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Winamp Alpha for Linux 347

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-exactly-is-the-point dept.
nerdguy0 writes "It appears that Winamp isn't just for Windows anymore. Nullsoft has a Linux alpha of Winamp3 out on their site. Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done." Does winamp have better playlist controls then xmms? I've taken to using freeamp just because it has decent playlist controls. I say decent, not good. I want something with a tivo type of intelligence, but everything that claims to do something like this, well, doesn't.
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Winamp Alpha for Linux More

Winamp Alpha for Linux

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  • what about... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 2MuchC0ffeeMan ( 201987 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:25AM (#2426645) Homepage
    all those windows dynamic link library (.dll) plugins?

    • Re:what about... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:06AM (#2426733) Homepage
      Recently there have been a few projects using a subset of wine to support some subset of Win32 for some specific purpose (codecs, games etc). This looks like a possible application for this technology. I wouldn't be surprised if WinAMP itself is being ported with the aid of winelib.

      • Re:what about... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Progoth ( 98669 )
        I wouldn't be surprised if WinAMP itself is being ported with the aid of winelib.

        I wouldn't be surprised either, the linux version of winamp3, especially the UI, reeks of wine (horrible pun intended). While moving the windows around, it has that really slow to update feel that apps running under wine or ported with winelib have.

        I think the 2.4.9 kernel has issues with the sb live, (hmm, maybe time to try out .11 with the preemptible patch?), so I may be wrong about this, but winamp's sound quality seemed to be really bad when I was playing with it. I tried the windows version of winamp3 and it sounded ok, though.

    • Re:what about... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      New plugins will be written using the portable wasabi-api. If the plugin itself is portable (#ifdef madness) there won't be a problem with running it on linux - a simple recompile.

    • Re:what about... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Technician ( 215283 )
      I guess it depends on what your browser reports. I got the following...

      Requirements: This BETA version of Winamp3 requires a Pentium II or higher class processor, 64MB of RAM (128MB recommended), and Windows 98 and higher (Windows 2000/XP Recommended).

      The D/L file is an EXE not an RPM. I guess I'll have to boot back in the other OS to get the RPM. They choose the Win/Lin version depending on what browser you arrive with.

      • Re:what about... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Yokaze ( 70883 )
        Not really, you just have to click on "Grab the Winamp 3 Linux Alpha Preview" link.

        (Writing this from a w2k machine, shame on me :) )
        • Thanks, I was checking everything marked "download" and it wasn't there, It was stuck in a list of other links. I missed it as I was looking for a winamp download, not links to elswhere.

  • Download it! (Score:4, Informative)

    by little_fluffy_clouds ( 441841 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:29AM (#2426649)
    It's 1.4MB in size, and is only available as an rpm.

    http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/Winamp- 0.a1-1.i386.rpm [nullsoft.com]

    • Oh great. There goes about 80% of the distros that aren't Redhat baised. I'd rather use rpm2tgz instead of trying to force it with plain-old rpm itself.

      But then, XMMS works well anyway.
      • Since Red Hat (according both Netcraft and the usual market research firms) is more than fifty percent of all installed Linux systems, with SuSE, Turbolinux, and Caldera (which all use RPM) being the other major players, I'd say your 80% figure is a flaming load of poo.

        Sorry not to burst your bubble. There's a standard and more people would like proprietary vendors to package their apps than otherwise.

        Deal with it.

        • Not just that, but it requires a very bleeding edge Linux system (Glibc 2.2, libfreetype, libstdc++-libc6.2)

          Personally, I feel they should release this as a completely static binary, this way it can be run on any Linux system. Linking to such bleeding edge libraries (We are a Redhat 6.2 shop) is unwise since few people will go through the trouble of upgrading glibc just to try this.

          I'll just stick with xmms.

          • It's an ALPHA! (Score:3, Insightful)

            by hearingaid ( 216439 )
            Personally, I feel they should release this as a completely static binary, this way it can be run on any Linux system.

            Deep breath.

            This is not a release. It's an alpha version, fergawdsakes. You don't release precompiled binaries of alpha versions.

            And yes, it's bleeding-edge: of course. The fact that it was compiled with bleeding-edge libraries is probably a reflection of the libraries Nullsoft have on their Linux boxen.

  • In my option in developing such a system , it may be better to start from scratch instead of using legacy windows code. (except for some of decoding and stuff).

    Using left over windows code , will cause bugs, crashes and slowness.
    • winamp 3 is new, and has been developed with portability in mind, the linux port was planed from the begging.

  • Playlists (Score:1, Redundant)

    by smartin ( 942 )
    I have to agree with the poster on play lists. I'm trying to set up a laptop in my living room to play mp3's and while xmms is a great player, it's ui to load songs and file simply sucks. What I need is something that my wife can deal with.
    • The real trick is to click on the icon representing your playlist. Now, holding the button down DRAG it overtop of the XMMS controls.
      Now, once the arrow is overtop of XMMS, release the mouse button.

