SillyDog701

[DJGM]

It has been reported that AOL, as part of it's recently announced major corporate shake up, have done
to Nullsoft what it did to Netscape in Summer 2003, effectively killing off future Winamp development.

AOL split itself into four this week, and one of the casualties is the team that provided
its musical credibility. And of course, we don't mean Spinner.com. After hemorrhaging
employees for months, only three Nullsoft employees are left after the shake-up.

Later in the same article . . .

Writing on his homepage, departing developer Steve Gedikian concluded, "At this
point, I feel like I no longer have the power to make any positive impact on Winamp."
He speculates that with only a skeleton staff, further development of Winamp is unlikely.
The team rescued a buggy version 3.0 with version 5.0 recently, adding the ability to
play Windows media files, burn discs, and organizer your porn collection: so there's
really no excuse for Windows users to persist with the bundled Media Player.

Since Nullsoft also make Shoutcast, it looks like that could end up being ditched as well.


So . . . R.I.P. Winamp. You will be missed . . .

And to the beancounters at AOL, thanks . . .for nothing, you dumb@$$ corporate clowns!

Read the full article at TheRegister.co.uk - click here . . .

Unsticky by Admin, 10.5.2005

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

[Antony]

If my understanding of the article was correct, there are still staffs left in the Winamp team. AOL has the trademark Winamp, and may release any versions of Winamp at any time.

I think the title "Winamp is DEAD . . . thanks to AOL" is a bit to strong, and not exactly accurate.

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[Edward]

Stranger things have happened before... Netscape development has resumed.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

[Al]

That's really bad news. I really loved Winamp 5, let's hope that they don't kill ICQ now

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Mozilla Firefox/1.0

[Subir]

I use Netscape Winamp for managing my MP3 collection.

I would be sad if it was discontiuned. It is the only free music management tool (that I know of) that lets you record sounds & music in the AAC format.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)

[Al]

I use Netscape Winamp for managing my MP3 collection.

I would be sad if it was discontiuned. It is the only free music management tool (that I know of) that lets you record sounds & music in the AAC format.

It's callec Nullsoft Winamp, NS Winamp is just a theme for Nullsoft Winamp

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[DJGM]

If my understanding of the article was correct, there are still staffs left in the Winamp team.
AOL has the trademark Winamp, and may release any versions of Winamp at any time.

Stranger things have happened before ... Netscape development has resumed.

That may be true if AOL decided to take on further development of Winamp beyond 5.xx, but . . .

. . . only three Nullsoft employees are left after the shake-up.

And . . .

. . . with only a skeleton staff, further development of Winamp is unlikely.

Remember though, Winamp is not open source, with the clear advantage of having many volunteer programmers
working on the source code. Netscape has that advantage, with it being based upon the open source codebase
from the Mozilla Foundation. All AOL has to do is grab a current or recent Mozilla App-Suite build, add in all the
proprietary Netscape/AOL components, and rebrand it from Mozilla to Netscape, and release it . . . job done.
AOL doesn't need a huge team of paid developers to do that, just a handful of staffers on overtime!

The Mozilla developers, of which there are thousands, the majority of whom are open source volunteers, do the
bulk of the work on the Netscape browser, and AOL doesn't have to pay them a penny. Not a single sausage.

If AOL decided to continue development of Winamp (a closed source product) they'd need to assemble an all
new development team. And pay their wages! Considering AOL's somewhat fool-hardly reluctance (so far) to
release a Netscape 7.2.x maintenance update, based upon Mozilla 1.7.3 with all the fixes, which they could
have done ages ago, I think the forecast of any new versions of Winamp from AOL are low. Very low.

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[Antony]

If Winamp is dying... we shan't worry about it at all.

We have the world's best music jukebox - iTunes.

iTunes links to the world's best and most popular online digital music store, iTunes Music Store, and works with the world's best portable mp3 music player, iPod.

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[Al]

That only supports Win2000+ which I'm not using. Winamp 2 is far by the best and quickest for WIndows 98

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[beanboy89]

That only supports Win2000+ which I'm not using. Winamp 2 is far by the best and quickest for WIndows 98

Yes, iTunes only supports Mac OSX and Windows 2000/XP. Users of older operating systems can't use iTunes. I am using Windows 98 SE, and I use Winamp 5 running with classic skins. I don't plan on changing that anytime soon, as that is the best configuration on my computer.

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[Al]

I still trust WInamp Classic more, well I used it more often

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[Antony]

That only supports Win2000+ which I'm not using. Winamp 2 is far by the best and quickest for WIndows 98

Apple iTunes was released in 2001, if I remember correctly.
Back then, it was Windows 2000 and XP, and Microsoft was phasing out older Windows.

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[Al]

I think you mean 2000, because XP wasn't out until late 2001. And the first verison for Windows was about a year ago. 4.1 was the first to support XP and 2000

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[Andrew T.]

Apple iTunes was released in 2001, if I remember correctly.
Back then, it was Windows 2000 and XP, and Microsoft was phasing out older Windows.

The first Windows version of iTunes was released in 2003.

Winamp, meanwhile, is arguably remains my favorite media player (at least for listening to WAV and MP3-encoded sounds and music), due to its simplicity, performance, small footprint, and small window size. I even found myself able to run Winamp 5.03 on Windows 95, although it is an unsupported platform.

That said, I noticed that the current version is 5.05. I'd better download that if it turns out to be the last version ever released!

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[Mandrake]

This isn't good at all, but as Antony says . . . we have iTunes, which I have enjoyed using .

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