldn't be using a 3rd party player. (i.e. freedb tagging, plugin system, etc...)

            • While Winamp isn't fully open source, you can at least review the source code. I don't see that as an option with foobar2000.

              I'm pretty sure iOS didn't exist when Winamp was mainstream, but you can now get Winamp for MacOS, iOS, and Android too.

              I just meant that it looks like iTunes where it is intended to take up the entire screen with album art, entire media library listed, etc. It looks more like a library manager than a simple application to play audio files.

              I'd rather use VLC with appropriate

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbialac ( 320955 )
        I've tried the newer releases. I've come to realize how much I miss it, but I have a big issue with it: on high density displays, it's too small and there doesn't seem to be a good way to fix the issue. Fix that and I'm back on board. It has always been easy to use and I don't need a billion ads showing up when I open a music player.

      • > Any "improvement" will actually be enshittification.

        Winamp 3, anyone?

      • I have yet to meet a library that could handle 500GB of MP3 the way winamp did.

    • Re:Modernize? (Score:5, Funny)

      by pond0123 ( 784875 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @08:53PM (#64817805) Homepage

      Nonsense! I want the UI to become at least four times as large, with huge, widely spaced, bland and sterile corporate UI styling consisting of flat areas with optionally rounded corners, but none of that 3D-effect-button nonsense and ideally, none of those ugly, cluttering shadows. If it doesn't look like some Apple rip-off, despite Apple's current style having become tired and dated several years ago, you're not trying hard enough and should remove even more detail and character. It must be bland, I tell you! That is the future.

      It must use an equally bland font too; something visually identical (for those poor, pathetic "normal" humans) to Helvetica, but actually made by a really expensive consulting company that calls it Meta Whalesong Regular and tells us that there's a slight widening of the letter "l", which represents the body of whales. The normal people won't think they see it, but the clever graphic designers know that it's really changing how they feel. It's not a user interface, it's a user experience. And don't forget, make the titles big. No, bigger! Even bigger! And bolder! People are idiots - make sure the titles of things shout at them in a huge, bold font that's totally different from the rest of the UI. Nobody's going to ignore typography that practically punches them in the face! Take that, human interface guideline authors worldwide.

      Meanwhile, there are lots of advanced features that only a few percent of the users like. They just waste dev time. We'll remove all those - if it's good enough for 95% of people, it's good enough for anyone, right?

      Removing all the visual complexity, decoration and features will of course increase the application's RAM and CPU footprint by two or three orders of magnitude, but that's a small price to pay for progress.

      • Re:Modernize? (Score:5, Funny)

        by ChatHuant ( 801522 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @11:43PM (#64818101)

        make the titles big. No, bigger! Even bigger! And bolder!

        Those are all excellent suggestions, but I think you forgot an essential feature: exclusively white fonts on a light grey background. This will definitively establish the originality and courage of the creators and will be highly admired in gatherings of UI designers everywhere.

      • Sorry, I'm going to revive the mid 1990s era and use the Chili Pepper font [legionfonts.com] and lots of Earth tones. Maybe throw in a few swirls for buttons and draw a gecko somewhere.
      • If you can incorporate some kind of blockchain in this, you can get VC $$$!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Winamp! Now with ads. Location tracking. And the cloud.

    • Does it still play mp3s? Leave it alone.

      But can it read mail yet?

    • Does it still play mp3s? Leave it alone.

      Well that would qualify as a failure of a media player then. Just playing MP3s means you wouldn't be able to consume modern media, the majority of which is being pushed in AAC format these* days.

      And by these days I mean for the past 2 decades.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )
        AAC? What is that, some fruit format? It's MP3 or FLAC these days.

        • It is not. Virtually no one encodes MP3s anymore. Literally 100% of any online music that I have bought (as in bought a CD and it came with an online download code) has been AAC or FLAC. Literally every music purchasing service will give you AAC or FLAC. Literally every stream (Winamp supports streaming) is AAC. And even if you're the type of person to rips music from video streams you're on AAC / OPUS.