      NOTE: For those with unsteady hands, you may require both. One to click and hold the first mouse button down (most left) and the other hand to move the mouse.

      If you don't like the UI, then don't use the UI. A good portion of the players out there use the same playlist format (straight text by the way) and your filemanager works perfectly fine to search through those lists...

      Otherwise, make an HTML page of your playlists and let the browser fire up the player. Lots of ways to approach this.

  • I downloaded it a couple of days ago ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by trexl ( 16434 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:32AM (#2426656) Homepage
    and alpha is a very good way to describe the results thus far. The player plays well, and will handle their streams, however there was no way to add anything but files. It seemed to me that it ran very slowly, and affected the performance of the other apps on the machine(a Dell laptop 850MHZ/256MBRAM) quite a bit. These are alpha kind of things, and by no means did I do a thorough evaluation. I am truly excited about this product coming to Linux as evidenced by my nearly immediate download, although it will be very difficult to get me away from all of my presets in xmms ... but I'll be playing with it.

    • try `wine winamp.exe` (Score:2, Interesting)

      by incuo ( 178238 )

      try

      $ cd
      $ wine winamp.exe

      yep, it works perfectly well here (kernel 2.4.12).

      of course, i installed it in whine-blows first ( haven't tried installing in Linux using WINE ).

      [...]

  • Winamp authors (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GoatPigSheep ( 525460 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:32AM (#2426657) Homepage Journal
    Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done.
    Who's to say the winamp people haven't done hard work either? Just because they have corporate sponsorship and their software is closed-source doesn't mean the software is 'bad'. Besides, if there are already good players available for linux, I doubt people would switch to a closed-source solution that does the exact same thing, unless it offered superior features of some kind. Anyway, this should be considered a good thing, as linux needs as much support as it can get when it comes to multimedia applications, and especially ones from big companies (in this case, AOL)
    • I just know I'm going to get modded down for troll, but please READ this post ALL the way through before you do so. I am not a Win32 zealot, I love Linux and want only the best for it.

      Anyway, this should be considered a good thing, as linux needs as much support as it can get when it comes to multimedia applications, and especially ones from big companies

      There is already a Shoutcast for linux, why would you need client sortware on a server OS? Why do you want people to waste time on this, when developers could better be spending their time competeing with Unix in the enterprise market. That's esentially what this is... a waste of time and resources. The most precious resource the Linux community has is it's developers, shouldn't you be encouraging them to play to their strengths instead of "run multimedia apps and have office so Linux can be just like Windows". I don't want Linux to be just like Windows. If I want Windows I have windows. If I want an affordable server solution I have Linux... and that, in all honesty, is a solution that needs some more solving.

      Please stop crying for Linux to be a desktop OS. Perhaps it will evolve into one after it has swallowed the server market, but now is not the time to spend valuable resources on it.

      • Re:You need multimedia apps in Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:38AM (#2426825) Homepage Journal
        What if the developers' strengths are in developing multimedia applications? Or GUIs? Do you want them to develop MySQL until *you're* ready to use Linux as a desktop? Not me. What about the StarOffice, AbiWord and Ximian developers? Do you want them to abandon their projects so they can work on something you approve of?

        I for one use Linux as my desktop for 70 hours a week rebooting to Windows only when I need to check my email in Lotus Notes (and that's only because I haven't loaded the RPM yet).

        Its not up to you to decide how the rest of us use Linux. It already is a desktop-suitable OS.
    • Uh, keep in mind that "Support from Nullsoft" != "Support from AOL." Of course, Nullsoft is a little part of AOL. Nullsoft has definitely done things that AOL would never do. Even while it's been a part of AOL.

      It reminds me a little of Miramax, although Nullsoft never did anything like this: "We made this movie called 'Kids' but we can't release it because it's NC-17. Oh, what shall we do? Such is the plight of an artist owned by Disney. Oh me, oh my." And then finally selling it for twice what it was worth after hyping it for long enough.
      • yes nullsoft did something very daring while owned by AOL, they released Gnutella. And we all know the kind of 'trouble' those programs have caused for big corporations, like AOL. :)
    • Subject says it all really. Do you want to learn more? [sonique.com]
  • I thought all that xmms was was a port of Winamp to Linux? And that they were based on the same source.
    So, if winamp is getting ported now, can you use regular Winamp for windows plugins? That would be great

  • Not entirely true... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jon Chatow ( 25684 ) <slashdot@jdforrester.org> on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:35AM (#2426669) Homepage
    Winamp Mac edition has been in alpha-stage for quite some time (I've been using it for over 4 months, personally).

    I like Winamp, but, no, the playlist randomisation is purely random - it doesn't randomise within a genre or the like, for example.

    • Well, there seems to be a limit on how long titles can be... ;-)

      I like Winamp, but, no, the playlist randomisation is purely random - it doesn't randomise within a genre or the like, for example

      In the Windows version, if you go to Preferences -> Shuffle, there is something called "Shuffle Morph Rate." It's a horizontal bar, with "Slow" on the left and "Fast" on the right. The text says the following:

      "The shuffle morph rate controls how new songs are picked up when in shuffle mode. In slow morph mode, a slight variation of the same playlist is played each time through, whereas on fast shuffle mode mode major changes happen each time through.

      The default is very close to 'Fast.'"



      But, as you said, there's no way to randomize within genres, outside of creating your own custom-playlists. And that probably won't be too random...at least the second time...

  • Winamp, and as a consequence, xmms, have always seemed clunky in terms of UI to me. Freeamp is better, but in my opinion GQmpeg, even though it is just a frontend to mpg123, has the best interface. It also has some really neat skins (check the PDA one).

    GQmpeg [sourceforge.net]
    GQmpeg Skins [sourceforge.net].

  • Windows Media (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Moderator ( 189749 )
    Assuming you can use WinAmp plugins, you would be able to listen to Windows Media files on Linux. Not only that, but WinAmp has dozens of plugins for video and other audio types. This could be the link that Linux needs to be a usable multimedia system.

  • Won't even run for me.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Eivind ( 15695 ) <eivindorama@gmail.com> on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:44AM (#2426687) Homepage
    Very Alpha I'd say. With my Mdk 8.1 system and Xfree 4.1.0 the player won't even start. They start it with a shellscript that redirects all error-reporting to /dev/null, After I uncomment that and run it again I see that it fails with:

    libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
    libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
    libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
    libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
    X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
    Major opcode of failed request: 72 (X_PutImage)
    Serial number of failed request: 5011
    Current serial number in output stream: 5012

    Ofcourse since it's closed-source I can't even begin to guess what's causing that. Anyone else have any luck running the player under mdk 8.1 ?

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by imipak ( 254310 )
    It appears that Winamp isn't just for Windows anymore.

    I could have sworn I was using Xamp on Linux two years ago. Or did I dream it?

  • playlist controls (Score:4, Informative)

    by seanw ( 45548 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:47AM (#2426698)
    this seems like good news in general, but I also get the feelin a lot of work will be duplicated by the Winamp and XMMS people.

    on the top of the poster's list was playlist controls. I totally agree, and I am shouting at whoever is listening...LOOK at iTunes!! anyone who has ever had the good fortune to use iTunes knows what I'm talking about. it is hands down the most powerful, flexible (and beautiful) music interface I have ever used, and I would pay money for it, without hesitation, should someone port a similar scheme to linux.

    regards,
    sean

  • (Winamp3 == Soundjam)? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:55AM (#2426709)
    I had a buddy who went to work for C&G a little while back. After a few months, he left that job and then went to work for a Newspaper.

    A little bit ago, I heard that Cassidy and Greene was discontinuing Soundjam, which was really quite an incredible (closed source, alas) audio player for Mac. They're now working on iTunes, or something similiar.

    When I played with the Winamp 3 alpha, I couldn't help but think how closely it resembled Soundjam in terms of features and skinnability. About the only feature it was missing that Soundjam had was a built in CDRipper/Encoder. I dunno. Is that in the new beta? NS seems to have replaced that with it's rather overdone playlist database.

    There's you Tivo-like Playlist, Taco.

    At any rate, I found the Winamp Alphas to be quite processor intensive, even on a P3 500 and a Duron 800, especially with the more data-intensive features like the playlist database or the animated skins running.

    An entire database in an audio player? Thanks, but I'm going to err on the side of sleekness. This may be a neat feature, but I never play my MP3's in any other way than drag and drop. I drag and drop a particular track I wanna hear, or drag a whole folder and then hit 'shuffle'. I'm certain others will find it useful, but for me, it's unecessary bloat.
    • An entire database in an audio player? Thanks, but I'm going to err on the side of sleekness. This may be a neat feature, but I never play my MP3's in any other way than drag and drop. I drag and drop a particular track I wanna hear, or drag a whole folder and then hit 'shuffle'. I'm certain others will find it useful, but for me, it's unecessary bloat.

      I have to agree with you here, the thing I like about Winamp 2 is the simplicity of the playlist. I can just point it at an entire directory, and then shuffle through all the files in there. The new Winamp (although all the functionality isn't there yet) does not seem to make that very easy. Never mind, I can still use xmms!
    • Cassidy and Greene was discontinuing Soundjam, which was really quite an incredible (closed source, alas) audio player for Mac. They're now working on iTunes, or something similiar.

      Yes, it's true, SoundJam was discontinued because of iTunes. However, I believe the developers left C&G to go work for Apple, with the blessing of C&G being given due to a cheque from Apple. It is still possible to find SoundJam in odd places (I have a limited version of it on my machine that came with my Rio; I bought my Rio just before iTunes was released & consequently never upgraded; "RioPort SoundJam MP" still comes in handy sometimes, although it's somewhat crippled).

