WinAmp's Open Source Story Is Over
WinAmp's Open Source Story Is Over
Without warning, WinAmp deleted its entire GitHub repository, effectively ending the whole story around open-sourcing the music player code.
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I understand the nostalgia surrounding Winamp—I loved it too. But with old versions still available, maybe it’s time to let it rest and look forward. Rather than holding onto the past, we have an opportunity to create new, modern tools that fit our needs today—and we can make sure they’re free and remain open-source from the start. This whole situation offers a valuable lesson: instead of relying on companies or commercial interests, we can build software as a community, ensuring it stays accessible for everyone. With over 8 billion people on the planet and so many resources available, including AI advancements, we’re more capable than ever of creating tools like Winamp—and beyond. I guess I am not understanding what the problem is here, also, someone in this thread has already pointed out that we still have VLC, which IMO works exceptionally well!
That's the sad part. If there's one thing that the open-source community produces an abundance of, it's definitely text editors, but music players are a close second.
Previously, we've had XMMS as an open-source project that supported WinAmp skins.
And right now, perfectly actively maintained, there is QMMP.I'd bet money that the code quality of QMMP is a lot higher than that of WinAmp. So, if anyone wanted an open-source WinAmp, it was there all along.
QMMP is great. Personally I don't care much for Winamp-style music players (Strawberry Music and Tauon Music Box are my favourites right now) but QMMP opens anything I ask it to, has an alright default skin, and is obviously heavily customizable with afaik Winamp skin compatibility. It was time to leave Winamp over a decade ago.
Strawberry is really great. It's the only music player I use anymore. Only bummer is no DSD support. I get it though. There isn't enough developers to maintain such a thing.
Tauon is my favorite music player. Don't hear about it much. Handles large libraries really well. Pretty sure it will play DSD too. https://github.com/Taiko2k/Tauon or https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.taiko2k.tauonmb
See! I had not heard of QMMP, it looks great, thanks for sharing that :)
Between VLC and butterchurnviz.com if I want a visualizer, I'm pretty set.