[BC] Winamp

[Alan Kline]

No more a "buggy whip" than Microsoft Word. I use it every day, and the 
most recent release just came out yesterday. IMHO, it's still the best 
in its field.

The article referenced in Gary's post claims that Winamp lost market 
share to iTunes. The only reason that bloated POS has millions of users 
is that iTunes has been necessary to backup and update iOS devices. 
(Yes, I know it's not mandatory now, but wireless iOS backup still isn't 
practical for those of us without gigabit Internet at home...) iTunes is 
an incredibly poor piece of software and a miserable media player.

I don't see where either Flash or HTML5 has anything to do with Winamp. 
I don't use a web browser to listen to streams or audio files any more 
than I would use Word to surf the web. Different tools for different jobs.

If anything involved qualifies as "buggy whip", it would be AOL--the 
home of more bad business decisions than any other tech company which 
has managed to survive. The fact that AOL survives at all is amazing, 
and it would appear that Winamp's demise has more to do with AOL's 
ineptitude than with any fault in the Winamp product.

The fact that AOL is encouraging users to download the 5.66 release for 
another month suggests that no functionality will be lost, and that the 
product will be usable for the indefinite future. The fact that the 
current release is fully Win8-compatible bodes well for it. There also 
appears to be a movement in the Winamp forums to try and persuade AOL to 
release the source code for continuing development.

A quick look at the Shoutcast website does not reveal the termination 
notice that's on the Winamp site, so perhaps Shoutcast will survive.

ak

On 11/20/2013 9:00 PM, Fred Gleason wrote:
> On Nov 20, 2013, at 21:18 12, Gary Blievernicht <garybliev at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> AOL finally managed to kill it. Winamp to cease 12/20/13
>
> A casualty of Flash and HTML5.  Bye bye to another buggy whip!