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  1. From http://www.winamp.com/media-player

    Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release.
    Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.
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  2. VH Wanderer Ai Haibara's Avatar
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    If cameras add ten pounds, why would people want to eat them?
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  3. It saddens me greatly to hear this.

    Not one of the current media players today offers the customization and range of options that Winamp offered even 15 years ago.

    I use Winamp as we speak for everything including watching videos. I've used many players in the past and still use MPC today but nothing has the 5-second forward/backward browsing that I can easily control with the keyboard. They all have the same piece of shit cursor that has like 10 seconds per single pixel. Through directshow it plays everything just like VLC.

    Winamp was THE UNIVERSAL STANDARD for practically everything involving audio and there was always a DLL plug-in for every new format that surfaced. Normally I would remain confident and not be worried about losing such a popularly-acclaimed universal app, but I've been around long enough to see many great, revolutionary apps disappear and get forgotten by the ADD-ridden idiot public.

    Kazaa, the greatest P2P app that swept the entire planet twice as vigorously than Napster had 5 million netizens connected at any random second of the day and this decentralized fist of community power would be impossible to ever shut down. I saw all those pitiful failures at the time attempting to compete such as Ares/Gnutella/BT which had less than 5% of Kazaa's userbase and confidently ignored these non-credible threats. Then Kazaa's own fuckspigot board of directors decide to get greedy and aggressively fought against open-source alternatives like Kazaa Lite that aimed to address the problem of the supernodes ultimately depending on Kazaa's (centralized) server for everybody to be able to connect to each other.

    ************* wouldn't compromise and they succeeded in ******* their own great product up far worse than the RIAA/MPAA ever could have.

    The network slowly but surely died and it's now almost completely forgotten, succeeded by BT where we have to access websites with trackers to "P2P" where they can be shut down at any time by the pigs and where any content can be removed for any reason by the profiteering dipshits who operate the sites.

    Winamp will end the same way unless the directors release the source code and allow the community to continue its legacy.

    But I'm not convinced it will live on. Sigh.
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  4. After that immense praise of a player I feel obligation to say - so, what ?
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  5. Obviously you only read one sentence of my post and assumed the rest is mindless praise. But I'll answer you:

    So people will be forced to use other, crappier, less convenient, less customizable, less awesome players and it's gonna suck ass. That's what.
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  6. Member PuzZLeR's Avatar
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    This is very sad.

    My digital media "childhood" started to develop somewhere in the 90s, and Winamp was a big part of its "growing up". The lightning rod gives me memories every time I look at it. This feels very much like, for example, a bakery / diner / theatre / newletter / etc we all loved as kids is closing its doors.

    Oh, and Winamp was always a great player too. Among the best ever.

    Very sad indeed.
    I hate VHS. I always did.
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    Originally Posted by Mephesto View Post
    Obviously you only read one sentence of my post and assumed the rest is mindless praise. But I'll answer you:
    You kind of lost some of us with that diatribe about Kazaa. Kazaa did not die because those in charge of it made bad decisions. Kazaa died because it offered zero anonymity and too many of its users got successfully sued, including the rather infamous Jammie Thomas. Users abandoned Kazaa because the chance of being sued as a user became too great a risk to take. You consider BT worse, but yet here we are where Kazaa is long dead and BT lives.

    Sorry about Winamp as clearly it was important to you (I haven't used it for years and was a bit shocked to read this thread and see that it wasn't dead years ago) but life goes on. Winamp didn't have enough users to survive in its business model. If anything, I'd say you should be pleased it lasted as long as it did.
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  8. Originally Posted by jman98 View Post
    You kind of lost some of us with that diatribe about Kazaa.
    The point was that it's very easy and very possible for great, worldwide-acclaimed ubiquitous, revolutionary programs to die and be all forgotten about in a matter of a year. Winamp was the standard for audio playing and has been for over a decade. If I was as dumb and naive as I was 10 years ago I would scoff at the idea of Winamp ever dying but I know it will unless they allow the community to take over its development and continue its legacy. We tried this with Kazaa but the sacks of rhino shit in charge of Sharman Networks did aggressive crackdowns on anyone distributing Kazaa Lite.
    We were more likely to get in shit for running a spyware-free superior community alternative to Kazaa than downloading songs or movies for free. How's that for destroying your own userbase far better than the RIAA could?

