Winamp is dead

AOL will withdraw Winamp from public availability in a few weeks. For what music player will people develop plug-ins for NSF, GBS, SPC, VGM, PSF, USF, GSF, 2SF, etc. after that?

XMPlay, of course. In fact, I haven't seen Winamp for a long, long time, while using its plugins all this time in XMPlay.

Last time I asked, I was given the impression that foobar2000 was the favored windows-world media player.

One problem with XMPlay is that only handpicked developers are allowed to develop native input plug-ins, and the Winamp plugin SDK will probably disappear along with Winamp.

In my opinion, an input plug-in should be a separate executable that renders directly to a WAV file on stdout, allowing other applications to open it as a pipe. But then that's just the wishful thinking of my UNIX-philosophy mind.

This sucks, I really love Winamp as a player.
However you'll still be able to get the last version running and get it from unofficial sources.

When I changed my PC recently I just copied Winamp from drive to drive without re-installing it in the system and it works just fine, so it means no registery is needed for making it work, so it's very easy to clone.

Foobar is good too, but I still prefer Winamp.

Ever since I discovered XMplay I never looked at winamp again.
Winamp going away is quite the shock though, totally unexpected !

Audacious is the best audio player out there. It plays FLAC, MP3, all the common crap. Also natively plays NSF, SPC, GBS, and a few other retro formats too. Plus, it has a winamp look and even supports their plugins, AFAIK. Best audio player available, bar none.

Who is going to whip the llama's ass!?

I still use winamp, and will probably continue to do so. They can withdraw it all they want, since I have a bunch of installers saved locally, stretching from the 2.x days and up until today.

There is a lot of problems with audacious. Not that it doesn't show promise though :
- It crashes when you try to play an unknown sound format instead of displaying some kind of error messages
- No plugin for PSF, PSF2, MINIPSF, MINIPSF2
- No plugin for GSF, 2SF, ...
- No plugin for streamed formats (GENH, XA, VGM, ...)

What does this mean for winamp plugins? (which I use to play specific music formats in the games I develop am going to develop.)

XMPlay and Foobar2000 allegedly support Winamp input plug-ins. Or some plug-ins are also available as disk writers, outputting a wave file. Or some plug-ins (such as Game_Music_Emu) are available as source code, which you can wrap in your own disk writer.

I have been using winamp classic for like 15 years. Still has the original skin too.

Development may have stopped on it, but the program still runs. ;P

Winamp did everything I wanted it to do back in 1997. Is a lack of ongoing development on it really a problem?

That depends on how quickly changes to the Windows API leave Winamp behind. For example, programs for Windows 3.1 did everything people wanted them to do in 1994, but they don't run at all under 64-bit Windows without buying a copy of Windows 3.1 and emulating it.

The second problem is that the plug-in SDK will become no longer available. This might make it more difficult for developers of players that take Winamp input plug-ins to maintain their players, especially if the best input plug-in for a particular format is closed-source and its maintainer has become uncontactable.

• GBS, GYM, VGM, NSF, NSFE, SAP, SPC, VGM: Game Music Emu has source, and in fact I've compiled it once.
• SGC: ?
• PSF, PSF2: Highly Experimental appears not to have downloadable source. SexyPSF does though.
• USF: 64th Note has source.
• GSF: Highly Advanced has source.
• 2SF: I can't find a project page for vio2sf anymore.

The Winamp 2 plugin system is still vastly more widely used than any later version, and it was released in 1998. There just hasn't been significant need to improve the plugin API since. SDK availability hasn't ever been an issue; the only thing that's required to make a Winamp 2 plugin is some DLL entry points and the correct data structures.

The current version of Winamp is compiled for all modern versions of windows. It's going to be a very long time before Microsoft's progress will manage to obsolete it.

there will always be a version of winamp available to the public you just need to look in the right place!

For my part I know I will continue to use winamp for a good while still. Until I feel a good reason to switch to another player.

I am agreeing with you, and I don't use Winamp anyways.

Anyways I just use a NES/Famicom emulator to play .NSF (and I hate that you cannot turn off the duration feature of NSFplay; having the time display is useful but I would rather it just play forever in a "dumb" way), VGMPlay to play .VGM, etc.

But what might be of interest to a few people is a Csound plugin for playing .NSF files; this would be used mainly for postprocessing, although it may also be used to build a GUI, to control it with wii remotes, and various other things; Csound can do all of these things! If it is made the commands might be: