Winamp was Designed by Nullsoft Inc.. Their trademark is a llama.

Winamp is a skinnable mp3 player, which was one of the first mp3 players to be offered to the general populace for free. Winamp also allows different types of plugins to be installed to offer different visual and audio effects.

Winamp Easter Egg (very cool):

Switch to the original winamp skin, click on the main winamp window, and type this in this exact order:

'nullsoft' hitting your Esc. key after each 'l'

Ie: n, u, l, (esc key), l, (esc key), s, o, f, t

TUH DAH!

A very popular media player, made by Nullsoft, for the Windows operating system. It is very fast, stable, and has a huge variety of options.

It can play a variety of formats, including:

  • MP1, MP2, MP3
  • MIDI
  • WAV
  • CDs
  • WMA
  • Modules (MODs)
  • ... and many others
  • It's functionality can be extended by downloadable plug-ins. It also offers the ability to be "skinned", and has a feature for visualizations which can go along to any music playing.

    Personally, it's the most stable program on my system. And one of the few I actually respect. :)

    Winamp is available at www.winamp.com.

    A while ago, maybe one of the early 2.x versions of Winamp had a running counter of how many hours total you listened to Winamp, and how many times you opened the program. I wish they'd kept that in for future versions, alas and alack. And no one's mentioned that in 1999 I believe (?) Nullsoft was purchased by AOL for an insane sum of money. I believe Justin Frankel, the founded and lead programmer got something like $98 million. In addition, Nullsoft also made the Shoutcast server thingy, which let lots of people make their own pseudo-radio stations right online. Geek radio at it's best. Also, Nullsoft has released a visualization plug-in for Winamp that removes the ads from AOL's Instant Messanger, or AiM. All this wackiness and he's still employed at everyone's favorite ISP. He's one of my heroes. ;)


    Update 1-13-2K2: Okay, apparently Mr. Frankel only got something like $400,000 - $500,000 for his "company". Doesn't matter, he's still my one of my heroes (if only a lot poorer now).
    I've only ever met one of you folks in real life, and you can bet your ass that I had to think long and hard before I allowed that to happen. But dann turned out to be a perfect young gentleman who neither tried to look up my daughter's skirt nor tell rude jokes to my wife. Tonight, when I asked a question about WinAmp in the catbox, dann was very quick to help me with the answer. By the time I had figured out that I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me, he had left for a while. Then graceness took over and finished the job helping the computerally handicapped feel his way through the darkness of the wires and chips to solve this little problem he had been trying to solve.

    I love WinAmp and I've started doing what most of you have done long, long ago: That is, make a file on your hard drive of every song you've ever loved in your life, and then sit there and get drunk and listen to them in random order. The thing that annoyed me was that songs pulled from Napster or AudioGalaxy were at all these different volumes, and copies of songs from CDs seemed even at more variance with some sort of norm.

    So, I figured that there must be some way to stick a command in WinAmp that would cause it to play all the songs at relatively the same volume. And, thanks to dann and graceness, I'll share this with you now. Please be forewarned that whoever created this plug-in will do the little sneaky things like make a site you don't really care about the default home page on your computer if you're not careful, and you might find a few porn related links in your favorites folders. (I'm quite sure that those were not there before! Quite sure indeed! But if I'm blaming this guy for something someone in my house did, I'll consider spanking someone. Let me know if you find these incursions into your private space if you decide to use this program.)

    And that reminds me of a story. We hired a new guy at work a few years ago and gave him a laptop. He'd never used a computer in his whole life. He was mid-50's and a slim, good-looking guy with a thin silver moustache. You could tell he was a cock hound. I didn't know much about the whole computer deal, as you probably know, but I did know enough to help him figure out the basics. He was very curious about the internet. He'd heard a lot about the internet. So I got him set up with a dial-up connection and showed him how to log on the web. The next day, he came to work and set up his laptop. A couple of the secretaries were getting coffee and they came over to say hello to the new guy. I walked over as he turned his computer on and logged on to the web. I was asking him how it had gone as he "played with" the laptop the night before. And then his brand spanking new home page popped up. Two girls with very large fake bosoms and some sort of greased-up flexible tubular instrument were engaged in a sort of back and forth that was far from seesaw. One of the secretaries dropped her coffee and burned her ankles. The look on the new employee's face was priceless. Have you ever seen someone turn beet red and begin going "hommina, hommina" like they were in a Marx Brothers movie? Jesus, I loved that moment. After the girls were gone, he looked at me with all the seriousness he could muster and said, "I knew I should not have let my son use this computer last night!" I reminded him that he was unmarried and did not have children. He decided to resign before accepting his first paycheck.

