Winamp
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Winamp | |
|---|---|
 |
|
 Winamp 5.5 featuring the new Bento skin |
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| Developed by | Nullsoft |
| Initial release | April 21, 1997 |
| Stable release | 5.531 (5.5.3.1938) (April 1, 2008) [+/−] |
| Preview release | [+/−] |
| OS | Microsoft Windows, Linux (version 3)[1] |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Genre | Media player |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Winamp.com |
Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is skinnable, multi-format freeware / shareware.
Winamp was first released by Justin Frankel in 1997.[1] Current Winamp development is credited to Ben Allison (benski), Will Fisher, Taber Buhl, Maksim Tyrtyshny, Chris Edwards and Stephen (Tag) Loomis.[2]
Winamp grew from 33 million users in February 2005 to over 57 million users in September 2006.[3]
Contents |
[edit] History
[edit] Winamp 1
Version 1.006 was released June 7, 1997[4] renamed "Winamp" (lower case). It showed a spectrum analyzer, and color changing volume slider, but no waveform display. The AMP non-commercial license was included in its help menu.
According to Tomislav Uzelac, Frankel licensed the AMP 0.7 engine June 1, 1997[5] Frankel formally founded Nullsoft, Inc. in January 1998, and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to $10 shareware.[6] In March, Uzelac's newly founded company, PlayMedia Systems sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nullsoft, claiming unlawful use of AMP. Nullsoft responded that they had replaced AMP with Nitrane, Nullsoft's proprietary decoder, but Playmedia disputed this.
Version 1.90, released March 31, 1998 was the first release as a general-purpose audio player, and documented on the winamp.com website as supporting plugins, of which it included two input plugins (MOD and MP3) and a visualization plugin.[7] The installer for Version 1.91, released 18 days later, included wave, cdda, and Windows tray handling plugins, as well as the famous Wesley Willis-inspired DEMO.MP3 file "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass".[8]
[edit] Winamp 2
Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions became widely used, and Winamp was one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Microsoft Windows.[9] The new version improved the usability of the playlist, made the equalizer more accurate, introduced more plug-ins and allowed 'skins' for the playlist and equalizer windows.
PlayMedia Systems filed a federal lawsuit against Nullsoft in March 1999. In June, Nullsoft was bought by AOL for $80 million.[10] PlayMedia was granted an injunction on Nullsoft distributing Nitrane, and the same month the lawsuit was settled with out-of-court licensing and confidentiality agreements. Soon after, Nullsoft switched to an ISO decoder from the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the developers of the MP3 format.
Winamp 2.10, released March 24, 1999 included a new version of the "Llama" demo.mp3 featuring a musical sting and bleating.
Nullsoft relaunched the Winamp-specific winamp.com in December 1999 to provide easier access to skins, plug-ins, streaming audio, song downloads, forums and developer resources.
As of June 22, 2000 Winamp surpassed 25 million registrants.[10]
[edit] Winamp3
The next major Winamp version, Winamp3 (so spelled to include mp3 in the name and to mark its separation from the Winamp 2 codebase), was released on August 9, 2002. It was a complete rewrite of version 2, newly based on the Wasabi application framework, which offered additional functionality and flexibility. Winamp3 was developed parallel to Winamp 2, but many users found it consumed too many system resources and was unstable (or even lacked some valued functionality, such as the ability to count or find the total duration of tracks in a playlist). Winamp3 had no backward compatibility with Winamp 2 skins and plugins, and the SHOUTcast sourcing plugin was not supported. No Winamp3 version of SHOUTcast was ever released.
In response to users reverting to Winamp 2, Nullsoft continued the development of Winamp 2 to versions 2.9 and 2.91. The beta versions 2.92 and 2.95 were released with the inclusion of some upcoming Winamp 5 functionality. During this period the Wasabi cross-platform application framework and skinnable GUI toolkit was derived from parts of the Winamp3 source code. For Linux, Nullsoft released an alpha version of Winamp3 in October 9, 2001 but has not updated it despite continued user interest.