      Although I love iTunes and use it frequently, ironically, my favourite MP3 player is MacAST, due to its superior AppleScript support. while it doesn't do everything I want it to, it does allow me to press the play button in a script. iTunes, weirdly enough, has no AppleScript support at all. also, the one feature that SoundJam had that iTunes doesn't is a large base of available visualization plugins. the default Apple visualization is kinda cool, but I've yet to see anything as neat as G-Force, or in fact any non-Apple visualization plugins at all. this is weird. there is an SDK for iTunes plugins, does anybody use it?

      Anyway, back to the topic. :) SoundJam was - as far as I know - based entirely on original code. MacAST (formerly known as MacAmp) was originally a port of WinAmp. (Amp changes to AST for broadcasting, i.e. shoutcast playback support.) It was done by a company called @soft though, but they did have Access To The Source.

      the post-iTunes postscript: @soft's site is still up. However, they haven't released much; they just put out an encoder a few weeks ago, but most of the site is still living in March 2000. most of the other Apple MP3 players have basically stopped. the only reason people use them now is because they have Old Macs and can't run iTunes, or because they're cranky like me. :)

  • I don't like this trend... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:56AM (#2426710) Homepage
    Complaining on and on about how Company X won't provide Software X for Linux, followed (immediately upon release by Company X of Linux version) of complete deriding of that software (comparing its features to some previously created Linux software) is not good encouragement for other software companies looking into the possibility.

    Not to say software shouldn't be allowed to compete against other similar software so that the best can win, but the immediate, relentless bias towards the earlier-compatible software serves no one.

    • Re:I don't like this trend... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Goonie ( 8651 ) <robert DOT merkel AT benambra DOT org> on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:05AM (#2426729) Homepage
      I don't think anybody has been asking for more Linux MP3 players.

      The office apps to be finished, more work on personal and commercial finance apps, more games - sure. A media player that supports the Sorenson codec - definitely. But more MP3 players? I doubt it somehow.

      Sure, if somebody releases another one all power to them, but when good free alternatives exist it's not something to get too excited about.

      • I have wanted this for a long time. Winamp 3 should be very cool indeed, it should be able to not only play mp3's, ogg, etc, but also have many great visualization plugins (milkdrop anyone?). On top of that it should be able to have a compeletly freeform interface through scripting, and enable people to rip, encode, burn, and even download (through a very possible gnutella plugin maybe?) all in one program. Music squared. Imagine being able to request an album, have the tracks looked up for you, downloaded, .WAVed, burned as a CD and added to playlist. Its just a matter of plugins.
    • Complaining on and on about how Company X won't provide Software X for Linux, followed (immediately upon release by Company X of Linux version) of complete deriding of that software (comparing its features to some previously created Linux software) is not good encouragement for other software companies looking into the possibility.

      The only encouragement for commercial software companies looking into the possibility is the potential to make money from the sale of their software product. That's going to be any software company's burden to overcome if they're going to play in the Linux arena.

      Linux users are naturally going to compare the proprietary software offering with open source alternatives. Some are naturally going to resist using the closed source product because they know what they'll have to give up if they do, namely some freedom.

      Some software overcomes this burden and succeeds. I dare say VMware [vmware.com] is presently in this position, providing the best hardware virtualization software available today. Perhaps Plex86 [plex86.org] may one day shift the balance of power, in the Linux workstation market.

      Most commercial software companies who introduce proprietary software in the Linux marketplace will naturally find a lukewarm response unless the value potential of their offering overcomes the existing culture.

    • Ah, so we shouldn't place closed source software under the same scrutiny as open source software? Rubbish.

      I have a definite bias towards free software, software for which I have the right to view and modify the code. I see no reason to encourage people to produce closed source software for Linux if there is a viable open source alternative, as is the case with Winamp.

      If, however, there is a task for which open source software is not available then closed source software is fine, but if closed source software has trouble competing with Open Source then that is a good thing.

    • The GPL makes for damn difficult competition. It makes it hard to make money on Linux, but if you wait too long someone will duplicate your functionality and you're program will be largely insignificant.

      That's the free market -- or capitalism turned on its head, perhaps. It promises nothing more than a chance, and Winamp had and continues to have its chance. I don't think it's a very good chance, but no one promised Winamp anything like that.

  • Why use Winamp? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by reynaert ( 264437 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:58AM (#2426715)

    Why would I so unique about Winamp that I would want to switch? Last time I used Windows, Winamp was a nice player that did it job without being annoying. (Quite an achievement for Windows software, BTW). But what does Winamp have that popular Linux players, such as XMMS and Freeamp lack?

    • the _huge_ loyal plugin coderbase perhaps?

    • Re:Why use Winamp? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by newbiescum ( 190145 )
      Feature-wise, probably not much now, but it is a brand name that people follow. Nevermind the debate over its closed-source nature, many other businesses (multimedia oriented in this case) will at least look into what the biggest companies do and see what their business plan is like.

