The Nullsoft Dev Team has finally kicked out Version 3 of the llama ass-whipping Winamp. Winamp users and music lovers everywhere have been anxiously awaiting the release for months, as the team promises a host of new features and improvements to put Winamp in the same ring as Windows Media Player and deliver a first round knockout. If, which all expect it will, Nullsoft continues its fine tradition of making excellent software, this fight is over before it even starts.
Over at the home of Winamp 3 the excitement rose as 'Winamp 3 has been okayed to launch' surrounded by flashing sex appeared on the site. Users had to wait until midnight last night, but the downloads have been shooting through the roof since its official release. The team also noted this, 'The programmers are now on overdrive to get an acceptable experimental preliminary pre-alpha test demo out to you folks. We're looking for some sort of release in 2-3 weeks, hopefully.'
Our teams are currently working hard on Winamp with the intention to make it a player of today while preserving what makes it so special. In other words, a complete listening experience. Therefore, we can say it: no llama’s will be hurt in the process but it’s going to whip some asses! Want to be THE first informed? Nullsoft's snarky attitude was obvious from the start with its mascot - a llama named Mike who came with his own tagline: 'Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!' (a line inspired by the.
For those of you who are interested, you can view a screenshot of Winamp 3 Alpha 2 here, and download it immediately from FileForum.
Justin Frankel is the programmer of the legendary Winamp. We were interested in the “early days” of the Winamp from the beginning in 1997 until just before the Winamp went bloated with the releases after Winamp 3 in the time after AOL bought Frankel’s Nullsoft.
“Winamp, It really whips the llama’s ass!”
We talked with Justin about the early days of the Winamp, the design, the time and the decisions he made. Yet he also talks about this recent audio-tool REAPER, also in terms of design and community. In other words: things of interest for the designing developer! If you are more interested in the Winamp AOL buyout and the time Justin left… scroll down. There are some related readings linked at the bottom of this interview.
Back on 1997 Justin started his first company “Nullsoft” with the first software called “Winamp“. Winamp went so famous, that AOL bought Nullsoft in 2001 for about 80 Million Dollar. Still Winamp is one of the most popular music applications on Windows PCs. Especially the releases smaller than Version 3 (V2.6 – V2.91) are still often used and I also power it on regularly. This piece of software is one of the most loved and distributed independent music applications in the world, not only in history, but still at present.
Nullsoft also made lots of other software that is also widely in use, or had revolutionary impact, software like the SHOUTcast streaming server, the Nullsoft installer, the first decentralized peer-to-peer network Gnutella, or the high-secure closed peer-to-peer network WASTE.
Winamp. V0.2a. The first release. Memory usage: 1.3 MB.
I started making Winamp, and actually pretty much all software I’ve ever created, because it was software that I wanted to be able to use. Often there is something you want to do on a computer, and no way to do it or at least no way to do it that you will enjoy.. That’s the joy in programming, you can make things to use. Winamp grew out of wanting a good, enjoyable way to listen to mp3s on a computer. It wasn’t the first mp3 player, but the mp3 players around before it were hard for me to want to use.
Likewise, my current project, the digital audio workstation software REAPER, was created because I didn’t particularly like the other available software for recording music. As a programmer and software designer, I think the most important thing for developing applications is that you USE the software you are working on. Oh, and I also think that it’s essential for the people designing the software to have an understanding of how things work and can be built – just in case, not that anybody asked!
Winamp V0.92. Memory usage: 2.6 MB.
I didn’t.. At the time I started Winamp mp3s were very much an underground phenomenon.
Community is such a tremendous resource for software developers. Of course much of this varies depending on the kinds of users – for both Winamp and REAPER we did or do have quite a few advanced users, enabling more of this:
The best way I’ve found to get this to happen seems to be “forums”. Forums seem to really work well for this kind of software. Of course you have to create the right environment – encourage people to act cool, try not to control things too much… Give respect, get respect, that sort of thing.
REAPER audio work station V2.2. Memory usage in idle mode: 23.6 MB. Space required on harddisk: 11MB.
*laughs*. Well, I think everybody uses iTunes now anyway… I think what made Winamp nice was, that I was pretty stingy about what I’d do, which may have been a fault… I mean, you look at a lot of music playback software, and they’re trying to do so much at the expense of the basics. There are about 20 things in iTunes that drive me NUTS, which means I can never really use it, except for putting music on my iPhone once every few months…
Winamp V0.99. Memory usage: 2.6 MB.
Like I said before, I make stuff I want to use.. So who knows? *smiles*
SHOUTcast wasn’t terribly revolutionary, if you ask me… and the most interesting part of it, like the automatic directory listings etc., actually was Tom Pepper’s idea, anyway. I just wanted a way to broadcast episodes from the radio show Loveline online since they didn’t play it where I lived.
The default skin was its identity, though. It changed a little bit here and there! Quite a bit actually if you compare 2.x to 1.0. Had we changed to some other skin, you wouldn’t be able to recognize it. We did change it vastly for the “modern” look for Winamp 5, but I still use the classic mode most of the time myself.
Winamp V3. Memory usage: 9.6 MB.
I’m pretty lazy. Not TOO lazy, but reasonably lazy. For example, after a month or two of dealing with some repetitive task I’ll usually go write a script for it… What I really like is being able to make things easier. It’s also pretty gratifying to have a positive impact on other peoples lives. The final thing I should mention that’s great about software, is that the author can write something once (OK well it’s continuously, but you get the idea), and then people can enjoy the benefits of it indefinitely. It scales infinitely. Which is AWESOME.
Well at the time I came up with the name, it was both a play on Microsoft, and also accurate since the company, and my skills as well, didn’t exist.
I like music a lot, and more and more as life goes on. Music wasn’t a big part of my childhood, until highschool when I started listening to stuff that had a big impact on me. I wouldn’t say that it’s really a driving force, but it’s a part of my life no less…
The Winamp. V2.90 with custom Micromusic skin. Memory usage: 8.6 MB.
Well we try to keep things small, which has numerous benefits besides the obvious “generally less bloat/ram use/disk thrashing”:
Obviously sometimes you have to do things to make things bigger, and that’s OK, but to the extent that you can save size and/or complexity without really compromising functionality, why not?
Really it’s just the attention to these details and the making compromises of with this in mind that gets you there. For example, we still use VC6 because the newer versions of MSVC can’t dynamic link to the classic msvcrt.dll (which is on all systems Win95b+), so you either have to ship a big runtime or static link everything. This sounds hideously boring, but for an application like REAPER with many plug-ins included it’s probably the difference between a 3MB installer and a 5MB installer.
Tom was essential in making Winamp what it was. He designed most of the artwork for the user interface, hosted the website and was responsible for a huge amount of the overall Winamp experience. We also created SHOUTcast together which ended up being huge.
That’s tough… Winamp was probably my first real Windows application, other than little ports of graphics engines and whatnot, so it evolved quite a bit. Perhaps you should ask people who maintain the code now what they’d like to be different!
The very first versions were distributed on IRC in channels such as #mpeg3 on EFNet. Soon after we set up a website and so on… But initially it was just something for me and some friends to play with.
Text and Interview: Martin Wisniowski, April 2008