[edit] Winamp 5
The Winamp 2 and Winamp3 branches were later fused into Winamp 5 — Nullsoft justified their non-sequential christening by quipping that 2 + 3 = 5 — taking the best parts from both applications. They also joked that "nobody wants to see a Winamp 4 skin" ('4 skin' being a pun on foreskin)[11]. It was also joked that "Winamp 5 is so good they skipped a number." (Going from 3 to 5) Winamp 5 was based on the Winamp 2 codebase, with several Winamp3 features (e.g. modern skins) incorporated. Winamp 5.0 was released in December 2003. Most of the Wasabi framework built for creating Winamp3 and its components was released as open source, and as of 2005 an active development effort has succeeded in making a standalone version of Wasabi, minus the skinning and scripting modules which were never released.
Winamp 5 comes in three versions. Lite and Full are freeware, and Pro requires registration and (as of October, 2007) sells for US$19.95. The Lite version has far less functionality (largely supplementable with plugins) while still replicating most of Winamp 2's feature set in a far smaller installer. The Full version offers a richer feature set, including music ripping and CD burning at limited speeds (6x for ripping and 2x for burning). The Pro version features unlimited speed music ripping and CD burning and MP3 encoding.
From version 5.2 on, support for synchronizing iPods is built-in.[12]
Winamp 5.5: 10th Anniversary Edition, released on October 10, 2007,[13] marked the tenth year since the first release of Winamp. A beta preview was released on September 10, 2007. New features to the player included album art support, a much improved localization support (with several official, localized Winamp releases, such as German's, Polish's, Russian's and French's), and a unified player and media library interface skin.[14] This version also dropped support for Windows 9x.
The 5.5 Version outputs the classic Winamp 2 interface when the Windows Aero taskbar preview is seen, instead of the original window contents, as any other program would do.
[edit] Features
Besides MP3, Winamp supports a very wide variety of contemporary and specialized music file formats, including MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and Windows Media Audio. Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC, and Replay Gain for volume levelling across tracks. In addition, Winamp can play and import music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and can also burn music to CDs.
Winamp supports playback of Windows Media Video and Nullsoft Streaming Video. For MPEG Video, AVI and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Windows' DirectShow API for playback, allowing most of the same video formats as Windows Media Player. 5.1 Surround sound is supported where formats and decoders allow.
Winamp has extensive support for plugins. Input plugins allow Winamp to play additional media formats, while output plugins enable additional features such as sound effects (via DSP plugins) and visual effects (notably Advanced Visualization Studio, or AVS, and MilkDrop). Other plugins included in the installer bundle activate features such as global hotkeys. The plugins enable can be selected during installation due to Winamp's use of NSIS to package the application.
Winamp is an early and popular example of application skinning. Winamp 5 continues to support Winamp 2's "classic" skins (static collections of bitmap images) and Winamp3's more flexible "modern" skins, which can be freeform with true alpha channel transparency and controlled by scripting.
Winamp supports many types of streaming media. Its SHOUTcast technology provides free access to Internet radio and Internet television, and Winamp can also access XM Satellite Radio, and AOL Video content. It can access the Singingfish audio/video search engine, and SHOUTcast Wire provides a directory and subscription system for podcasts.
Winamp's media library contains support for Unicode metadata for media files, and full Unicode filename support.
Winamp has extendable support for portable media players. Device plugins are currently included for iPods and Creative NOMADs, Mass Storage Compliant devices, and the Microsoft PlaysForSure and ActiveSync technologies for devices such as those running Windows Mobile.
In more recent versions of Winamp, support has been added to allows users to share their media library to their gaming consoles on the same network through Winamp Remote. This was created through a partnership with Orb. The same extension allows users to access their media library anywhere with an internet connection.