      In any case, the better question should be what is there to lose in having another MP3 player? If it eventually does a better job than XMMS, FreeAmp, etc., and it spurs new innovcation, better features in MP3 players, that's what competition is for, right?
    • largly for plugin support, such as g-force, whitecap, geiss ... but these will be hard to implement in linux due to the .dll/winAPI problems.

      One of my favorite features of WinAMP simply doesn't exist in XMMS: try right-clicking on the (back, play, pause, stop, next, open) buttons and you'll find a bunch of features that most people don't know about. All have shortcuts of course; with winamp selected (and playing a song), press SHIFT+v (or click stop while holding shift). the song will fade to a stop in 10 seconds. CTRL+v will stop playing after the song. I've actually taken a sharpy to my keyboard and drawn these controls on the bottom edges of their respective keys; back on Z, play on X, pause on C, stop on V, next on B.
    • XMMS is Winamp 2, for all intents and purposes. It is an almost exact clone. Winamp is the best MP3 player out there for Windows right now (IMHO), it is small and fast and flexible and does its job well, much like XMMS.

      Winamp 3 is the next version of Winamp with better skins and plugin support, and an MP3 database that lets you load in all your music, then select and sort it by artist, genre, album, year, and whatever else is contained in an ID3 tag. It might be good when its finished, but its a long way from being finished right now. So basically, Winamp 3 will be like what XMMS 2 might be like, if such a thing were made.

  • What do you mean by that? How could a digital music player work like Tivo? Your ripped cds don't have commercials, and don't need to be saved so you can listen to them later. What feature of tivo could be applied to music player like winamp to make the controls better?

    • Re:Tivo-like controls? thumbs up and down (Score:4, Insightful)

      by victim ( 30647 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:22AM (#2426774)
      IDNOAT, but I hear Tivos have a "thumbs up" and a "thumbs down" function to allow you to give feedback to it about what you like.

      The interesting part is that half of that user interface is already in an mp3 player, they just need to take advantage of it.

      Consider...

      I have about 4000 tracks in my mp3 library. I leave xmms on shuffle play. There are tracks that I almost always skip. Sometimes it is a weak track on an album, sometimes it has especially inflamatory lyrics and isn't appropriate for the office, sometimes it is an artist that has ticked me off (Randy Newman isn't getting played much lately).

      The player should keep track of which tracks or artists I habitually skip reduce their probability in the play list. If I stop skipping them then it should start reducing their penalty. (Say Randy Newman drops his suit against mp3.com and apologizes, I might stop skipping his tracks.)

      There, no complicated user interface required. Just a player that pays attention and learns a wee bit. For bonus points, add a "i like it" button to the user interface and allow tracks to acquire 'thumbs up' points as well.
      • Tivos have a "thumbs up" and a "thumbs down" function to allow you to give feedback to it about what you like.

        check out Mserv [sourceforge.net].

        It's a client/server app designed for an office setting where many people can hear the music playing from the mp3 music server -- like overhead speakers or with shoutcast. The client runs in Windows and puts a treble clef in the taskbar tray. Users sign into the app and rate songs as needed while they're playing from "hate it" to "love it". Admins can stop/start the player and skip tracks.

        As you could guess, the server keeps track of who's logged in and modifies the playlist on-the-fly so as to avoid playing songs signed-in listeners have said they don't like and focus on songs the signed-in listeners are either neutral about or have said they liked. It's actually a very cool app.

        I was foolish enough to buy the X10 wireless audio extender, and used this app to adjust playlists for when either I, my wife, or both of us are home. If I can figure out how to "sign in" users without having them actually start windows anywhere, I would be able to make Misterhouse [sourceforge.net] take voice commands like, "Alfred, please play some music for Steve", or "Jess", or "a party", or "dinner".

        * Bonus points on why I would call my home automation system "Alfred"
      • There's an XMMS plugin that tracks when you skip over a file, and then when you shuffle a playlist will put those skipped files further down on the playlist.
      • There's a program which does exactly that. It's called Cymbaline. I'm too lazy to find the link, but you can find it on Google.

        It's console-based. It keeps a playlist with a score for every song (which starts out at 35). It adds points to a song's score if you listen to it all the way through, and subtracts them if you skip it. There's also a key which sends the score up to 75.

        I haven't touched XMMS since I downloaded it.

  • Help forums on winamp.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by little_fluffy_clouds ( 441841 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:00AM (#2426717)
    Winamp.com already have a couple of useful support forums for this beta:

    General Discussion [winamp.com], and
    Developer info. [winamp.com]

  • Requirements: This BETA version of Winamp3 requires a Pentium II or higher class processor, 64MB of RAM (128MB recommended), and Windows 98 and higher (Windows 2000/XP Recommended).

    I hope the Linux version has lower requirements. I really don't believe this. Winamp 2 runs on a P166. Where is the time that good software fitted on one 720 disk? (and would run on a 286)

  • XMMS will continue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by larien ( 5608 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:08AM (#2426736) Homepage Journal
    XMMS isn't just a linux MP3 player; there are now plugins for Solaris, AIX, IRIX and other Unixes.

