Had been aiming for something to be publicly released for WACUP in time to acknowledge Winamp’s 25th anniversary & my transition away from being a Winamp user but coding often doesn’t go to plan nor am I really feeling it considering what the new “winamp” now is representing.
The Winamp legacy is definitely a mixed bag from all of the creative people who ended up in jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have happened from their early steps in making skins (& yes they often were awful / awkwardly done) whilst becoming a nostalgic thing or even a joke for many.
There’s also all of the other media players that were influenced by what Winamp & the general mixing of ideas about software at the time including the countless XMMS based forks on linux as well as the actions that led to foobar2000 being created & similarly WACUP being created.
In a world that is now heavily based on streaming & ease of consumption of media its fair to say the Winamp way doesn’t make sense for the majority.
It had it’s time & for those still using it (or its clones) there’s a reason why they still do & that comes down to having choice.
Sadly the legacy of what Winamp now represents has been badly tarnished & the biggest issue from that imho is it destroys all the work & effort that so many of it’s community of users put in to making skins, plug-ins & other related content to make it more than it’s base program.
Whatever may happen & however you may now view Winamp, the old versions will keep going for however long to come, some of the community of Winamp users are still making & updating things & there’s numerous clones (yes including WACUP) to keep that classic Winamp experience alive.
Winamp has brought me a number of highs & lows over my ~23 years of using it, making plug-ins for it & when having gotten to work on it. I however count myself now as one of the many an ex-Winamp user as my needs change & #WACUP now fits those needs which new “winamp” will never.
So with that I’m now off back to my coding hole & acknowledge what one small(ish) piece of software came to represent for so many from both the good & the bad as well as what it ended up spawning in so many numerous ways that will always be much greater than the sum of its parts.
-dro