[Steven W]

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/2391/ ... ionomy.htm

Winamp has received a fresh lease of life. The music player, which was supposed to shut down on Dec. 20, has been rescued, not by Microsoft as earlier speculated, but by Brussels, Belgium-based Internet radio stations aggregator Radionomy.

I used to love Winamp. Over the years it became more and more bloated. I still keep a couple of old versions 2.x around. The speculation that Microsoft would buy Winamp is pretty ridiculous.

[!]

...The speculation that Microsoft would buy Winamp is pretty ridiculous.

Indeed. Those motherfuckers and their fucking Windows Media Player, that thing is a big joke. Totally unusable. I managed to trim the new bloated Winamp down to a very few files some years ago. I think around only 14 files.

Winamp reminds me of the good old days of the Internet and personal computing era. It used to be fun times. Before Facebook and Twitter existed. Everyone was on IRC.

[MasterOne]

I never liked Winamp. It was bloated by the time I got around to trying it. I used to use XMMS on Linux which had a similar UI to Winamp, but was of course a better piece of software.

[Steven W]

As stated, I really did like Winamp many moons ago. I remember watching the decline. The introduction of a video player was, in my opinion, a bad move. Then there was the advertising that starting up (even in the paid for version):

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=280976

Can't believe that thread is still around.


Here's an article about how some employees say it went downhill:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06 ... id-itself/

I found the bit about AOL buying two companies and tossing them together particularly amusing, I found myself in practically the same situation in the past couple of years:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06 ... id-itself/

It is amazing how these huge corporations believe that they are indestructible or offer something of such great value that is irreplaceable. Hello, Microsoft? Anybody home?:

And that pointed to a bigger problem for Winamp, and for the "Winamp culture" inside AOL-its primary users were music fans, geeks, and people who cared about what bitrate their MP3s were encoded at-in other words, the key users of Winamp in the early 2000s were allergic to AOL as a company. (Or perhaps were just put off by all those AOL promo CDs.)

Heh, I remember in those days getting the relatively inexpensive dial-up service from the phone company and in the back of my mind wondering what made AOL so great -- thinking perhaps I was missing something. Finally saw AOL from a new friend and realized there was nothing that made it so great.