    Perhaps more importantly (for linux users, at least) is that the open source nature make developing plugins easier.

    What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?

    • Re:XMMS will continue (Score:2, Informative)

      by Odds ( 3533 )
      > What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?

      *cough*. The Winamp (1.x/2.x) plugin API is absolutely terrible. Let me give you an example. If you want to retrieve the title of the track, what do you do? Well, you get the window handle for Winamp by calling a few Win32 API functions with "WINAMP.EXE" as the argument. Then, you call the Win32 GetWindowTitle function, then you take the resulting string and strip off the "Winamp - " from the front. No, there's no nice exported "GetSongTitle()" function.

      It gets worse. What do you have to do to get id3 information from the playing mp3 file? Well, you get the HWND again using the old approach. Then you send a WM_USER message to get back the index into the playlist of the file being played. Then you send another WM_USER message to get the filename of the playlist. Then you ask Windows politely for Winamp's full path, and use that to build a full path to the playlist. Then you read the playlist file in, and find the ith entry. Then you use id3lib to retrieve the id3 info, after patching id3lib since Winamp generates non-conforming id3 tags.

      Please, do not bring this Frankenstein to Linux. Won't someone think about the children?

      - David

  • A Playlist patch for XMMS (Score:3, Informative)

    by abelsson ( 21706 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:08AM (#2426738) Homepage
    I wrote a patch to filter the playlist of XMMS a while back - it's pretty simple: You start typing in the playlist and it filters out all the songs that doesnt match the string you wrote. Backspace deletes the last string you typed.

    It's really convenient when you have a 2000 song playlist and just want to listen to a specific album.

    However, it breaks the usual shortcuts (p for play, etc) in the playlist - you need to use the main window for that. There are lots of improvements that could be done - wildcard and substring matching are obvious ones. But it works well enough for me, and makes the XMMS playlist much more useful I like to have a large playlist and just filter out things i don't want to hear right now.

    Anyway.. if anyone's interested it's available here [abelsson.com] (I'm not sure it still patches cleanly, haven't tried in a while.)

    -henrik

  • Lots of people have mentioned how strange they think it is to release Winamp on a platform with a perfectly good clone, but I think this is bizarre for another reason. Surely this is a *really* good example where simply branding an open source product would be perfectly adequate for creating a presence on a platform? Quite clearly if Winamp released a Winamp branded version of XMMS there are a large number of people who would download it simply due to name recognition, and they wouldn't have to worry about their development being open source, since they would have a pretty much guarenteed (unless they really screwed up) following, who would download WinampLinux rather than any other version of XMMS. Are they really so into their closed source scheme (for a free beer program!) that they can't bear to use what's already been developed, and simply improve it to achieve feature parity or whatever?
  • ..seeking in a stream via HTTP "partial content" feature. And Advanced Visualizatoin Studio.

  • I'll be using winamp on lunix (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ukyoCE ( 106879 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:13AM (#2426752) Journal
    One of the biggest reasons I don't use linux all that much is the quality of programs for doing my everyday things. High on that list is listening to mp3s/oggs. I tried both freeamp and xmms, and while I thought they were decent, both seemed to be trying their damndest to copy winamp, and failing. Both had many quirks that annoy the hell out of me. For instance on XMMS you have to hold down the mouse button to navigate the right-click and options menus. The add-files in xmms is extremely clunky too. I can't even read half the names of my songs because of it.

    WINAMP being ported to Linux is a GOOD THING. It is definetly the best media player. Even if it wasn't, with 99% of windows people using Winamp, seeing the software they use ported to linux is a great way to convince them to get off Windows.

    If anyone wants to stick to XMMS or Freeamp because of their religious open source ideals, regardless of player quality, go right ahead. I'll be using winamp as soon as it's out of beta for linux.
    • Would be nice to have a all Linux streaming solution that works with Shoutcast. I have yet to see any stable streaming solutions that are full featured for Linux (anyone have any URLs for me?). I wonder if/how long until they port the Shoutcast DSP to the linux Winamp3 version. The Alpha doesn't startup on my system, Redhat 7.1.

  • Competition is always good. But the good people over at 4Front Technologies have supported Linux and *BSD for a long while. Nullsoft (AOL) could've been in this space a long time ago. They're only expanding their base now that its obvious that Microsoft's WMF will make every other media format a second class citizen on the windows platform. Show a little loyalty.

  • its an alpha of winamp 3 (three)! (Score:4, Informative)

    by porter235 ( 413926 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:23AM (#2426776)
    a couple of things.

    1) it's an alpha of winamp 3, containing a different feature set than the winamp most of you know (and that xmms borrowed the look of)One thing is an extreamly flexible skinning script language, allowing for a custom shaped, custom programmed interface (for the most part, from what I understand).

    2) it's an alpha! bitchin'bout it ain't makin' it better! if you want to use winamp in the future, than write the team with constructive notes. yes it's not open source, but it is free. negative shit like some of these postings is not a good way to encourage people to develop for linux.

