Moving from Winamp to MPD

Introduction

Winamp

  • trace the history of Winamp?
    • I'm going to start a timeline:
      • "That’s the joy in programming, you can make things to use. Winamp grew out of wanting a good, enjoyable way to listen to mp3s on a computer. It wasn’t the first mp3 player, but the mp3 players around before it were hard for me to want to use." – Justin Frankel, Justin Frankel on Winamp and the Reaper |  Digital Tools
      • Winamp 0.2a
        • A brief history of Winamp - YouTube
        • Winamp - Wikipedia
        • "It was a minimalist piece of software, with just a menubar to play, stop, pause and unpause. The name is a portmanteau of Windows, as in the Microsoft operating system, and the acronym for the Advanced Multimedia Products engine that played MP3 files." --Winamp R.I.P.: Celebrating The Life Of The Nullsoft's Revolutionary MP3 Player
        • "In a year and a half, 15 million people downloaded the program. A sizable portion even sent in the voluntary ten-dollar shareware fee that Frankel had requested, reluctantly, on his parents' advice. With tens of thousands of dollars coming in every month, his dad all but abandoned his law practice to help field calls from companies that wanted to cash in on the outfit Justin nihilistically called Nullsoft, a play on Microsoft."
        • "“Winamp grew out of wanting a good, enjoyable way to listen to MP3s on a computer. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but the MP3 players around before it were hard for me to want to use.” – Justin Frankel on Winamp and the Reaper |  Digital Tools
        • "The Windows Advanced Multimedia Products (WinAMP) player was released to the world on April 21, 1997. The next year, when its parent company Nullsoft formally incorporated, Winamp became $10 shareware. But no one pays for shareware, right? Wrong."
        • "“Nothing ever was broken [if you didn’t pay], there was no feature that was unlocked,” Rob Lord told Ars. “In that year before we were acquired, we were bringing in $100,000 a month from $10 checks—paper checks in the mail!”" – Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself | Ars Technica
      • Winamp 0.92
      • Winamp 1.0006
      • Winamp 1.90
      • April 18, 1998: Winamp 1.91
      • 3M downloads
        • Rebootlegger | WIRED
          • "During the past few years, the bootleg trade in MP3-compressed music has boomed. To play these scavenged files, you need special software – and that's where Frankel comes in. In June 1997, he released on the Web his freeware Winamp player, which combines customizable design, intuitive interface, and flawless CD-quality sound. In a collaborative development process with users, the program became a runaway hit and has been downloaded more than 3 million times to date."
          • "Frankel had to make Winamp into US$10 shareware just to pay for the bandwidth consumed by the 30,000 daily visits to his site (winamp.lh.net/). He's had just enough money left over to buy a used car."
      • Winamp 2.0
      • Rob Lord joins Nullsoft
        • "It was Lord’s job to figure out how to make the company money. Like most 1990s startups, the plan involved banner ads and possible partnership deals with other startups. Lord, then in his late 20s, moved from California to join the 18-year-old Frankel, still living at his parents’ home in Sedona, Arizona—where his father, attorney Charles Frankel, acted as the company’s counsel and chief financial officer."
      • Nullsoft purchased by AOL
        • America Online | Who We Are | History
        • "AOL acquires leading Internet music brands Spinner.com, Winamp, and SHOUTcast"
        • Winamp - Wikipedia
        • $80M in stock
        • $100M total – The death of the last maverick tech company.
        • AOL merged with Time-Warner in 2000
        • "Gnutella's birth came at the end of what Frankel now calls his "very short honeymoon" with America Online. At first, it seemed like the ultimate setup: good money, a nice office and the freedom to work on the next version of Winamp. But it didn't take long for things to sour. Almost immediately after the deal was struck, persnickety hackers online cried "sellout." Frankel's girlfriend broke up with him because, he says, "she got freaked out by the money." And the big, open office Nullsoft and Spinner shared in San Francisco got Dilbertized by AOL. "Three months after we arrived," Frankel says, "they built all these cubicles, and it sucked.""
        • "It was inside his cubicle one day that Frankel first saw Napster. File-trading wasn't new. But Shawn Fanning, Napster's nineteen-year-old creator, had coded a clever piece of software that made this geekish pastime user-friendly. "When I first saw Napster, I thought, 'Wow, that's pretty cool,' " Frankel says, " 'but how will they keep from getting sued?'""
        • "He coded fast and on the sly. "I didn't want AOL to find out," he says, "because they'd prevent it from happening.""