          MP3 is a legacy format that isn't used anymore. Hasn't been for well over a decade. Just because you still

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by KlomDark ( 6370 )
            Enjoy your bubble, I've yet to encounter AAC anywhere. FLAC or MP3 (VBR0 usually, sometimes FBR320) is all I see.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by KlomDark ( 6370 )
            And any music I've bought from Amazon Music has been provided as an MP3. So I dunno what you think you're talking about this AAC stuff.

    • I should also mentioned that the ability to play music is too low of a bar. I expect at a minimum that my media player supports endpoint device management through Windows Core Audio, like literally every media player on the market except for Winamp.

  • Did it REALLY, though? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:09PM (#64817613)
    WinAmp wants to pretend that they opened their source code out of altruism, but the real motivation was that they were facing serious camelid abuse charges in the Hague.
  • This is too little too late. I think Plex could do something interesting with it however.
    • Yeah, Plex's Plexamp is already pretty awesome. Maybe some of the equalizer animations could be pulled in :) https://www.plex.tv/plexamp/ [www.plex.tv]
      • Yeah, Plex's Plexamp is already pretty awesome

        Do you still need a to run an entire server to play an mp3? That part kind of turned me off.

        I wish someone would make a decent mp3 player for linux, however. I just use Elisa, even though it's very limited (that said, it's limited nature makes it work very well with touchscreen)

        • I wish someone would make a decent mp3 player for linux, however. I just use Elisa, even though it's very limited (that said, it's limited nature makes it work very well with touchscreen)

          I'm happy with Audacious, it feels a lot like the Winamp of old. I've heard good things about Foobar2000, but haven't used it myself.

          • I'm happy with Audacious, it feels a lot like the Winamp of old.

            Oh wow, it even supports winamp skins. Thank you!

            I actually have used Foobar on PC for a long time (32-bit, 75% of the plug-ins don't work with the 64) However, the linux version needs wine to run and is really, really janky.
        • Yeah...I think that's still the case. I have a NAS sitting around, so I just run it on there. It's my replacement for J River Media Center that I used for years. J River just never got an app that was any good, always struggled with hangs or forgetting what it was playing...
    • What is mp3?

  • WTF kind of source license is this shit (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheDarkener ( 198348 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:24PM (#64817655) Homepage

    This is total crap. So, what... I do the work, then IF you accept it into your GH project, you'll claim copyright, then deny me the right to share what I did in the first place?

    Fuck off.

    https://github.com/WinampDeskt... [github.com] : ...
    4. Contributions

            Contribution to Project: You are encouraged to contribute improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes back to the project. Contributions must be submitted to the official repository and will be reviewed and incorporated at the discretion of the maintainers.
            Assignment of Rights: By submitting contributions, you agree that all intellectual property rights, including copyright, in your contributions are assigned to Winamp. You hereby grant Winamp a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, and distribute your contributions as part of the software, without any compensation to you.
            Waiver of Rights: You waive any rights to claim authorship of the contributions or to object to any distortion, mutilation, or other modifications of the contributions.

    5. Restrictions

            No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.
            Official Distribution: Only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.

    6. No Sublicensing
    Sublicensing is not allowed; section 5 makes it unnecessary.

  • Shyeah, Right... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:37PM (#64817675) Homepage Journal

    To summarize: The "license" basically grants you no rights you didn't already have, and steals several from you. Notably:

    • You can't distribute compiled binaries,
    • You can't distribute your own source changes,
    • Any changes you hope to have distributed must be approved and distributed through Winamp,
    • All Your Code Are Belong To Us (Winamp asserts copyright ownership of your changes).
    • Agreement To Be Forgotten (you can't claim any authorship for any of your contributions).