  • What about plugins? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sho0tyz ( 147844 )
    The only thing that could make me switch at this point is if all the winamp DLL plugins somehow work in the linux version. Winamp has a lot of nice plugins you won't find for xmms. Somehow I doubt it, but have they even addressed the plugin issue at all?
    • Without plugin support, a Linux version of winamp would be useless to me. All the music on my drive is either ogg or a tracked format (.mod, .xm, .it, .s3m), none of which can be played without plugins. Adititionally, the modplayer plugin for winamp essentially sucks monkey nads, while the much less sucking modplug engine is used in the plugin for XMMS'.

  • all very strange... (Score:5, Funny)

    by archen ( 447353 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @09:31AM (#2426800)
    In all of this I'm starting to wonder where AOL comes in. I don't see Linux or Mac as big markets that they'll make any money in, but perhaps this is another stepping stone to get an AOL package that works for other OS's. If you look at what Netscape Communicator (4x) came with you see:

    Netscape - became Mozilla, is cross platform

    Winamp - being ported to Mac and Linux

    Realplayer - Mac and Win32 versions

    With these 3 components (and Macromedia flash) you could participate in just about everything the web has to offer. I could see these comming together in some sort of cross platform package in the future (with some sort of chat client).

    The whole player thing is getting a bit weird. Xmms started off as X11 amp, which was basically a copy of Winamp, but later grew into a player with it's own flavor. Winamp then gets ported to Linux, which sort of makes for a weird situation. Mac amp was the Macintosh version of Winamp and used to be owned by Nullsoft, before the guys sold off the division to some other company. Now Winamp is available for the Mac again, but now under it's own name. And yes, Mac amp is now also available for windows. (So we have Winamp for Macs, and Macamp for Windows)...

    • Re:all very strange... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ShaunC ( 203807 )
      >In all of this I'm starting to wonder where AOL comes in

      What continues to intrigue me is the fact that AOL (as AOL Time Warner) also owns Warner Records. For the time being, the left hand seems to be operating without regard to the right; but who knows how long this will keep up? The conflict of interest is way too obvious and way too intentional.

      It's sort of like having the Moms Against Guns buy Smith & Wesson... You know there's got to be something shady in the works. I'm curious what Winamp will (d)evolve into over the coming years.

      Shaun
  • So will people use Winamp, or use XMMS out of principle? I like Winamp, but given the choice between an open-source and closed-source program, why should I use the closed-source version?

  • Winamp better than Xmms? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by deragon ( 112986 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @10:05AM (#2426900) Homepage Journal
    I tried Winamp. Its not beta, its alpha.
    I got it playing an mp3, but many features
    do not work/work well.

    However, when it played, it played my mp3 much
    better than xmms. For some reason, my mp3
    has a sort of "skip" sound at some point.
    Under Xmms, it plays loud. Under Winamp and
    mpg123, the "skip" is muted. You can hear
    it, but its much less intrusive.

    BTW, what can cause these "skips" to occur?
    Bad riping?

  • does this mean... (Score:4, Funny)

    by vena ( 318873 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @10:44AM (#2427041)
    Winamp Is Not A Monopoly's Property?

  • Nullsoft & Open Source (Score:4, Informative)

    by antiher0 ( 41258 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @11:11AM (#2427183)
    There seems to be a bit of annoyance in the community pertaining to the closed-source nature of Winamp. I'm not Nullsoft, but I'd wager that if they weren't part of a larger corporation, they would have probably open-sourced Winamp by now. Nullsoft isn't against open-source. Check out [nullsoft.com [nullsoft.com]] to see (the most notable contribution here is their open-source installer software... no more InstallShield!). Don't forget that Gnutella started out as a Nullsoft project. Besides, the past has shown that competition breeds innovation. Has anyone looked at the new media database thingy? It's pretty sharp. Of course, when it all comes down to it, it's Just Another MP3 Player.... *shrug*
  • Aside from the fact that Winamp/Linux is only made available as an RPM, it's so alpha, it barely even works!


    At least on my system (K6-3/333MHz, 192M RAM), XMMS plays everything I throw at it flawlessly, whereas this alpha of Winamp was slow and choppy under the same conditions. Slow and choppy to the point of being utterly unusable. And ugly, but that's something I could forgive from an alpha, if it actually worked.

  • The obvious namechange... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Omerna ( 241397 ) <clbrewer@gmail.com> on Sunday October 14, 2001 @03:08PM (#2428048) Homepage
    The name has to be changed to Linamp.
  • Mpg123, Xmms and the other linux players are all I could ever need to play mp3's in Linux, but just for fun, Wine [winehq.com] was good enough to run Winamp in Linux years ago... Here is a screenshot [dumol.go.ro] to demonstrate it! Taken on Feb. 23, 2000.