    But, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah: Getting WinAmp to play your songs at some sort of consistent volume. Here's what you do, and this information is strictly from the kindness of dann and graceness.

    Go to http://piettropro.cjb.net/ and look for the Rock Steady link. Then just run the installer. Then, in WinAmp, click on the top left hand corner icon, click "options," then "preferences." You will see, under "plugins" an option for "DSP/Effect." Click "Rock Steady" to activate the option that plays all the WinAmp files at pretty much the same volume. You can then configure it any way you like. The stuff you copied from a CD may still be a bit louder than the files you got from the internet, but the difference will be much less noticeable.




    UPDATE: (5/6/02). This thing is not working as well as I had hoped. Any ideas of a better plug-in would be appreciated. Sorry if I wasted anyone's time w/ this idea.

    And I've now met four more of you folks IRL. All have been more than pleasant experiences.

    I still use Winamp.

    "But it's 2024, Hazelnut!"

    And?

    "But it's oooooold! And outdated! And ugly!"

    The last version plays every conceivable type of digital audio, be it WAV, MP3, AAC (I think), WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, and similar, uses next to no system resources (0.3% CPU time and 87.5 megabytes memory on a Ryzen 3700X based system with 16 GB RAM even playing hi-res FLAC) and contains no advertising and is ultimately responsive. Which is a breath of fresh air in current year when even most text based websites are so bogged down with ads and popups and shite that exists solely to chew up bandwidth and annoy you into clicking on AI-generated sludge.

    "But it's ugly and outdated and has a horrible user interface!"

    No it doesn't. You're just used to the dumbed down and yet obscurantist user interface of modern applications. Winamp has a panel at the top left with the transport controls, the current playlist beneath, and tables sorting your tracks by album, artist, and title respectively, and clicking one of those tables and typing the name jumps to the first entry starting with that, and adjacent to the transport controls is a graphic equaliser for adapting to your chosen set of speakers of headphones or environment. What could be more intuitive. Everything is just there and laid out nicely. Or you can rearrange it how you like if that's too difficult for you.

    "But it doesn't sync to portable media players!"

    It does, and better than iTunes. Whereas iTunes will only let you sync what is on your PC to your iPod or phone or whatever, Winamp will do it vice versa also. That is, you can plug in a portable media device, click to sync to a PC, and it'll copy everything from the device onto your PC that you don't already have. Have fun killing music!

    "But it doesn't make suggestions for you like streaming services do!"

    I don't want an algorithm to tell me what to listen to. I want to listen to what I already want to.

    "But it doesn't use AI!"

    I don't want AI, I want to listen to music. Fucking hell. Can we stop putting AI in everything like a selling point. AI gets things wrong and makes things difficult by thinking it knows better than you what you're trying to do. Stop helping me, for crying out loud.

    "But it's 2024, Hazelnut!"

    Yes, yes it is. The fact that I'm still using a program that was first designed over a quarter century ago and which still runs perfectly on every version of Windows from 9x to 11 (albeit it has to be run administratively from Vista onwards) and does exactly what I need it to do in a bug free and super responsive way is proof that it is objectively better software than all its competitors. It also doesn't contain ads and is free. It can rip things from a CD or other optical media as well as burn to optical media also if you want. The only thing it doesn't do is accept an analog mic input so you can't rip vinyl or cassette tapes or 8 tracks with it. And you can save the output to disc in any audio format you see fit.

    "But streaming services exist!"

    Yes, yes they do. And I don't use them. I like to have local copies of all my music because things have a habit of going missing from streaming services for arcane reasons outside your control. Also they cost money and have ads and chew up internet bandwidth, especially if you like listening to the film scores of Basil Poledouris in Hi-Res FLAC like I do.

    And that, boys and girls, is why Winamp still really whips the llama's arse.

    (IN24/14)

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