    The "license" says that, "You may make, run, and propagate Covered works that you do not Convey, without conditions, so long as your License otherwise remains in force." However, the term Convey is defined as, "any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies," which pretty much covers any distribution, in whole or in part, in any form. Hell, it may even cover forking the repo.

    In short, I'd recommend avoiding this.

  • While I certainly remember the days when you needed an entire PC to play MP3s, I don't feel any nostalgia for them. And I'm saying that as someone who had a barebones 90MHz Pentium PC in the trunk of my '96 Toyota Camry, to play MP3s. Nowadays, my phone is my music player, and I think most of the younger folks don't even bother with locally stored music collections anymore, since streaming has become so ubiquitous.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Yeah, I am unclear why you would even want to run something like winamp today. Does it hav any useful feature that you wouldn't find on say xmms, windows media player, or vlc?

      • Yes it supports plugins that have many features you can't find anywhere else.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          Go ahead try to name one a quick google won't reveal one or more things of rough equivalence for use with some other currently popular player. I don't buy it.

          I am not saying winamp isn't good, or that there are not many really great plugins for it, or that if you like it/them you should use something else.

          Winamp is really really old now, there is an entire generation of working age adults who are likely to say "what's a winamp" if asked. It is simply no longer revelevant and has not been for a long long ti

      • Yeah, I am unclear why you would even want to run something like winamp today. Does it hav any useful feature that you wouldn't find on say xmms, windows media player, or vlc?

        Because it plays my collection of MP3s. Why would I bother with some other program to do that when Winamp does the job just fine?

  • Not open source (Score:4, Insightful)

    by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:42PM (#64817685)

    The source code release includes build tools and associated libraries for the Windows app, allowing developers to provide bug fixes and new features. However, the license prohibits distribution of modified software created from this code.

    Go fuck yourself!

  • Horrifyingly poor management (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @08:40PM (#64817777)

    It seems they don't really know how version control systems work because not only did they include a HUGE about of binaries in the initial repo. So now if you clone the repo it downloads 2.7GiB of bullshit. That's not all because they released Dolby's proprietary source code. The fix for their mistake was to add a commit to "remove" the code which is idiotic because well that's not how version control systems work! Don't take my word for it, you can check it out here. [github.com]

    I'm not surprised in the least that they want people to help them (for free without reward) because they are clearly helpless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SafeMode ( 11547 )

      Proper use of git and other scm's really should be a part of mandatory training at companies. Not knowing how it actually works is more of a default from what i've experienced.

    • Oh wow. The team must have changed completely, at least I cannot believe the original people could have possibly been that incompetent. I wonder if this will grant them a lawsuit as Dolby is not exactly known from their lax attitude towards licensing. Which would be instant karma for the BS licensing terms they used for releasing the source, where they would get all the benefits of free work, while the person doing the work would get absolutely nothing.

    • In case anyone is curious for research purposes ...

      Repro: git clone https://github.com/pixeldesu/w... [github.com] # github.com/pixeldesu/winamp.git
      Dir: cd winamp
      Commit: git checkout 0003d3d^1
      Code: cd Src/vlb/

      Whoops-a-daisy!

  • Now it's trying to pass itself off as open-source as if it's hip.

    This makes Functional Source Licensing look good. At least it has a two-year roll-over on codebase.

  • Whereas I wouldn't mind the Winamp of old being properly ported to run under Linux, the Windows version works more-or-less under WINE, and quite frankly I've been using Audacious [audacious-...player.org] for a while now, and have come to rather like it.

    • If you want a "winamp clone" on Linux, try QMMP. I think it might even take winamp theme files, but the default works well enough for me that I've never tried.

      • I originally tried QMMP, but just plain didn't like the way it worked and frankly didn't like the way it looked either. Audacious has a more polished look to it even if it doesn't look like Winamp (although it has a Winamp-style skin, which ironically I don't choose to use).
        *shrug* it's a matter of personal choice I guess, I just decided I preferred Audacious to QMMP.