    Yeah, it's a shameless plug, but there are some people interested in using Winamp's plugins in Linux. Well, that's the way to do it... Using Wine in Linux, Winamp uses even less cpu time than in Win 9x... Some of the plugins run just fine (see the screenshot [dumol.go.ro] for an example)

  • Winamp Mini-review (Score:3, Informative)

    by Alan ( 347 ) <arcterex@ufiesGI ... minus herbivore> on Sunday October 14, 2001 @05:11PM (#2428431) Homepage
    K, I'm in the middle of organizing a bunch of mp3s, so I downloaded and tried it, and figured I'd throw my observations up here.

    First of all, only an RPM. Sure, alien converted it to .deb easy enough, but still, the option of .deb, .tgz and .rpm would have been nice.

    Adding files is a PITA. You can't select multiple files in the playlist editor, and it doesn't take filenames on the command line like xmms does. There is a neat split in the playlist editor, and that might have let you add directories, but I didn't play with it.

    When you do get files in their playlist, the player takes about 70% of the CPU. Xmms has usage way below that. (my cpu is at 16% now, and I have a lot more than xmms going :)

    Sloooooooooooooooooooow. Moving windows around, opening windows, was slow and laggy. Probably having to do with the cpu usage.

    Fonts are pretty gross. Quite possibly my X setup though. Anyone else have everything come up in a large courier font?

    The automatic music stream retriever was pretty cool

    None of the windows 'docked' togeather like xmms or winamp under windows.

    Stability... while moving windows around and opening and closing the little 'helper' windows it crashed on me.

    All in all pretty dissapointing. Now I am very pleased that they are doing this! I hope their product gets better, addressing the above points, and that xmms has to get their asses moving to make thier product better (competition is good right?) But for me right now winamp doesn't cut it. Totall time of playing with it was a couple of minutes (less than it took for a song to play)before it crashed.

    This is a pretty poor review as I didn't have much clue as to what I was doing, and didn't spend that long on it, but for what I am looking for, no thanks.

  • Be Very Careful What You're Downloading... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @06:31PM (#2428679) Homepage Journal

    At the risk of appearing like a paranoid Montana militiaman, I would point out that AOL announced over a year ago they were going to incorporate copy protection measures [slashdot.org] into WinAmp. I don't know if AOL (Nullsoft's parent company) intends to cripple the Linux version with the same garbage, but I would advise you be vigilant when downloading any version of WinAmp for any platform. You do not want to help proliferate such stuff, even unwittingly.

    Schwab

  • developers plan file (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Simm0 ( 236060 )
    Winamp developers response to slashdot:

    [simm0@mercury ~]$ finger brennan@nullsoft.com
    [nullsoft.com]
    Login: brennan Name: Brennan Underwood
    Directory: /home/brennan Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
    On since Sun Oct 14 18:17 (PDT) on ttyp0, idle 1:05, from 64.105.36.233
    New mail received Sun Oct 14 19:20 2001 (PDT)
    Unread since Sun Oct 14 19:05 2001 (PDT)
    Project:
    Why, none other than architect and head such-and-such for Winamp 3.0.
    Codename Wasabi. Why this fails to get me all the chicks I'll never know.

    Plan:
    14-Oct-2001

    Dear /.

    We ported it to Linux because we *like* Linux. Calm down.

    Sincerely,
    Brennan
    • He updated again...

      Login: brennan Name: Brennan Underwood
      Directory: /home/brennan Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
      Mail last read Sun Oct 14 21:35 2001 (PDT)
      Project: blah blah Winamp3 blah blah
      Plan:
      14-Oct-2001 [Addendum 9:30 pm pst]

      Having read yet more comments, I think you guys are totally missing something:

      Our open-fucking-source SDK. It's 1.5 megabytes of C++ code, zlib-type
      licensed, mostly debugged, pretty portable, and happens to comprise about 90%
      of the *exact same code* we use to build Winamp3 itself.

      Do you see the point now?

      Do I have to fucking spell it out for you?

  • Comment from developer (Score:2, Informative)

    by Simm0 ( 236060 )
    Q: Can we have a Linux specific bug page/Linux specific winamp page so we can help fix and find these issues as they appear. There are quite a lot of loyal Linux fans who are very technically competent who can help out a lot here and will willingly do so.

    A: There will be, I think. But, bear in mind that the Linux version is ported from a fairly old snapshot of the win32 code. So a LOT of the bugs you'll find are already fixed in the main code base. Over the next month or two we're going to try to fold the Linux code back into the main tree.
    --Brennan

  • I can't resist. (Score:3, Informative)

    by trilucid ( 515316 ) <pparadis@havensystems.net> on Sunday October 14, 2001 @10:01PM (#2429198) Homepage Journal

    New test MP3 file for the Linux version:

    "Winamp... it really whips the Linus ass. baaaahhh."

    C'mon, :).

  • hmmm, xmms looks like winamp with a skin (can't remember the name but it looks exactly the same as xmms), the basic functionality is the same, and - at least on my laptop - xmms works better than winamp. even more - xmms was developed for linux and isn't just a half hearted port.
    so - why switch?

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