Important features

[Piglet]

Disclaimer:
I'm really sorry if I speak out of line, or if I anger anyone with this post, but I'm just being honest and trying to get my opinions/feedback to the devs
These are MY opinoins, so feel free to disagree, but keep it civil


Background:
I started using Winamp around 1998/99 on my Pentium. The computer was connected to my 2 bridged NAD amplifiers which fed my 2 Cerwin Vega! E-315 speakers. This was a modern and great way to play music at home, and it was really great when I threw parties...


My 2 cents:
Now, I'm sorry to say this, but Winamp in it's current state isn't modern. It doesn't offer anything that other apps/services/clients don't offer. The only thing it's got going for it is the great GUI and the plugin-support. So in order to really get this project off the ground, and get a growing user-base, features will need to be added/modernized.

The two most important features for me right now is:
1. Casting/AirPlay
2. Support for both local and online music (Spotify, Google Music, iTunes)

Since the official client for Spotify supports both local files, and Casting/AirPlay, most users won't be bothered to switch to another platform/client. BUT if Casting/AirPlay, and MORE than one online-service was supported, then this would make WACUP the ONLY solution for this.


Imagine this:
Mixing tracks from Google Music, Spotify, your iTunes library, and local files in ONE playlist... Then casting it to a chromecast/apple-tv that is connected to your AV/surrond-reciever Now if you could connect a cell-phone/tablet to WACUP over WiFi as a remote-control(jump-to-file, previous, next, play, pause etc) this would be even better. Casting videos would also be cool, since I don't think there are any media-players on Windows that can cast/airplay local videos to chromecast/apple-tv yet.



The ultimate casting experience:
If the output of any selected vis-plugin could be captured to a video stream on-the-fly, and synced with audio-stream before both are sent to the ChromeCast/Apple-TV/etc. Even cover/album-art and track/title/artist/album/etc., could be overlayed to the video-stream if preferred.


Thanks for reading, and feel free to disregard anything in this post

and as always:
cat flames >/dev/null

Piglet

[Dr.Flay]

This is not the official site or developer, so anything we get here is a bonus above and beyond the call of duty.
 https://getwacup.com/changelog/
Imagine having more than one Dev, and imagine someone getting paid.
Then imagine Google, Spotify and Apple allowing easy ways to access their streams, that don't involve hacky (and legally problematic) ways to get to the streams.
Find a valid legal and free API for any of the above and we have options.
Integrated Soundcloud is a more likely option currently.

BTW. You don't have to imagine Winamp having more than 1 online service. It came equipped with many but many have either disappeared or need a new URL
You can add any other services to the panel yourself, but it works best if the sites give up direct links or playlists so it all plays via the actual player not the browser panel.

[dro]

Piglet: You're airing views that a lot of people have and I tend to agree with most of them as it's a side effect of the changing nature of how people consume media has changed over what is now the 20 years of Winamp.

Now with the key aspect of what you've mentioned, certain aspects just aren't feasible unless there is a way to nicely interact with those services (which for the case of Cast isn't as Google don't provide an official API for Windows programs to use to my knowledge) and Spotify has / had a Windows library but it was deprecated and meant to be killed off / replaced with an alternative this year (but chances of which seem slim). As for iTunes, I don't seem them going for that considering it's history in causing issues for Winamp (though within WACUP now it is possible to make use of iTunes podcast feeds when manually entered which is something but full on iTunes related services is just a no-go from Apple's control of such areas and I'm not sure it's really wanted by the majority of the remaining Winamp users).

So on those counts, it's the services themselves that are the stopping point for getting such features added even if there's a demand. Plus not forgetting that some require licensing which as a single independent developer (as Dr Flay notes) does at times leave me stumped / unable to do unlike could be done when Winamp was owned by AOL (with the new owners making it clear they don't want to pay for any such things either). Sometimes I know it's cool to bash the 14 or so years that Winamp was under AOL but they paid for a hell of a lot of licensing costs to help make for the free Winamp that was expected and not having that now does make it hard to implement the things (legally) that would be most worthwhile.

However there's often a split in views when it comes to Winamp and streaming as some want it and others absolutely don't want that and will only ever play local files. Now it's part of the strength in that both options can be done but sometimes when saying about improving streaming aspects it puts off those who only want local playback (which often means they stay using 2.x instead of a 5.x which would do local playback better than the older version as well but that's another story).

So for WACUP, I've done a few things that act as the basis to make use of more streaming aspects (e.g. youtube, soundcloud, mixcloud, & tunein url playback support) and depending on licensing requirements I do want to add in some more to flesh things out to what is being used as long as it's a) legal and b) not a complete pain to get working (such as the case with spotify seems to be - as I could implement support with the current library but not knowing for sure when it's being dropped, that's potentially a lot of work to see suddenly broken).

I'm definitely taking on board yours and other peoples comments and as long as I can keep going WACUP (I need to get the patreon option setup sooner rather than later as well as hoping that the current Winamp rights holder doesn't have a go at me again) then I hope to do what I can to try to make things stay as relevant as possible for those that want to keep using a desktop media player in this mobile-centric world that we now live in.

-dro