[edit] Skins
Skins are aesthetic revisions of the graphical user interface of Winamp. Winamp has published documentation on skin creation, and invites contributors to publish skins on Winamp.com. Winamp 5.0 supports "classic" skins designed to Winamp 2 specifications, and "modern" skins per the Winamp3 specification. Modern skins support alpha channels, a docked toolbar, and other innovations to the GUI, but many skins found on Winamp.com still remain committed to the "classic" skin specification. Online communities of skin designers, such as 1001 Winamp Skins and DeviantArt, and the active forums on Winamp.com attest to the popularity of the feature and its flexibility as a medium for creative expression. As the number of independently produced works has increased, genre styles or categories of skins have emerged. Promoting celebrities, fashion models, films, cars, bands, brands, and other forms of entertainment remains a common staple of the medium. Artists have also created designs for their own sake: parodies of other interfaces, nostalgic emulations of old hardware and operating systems, hand drawn art, 3-dimension renderings employing transparencies, minimalist and high contrast designs, and clever implementations of vector graphics.
[edit] Plug-ins
The Winamp software development kit allows software developers to extend Winamp's functionality through the use of plug-ins, which are categorized into the following seven types:
- Input plug-ins decode media data contained in specific file formats.
- Output plug-ins control the destination of decoded audio (such as the DirectSound device or direct-to-file writing).
- Visualization plug-ins provide sound activated graphics.
- DSP/Effect plug-ins manipulate audio (reverb, spacialization, equalization, compression, etc).
- General Purpose plug-ins add functionality or extensions to Winamp (Media Library, alarm clock, or pause when logged out).
- Media Library plug-ins add functionality or extensions to the Media Library plug-in (gen_ml, included with Winamp).
- Device plug-ins add support of portable media players to the Portable Media Player plug-in (ml_pmp, included with Winamp)
Easy development of specialized Input plug-ins contributed to Winamp's versatility compared to monolithic media players. For example, popular video game music has driven development of plugins to play back game console music files, such as NSF, USF, GBS, GSF, SID, VGM, SPC, PSF and PSF2.
A wide variety of plug-ins are available on the Winamp web site.[15]
[edit] Derivative work
- Unagi is the codename for the media playback engine derived from Winamp core technologies as distributed with the AOL software or as an ActiveX download. It powers many AOL media projects (e.g. video@netscape, video@aol, AOL Radio, media playback within AIM).[16]
- The AIMTunes feature included with AIM 6.5 was implemented with components and code from Winamp.[16]
- XMMS is a player for unix-like systems (Linux and Unix) which has a GUI that is extraordinarily similar to the WinAmp 2.0 interface. In fact, loading and usage of unmodified Winamp skins (that comply to the older Winamp 2.0 specification) is possible.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ April 21, 1997 release date extracted from Winamp.exe 0.20a binary. This version still plays some constant-bit-rate MP3s on Windows XP SP2, but can crash when paused/unpaused.
- ^ Developer credits extracted from Winamp 5.5 credits screen.
- ^ "AOL Unveils New Winamp Version with Enhanced Dashboard and Remote Features", AOL LLC. Retrieved on 2008-03-15.
- ^ Version 1.006 release date from help screen, version from executable binary.
- ^ News page Playmedia website. Retrieved 2007-04-01.
- ^ Po Bronson (July 1998). Rebootlegger. Wired.com. Retrieved on 2007-04-07.
- ^ Winamp.com (1998-12-02). New Features listing. Retrieved on 2007-04-07. via archive.org
- ^ DEMO.MP3 15592 bytes, 32 kbit/s, 22 kHz, recorded in "1997" "Exclusively for Nullsoft" by JJ McKay. Voice only, no music stinger.
- ^ Power of 10: The past, present, and future of digital living. Top 10 downloads of the past 10 years. CNET Networks, Inc.. Retrieved on 2006-07-26.
- ^ a b "AOL Who We Are Website.", AOL.COM, 2004-10-19. Retrieved on 2007-04-09. from archive.org.
- ^ Winamp Media Player FAQ.
- ^ Winamp Media Player Version History - Download Winamp Media Player for Free
- ^ Winamp - Official Site
- ^ Winamp 5.5 Changelog
- ^ Winamp.com Plugins
- ^ a b File listings extracted from installation path and binaries.
[edit] External links
- Official Winamp website
- Winamp Heaven! Archive with older versions of the player
- Older versions of Winamp at OldVersion.com
- Winamp 3 for Linux, at BetaNews.net
- Interview with Justin Frankel on the design and the "early years" of Winamp. Digital Tools, April 2008.