  • Modernizing doesn't happen randomly (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @10:53PM (#64818025) Homepage

    "Modernizing" (whatever they mean by that) generally refers to an overhaul of the UI. UIs are hard to re-imagine, and if you look at open source software in general, the UIs typically focus on function, not beauty or elegance. If it's a spiffy new UI they want, they'll need to *hire* talented UI / UX people who know what they are doing, and who are firm in their resolve to make the UI consistent and usable. The fact that they are trying to outsource this to volunteer developers, already means they aren't willing to pay the money to do it justice.

    • "Modernizing" (whatever they mean by that) generally refers to an overhaul of the UI.

      That's not true, it's just the most consumer facing aspect that people latch on to. There are many things done in the name of modernisation under the hood which you do not directly see and Winamp could benefit from a couple:
      a) Winamp doesn't support Windows Core Audio APIs like virtually all music players from the past 2 decades have transitioned to, i.e. it is an audio player that can't manage its audio session or streams which incidentally precludes the ability to play back some formats like DSD.
      b) Winamp

      • Of course, there are back-end changes that fall into the category of "modernizing," including the ones you listed. These are equally thorny and are unlikely to be resolved by volunteers contributing here and there. These are things that require sustained, guided effort.

  • I'll take "How to ask developers to work for free without asking them to work for free." for $200, Alex.

  • But why? (Score:2, Informative)

    by tezbobobo ( 879983 )

    Software has moved on. Is there anything that Winamp is good at that VLC can't do better already? Winamp isn't just old, it is completely irrelevant. There are newer better products. Work done on Winamp would not improve it over other products; at best, it would help them catch-up, slowly, while they continue to improve.

    Just let it die, and focus energy on existing, better products.

    • Is there anything that Winamp is good at that VLC can't do better already?

      managing playlist of online radio links, ip addresses/domain names, at least I couldn't get it to work the last time I tried.. which was years ago

  • Not a proper free open source license (Score:3)

    by jopet ( 538074 ) on Thursday September 26, 2024 @12:06AM (#64818139) Journal

    They want the community to do the work for them but do not allow free distribution.

    As far as I am concerned they can just fuck right off until they share it under a proper FOS license

    https://github.com/WinampDeskt... [github.com]

  • WinAmp wine (Score:3)

    by Elektroschock ( 659467 ) on Thursday September 26, 2024 @03:57AM (#64818487)

    I think the only help of the source code I could imagine is to use the source code to debug it with wine, so that it becomes runable with wine.
    https://appdb.winehq.org/objec... [winehq.org]

    I was struggling in the past with that and I am excited to learn that there is now a platinum version.

    In any case the winamp license is not open source

  • Wants you to code the llama's ass!

  • Still using WinAmp 5.666, along with some classic mode skins from 20+ years ago.
    While you're at it, leave Eudora 7 alone too!
  • I still miss MusicMatch Jukebox until Apple bought it. MusicMatch Jukebox would play any type song file. iMusic/iTunes will NOT play some of my songs from years ago...DRM.

    • I still miss MusicMatch Jukebox until Apple bought it.

      So, last I checked (and the Wikipedia article confirms this), Yahoo bought Musicmatch, not Apple.

      The more infuriating part of MMJB is that it doesn't work on modern versions of Windows, because their integrated music store relied on lots of IE6 code that was designed in the XP era, so it barely works on the RTM version of Win7 and doesn't work at all on anything newer...and I've yet to find a workaround for MMJB that resolves this.

      • Sorry, my bad, Couldn't really remember what the name and and didn't it doing internet search. Thanks for clarification.
  • Since you can't distribute modified versions, this is effectively locked within microsoft's walled garden, just like winamp always was. It should be considered a dead project, since no one should be touching github in the first place.

  • Traumatized Llamas everywhere are cringing right now.

    "Not again. Never again."

  • 'nuf said.

  • All they have to do is contribute retro skins to Foobar2000 and PlexAmp. Problem solved.

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