    Kazaa did not die because those in charge of it made bad decisions. Kazaa died because it offered zero anonymity
    Sharing freely on a decentralized network is not secure but depending on a centralized tracker that keeps track of who is seeding what on every torrent is perfectly secure to you?

    Oh and, on Kazaa if I search for copyrighted songs and start downloading something from someone, I can log their IP with specialized software and prove beyond doubt that he transmitted a copyrighted file.

    On BT, not only do I not have to put any effort to know beyond doubt that someone is both downloading and sharing a copyrighted file. Just opening the torrent and connecting to the tracker will give me a huge list of 100 people currently seeding and downloading WITHOUT ME HAVING TO TRANSMIT ANY PART OF THE FILE TO ANYONE. In fact, just selecting and copying the Peer list will serve me the IP, the % of the copyrighted file he's downloaded, his port, his client. It's a ******* litigator's paradise.

    You call this blatantly 1984-esque, draconian snoopfest ANONYMOUS?

    and too many of its users got successfully sued, including the rather infamous Jammie Thomas. Users abandoned Kazaa because the chance of being sued as a user became too great a risk to take.
    That's a complete fictionalization of the technical reality of the time. People were sued the hell out of in the past, are still sued now and it had no proven deterring effect on filesharing behavior.

    Rather, FastTrack (the network Kazaa and many clients operated on) worked by thousands of supernodes serving thousands of peers each with all the metadata to allow decentralized, anonymous filesharing and the supernodes were frequently delegated.

    That was great but you needed a supernode list to be able to connect to the network. Where was this supernode list hosted? The very centralized Kazaa website.... BAD IDEA. When Kazaa was sued and they shut down in June 2006, anyone who didn't connect to the network for over a week would come back to a list of outdated supernodes in their cache. If at least one of the 100? supernode IPs on their list is still operational like it was last week then they would have no problem connecting again to 5 million other people.

    However, many inevitably stopped being able to connect because they had outdated supernode lists and most of these users weren't the well-informed power users who knew where to go, they were the common peasants who only knew one thing: I can't connect anymore.

    Gradually less and less people were able to connect and the network slowly died. I kept screenshots and logs, in February 2006 there were 3 million users connected at any random time. After June 2006 there were less than 1 million, by February 2007 there were half a million, by February 2008 only 100,000. After that it started being pointless to use it anymore because the content variety dropped and most of the (obscure) stuff I searched for was getting no results while Limewire and BT was.

    I hope it's clear what happened now. The open source community knew well this would happen and Sharman Networks aggressively resisted every possible attempt at an open source client that tried to fix this. They are rotten cocksuckers who have committed a grave crime against the P2P community and they know it.

    You consider BT worse, but yet here we are where Kazaa is long dead and BT lives.
    Megaupload lived a long time too despite the obvious technical flaw of relying on one single centralized source that can be shut down any time and it was... *gasp* shut down. Who will you rely on next when all the popular torrent sites are shut down too? You'll go to another centralized, corporate-controlled website with even more oppressive controls of what you'll be permitted to share and when.

    Sorry about Winamp as clearly it was important to you (I haven't used it for years and was a bit shocked to read this thread and see that it wasn't dead years ago) but life goes on. Winamp didn't have enough users to survive in its business model. If anything, I'd say you should be pleased it lasted as long as it did.
    A business model AOL mismanaged you mean just like Sharman Networks mismanaged their own? I think I'm foolish to explain things at this point.
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