        • "On March 14th, 2000, Frankel and Tom Pepper, a Nullsoft cohort, uploaded an early version of Gnutella, with a note: "Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and Shoutcast. See? AOL can bring you good things!" The next day, Frankel was with his parents touring Alcatraz, appropriately enough, when his cell phone rang. It was Pepper. "Dude," Pepper said, "you better get back to the office.""
        • "By the time Frankel returned, he says, "the shit had hit the fan." The timing of Gnutella couldn't have been worse from the company's point of view. AOL was in the midst of trying to merge with Time Warner, which was involved in suing Napster for facilitating copyright infringement."
        • "AOL ordered him to take the program down immediately, and the company put out a statement calling Gnutella an "unauthorized freelance project." But Gnutella, unlike Napster, couldn't be stopped. More than 10,000 people had downloaded the beta software that first day, and intrepid hackers had gone to work to reverse-engineer it and throw it into the hands of the open-source community, laying the foundation for BearShare, Morpheus, LimeWire and other file-trading wares."
        • "After that, Frankel says, AOL kept him on "a very short leash," steering him away from interviewers and encouraging him to focus on Winamp, the program they paid him 100 million friggin' dollars to work on in the first place. Not surprisingly, he acted out. In August 2000, he uploaded an MP3 search engine. AOL took it down. The next month, he uploaded to a secret section of the Nullsoft site a program called AIMazing, which would replace the banner ads in AOL's Instant Messenger with an image of a musical heartbeat. Frankel called it nothing more than "a cute innovation." The Wall Street Journal called Frankel "AOL's loose cannon.""
        • "AOL cracked down, again – this time requiring Frankel to seek approval before blogging online. "We fought off the AOL bullshit as much as possible," he says. When the company tried to insist that an AOL icon instantly appear on a user's desktop during a Winamp installation, Frankel hit the roof. "I'd be like, 'Look, our users don't want to use AOL!' " he says. " 'They think AOL sucks!'""
        • "He tried pitching Waste to AOL, but after the company dragged its feet for months, he got fed up. On May 28th, 2003, four years to the date that he was acquired, Frankel rebelled again – uploading Waste as a way to force AOL to deal with it, and him, once and for all. "AOL as a company should not just sit on their asses and try to keep from losing as many subscribers as it can," he says. "I mean, I'm a stockholder of the company. I want them innovating. I want them doing things that are good for the world and being socially conscious."
        • "“The general logic was that Spinner had built a service and had a pretty well seasoned management team in place,” McIntyre added. “Winamp had built a product and a platform that was capable of generating meaningful user adoption.”"
      • Exclusive: Nullsoft Gnutella Beta Test
      • Winamp hits 25M registrants
      • 2001
      • Winamp 3
      • Winamp 2.9
      • Winamp 5
      • Frankel leaves AOL
      • AOL axes Nullsoft - whither Winamp, Shoutcast? • The Register
        • "After hemorrhaging employees for months, only three Nullsoft employees are left after the shake-up"
        • "Nullsoft can also take the credit for AOL-disapproved projects such as P2P software Gnutella, which was released for one day only in source code form and WASTE, a decentralized encrypted file system named after Thomas Pynchon's secret postal service."
        • The death of the last maverick tech company.
        • "Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark."
        • "Gnutella was unveiled in March 2000, much to the chagrin of an unprepared AOL; executives feared the program would encourage copyright infringement and damage the company's pending merger with Time Warner. AOL quickly clamped down on Gnutella, but not before the software's source code leaked. Gnutella-based alternatives soon followed, igniting a peer-to-peer land grab that has yet to subside."
        • "But AOL knew it had to protect its investment and turn a profit from the freely available Winamp. Frankel and crew found themselves in hot water numerous times, but always escaped with little more than a proverbial slap on the wrist."
        • "However, growing displeasure reached a boiling point with Nullsoft’s unsanctioned release of WASTE – an encrypted file-sharing network – in June 2003. Frankel threatened to resign after AOL removed WASTE, but remained with the company long enough to finish Winamp 5.0."
        • Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp
      • Winamp 5.5
      • AOL announces it's shutting down Winamp
        • Waving goodbye to Winamp, paying respects to Nullsoft - CNET
        • this November 22 quoted the AOL announcement:
          • "Winamp.com and associated Web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years."
      • AOL sells Winamp to Radionomy
      • enduring love for Winamp
        1. October 2018 :: A flurry of PR after a leaked build of Winamp 5.8
        2. The Winamp Skin Museum is a beautiful homage to an iconic app
        3. Winamp Media Player legacy site - WinampHeritage.com
        4. Winamp & Shoutcast Forums

R/N:

  • "Jascha Franklin-Hodge started out as a Spinner engineer and later became the director of software development in 2003. Later, he co-founded Blue State Digital, the company behind Barack Obama’s 2008 social media strategy."
  • "“When you think about what AOL had in early 2000,” he told Ars, “the only thing that they were missing that [would be] essential to today’s media system is a hardware device. They had the number one software for playing [in Winamp], and in theory, although not in practice, the [Time Warner] content library that could have been a pioneer in streaming. And a radio service. It had all the elements. AOL could have been Spotify, it could have been Pandora.”"
  • "But it wasn't; it was AOL. And so, despite having the love of hardcore geeks, music fans, and millions of Winamp users, AOL’s main strategy was to try to convert those users towards the Service, ignoring or marginalizing other monetization strategies. As the years passed, both the Service and Winamp stagnated. (Today, AOL has just 3.3 million users.)"
  • "McIntyre summed up the problem bluntly. “Between 2002 and 2007, Winamp was an asset that AOL knew was valuable but didn't know what the fuck to do with.""
  • of course, it's FB page hasn't been updated since
  • talk a bit about the importance of owning your music
  • intros MPD mpdpopm xnde
  • from-nde
  • [ ] update the NDE winamp wiki page?
  • [ ] go back thru my info manual for scribbu
  • Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way) – Rocknerd
    • 5 February, 2017
    • The Making of Winamp - YouTube
    • "I could shuffle my whole collection. (Though building a several-thousand-track playlist in Winamp took a while.) I spent weeks just rediscovering stuff."
    • "Winamp was a delight to use: it started, it played stuff, obvious buttons did obvious things, it behaved in sensible ways and had sensible defaults. It did one thing and did it well."
    • RE the AOL acquisition: "Despite a stupendous pile of online radio streams right there in the Winamp software, and the entire catalogue of Warner Music to hand, they singularly failed to turn into Pandora or Last.FM; instead, they tried to get people to install Netscape or AOL whenever they downloaded Winamp."
    • original Nullsoft team quit in 2004
  • during Winamp's heyday, the industry struggled to monetized digital music
    • Napster, Kazaa
    • iTunes fixed that ($0.99/song!)
  • the Llama thing:
    • "WN: What is up with the llama? Where did that come from? (Nullsoft's mascot is a llama.)"
    • "Frankel: I think it originally came from someone who e-mailed us saying "Winamp whips the llama's ass!" That was, I think, an homage to Wesley Willis. And then it just kind of went from there"
    • "Early on, he had included the tag line "Winamp whips the llama's ass" (riffed from a line in a song by the late schizophrenic Chicago street singer Wesley Willis) on every player."

mpd

Getting Data Out of NDE & Into MPD

  • time log of my work
    • looks like I wrapped this up in late November 2020
    • wow, I wrote a pretty complex Scheme program to move ratings, playcounts & last-played over
    • now… did I actually run it?

xnde

from-nde

09/07/21 09:43