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Winamp's source code is now open

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First post, by konc

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Quoting the announcement on Facebook:

The Winamp Legacy player source code is now open!
Calling all developers, tinkerers, and retro lovers: this is your chance to shape the future of the iconic Winamp player. Get ready to explore, modify, and build on the classic you know and love.
The source code is available under a contract allowing non-commercial use, ensuring that Winamp remains free and secure.

https://winamp.com/player/legacy
https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp

Reply 1 of 22, by sdz

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The license is pretty restrictive:

5. Restrictions
No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.
Official Distribution: Only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.

But you can at least build it for yourself...

Reply 2 of 22, by schmatzler

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Wow, they used FLOSS code licensed under LGPL and just removed the license to hide it, which is a clear violation. And then they just silently closed the issue after someone noticed it.

https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/issues/240

The repo is currently overrun by trolls, which is somewhat understandable. Whoever made that decision is a scumbag.

Apart from that, those restrictions basically make this a dead project. I don't think many people will contribute to it.

"Windows 98's natural state is locked up"

Reply 3 of 22, by wbahnassi

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Wow didn't know github can have such amounts of spam! But yeah, bad move on the license...

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Reply 4 of 22, by leileilol

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I thought about posting this thread a couple days ago, but i'd rather not promote them (or any repositories of unclear/toxic legality).

Web3amp's repo is a wet fart of a dumpsterfire when everyone's either moved on and made cleaner, cross-platform modern clones sans 'dat nostalgia' brand power (qmmp, audacious). If it had a proper license I'm sure there'd be a good honest fork to just kick off all the post-3.x culture-acquisition hot potato corporate cruft and make some 2.10.0 version to continue off from before AOL null'd nullsoft.

Wonder if anyone still excited of WinAmp's existence and repeating the llama ass refrain has even heard of Wesley Willis. It's more like 'ironic media player' at this point

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long live PCem

Reply 5 of 22, by konc

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sdz wrote on 2024-09-26, 15:40:

The license is pretty restrictive

Yes exactly, not only restrictive but.. questionable too. That's why I carefully didn't write anything about "free", "open source" etc. I don't believe that there will be some worthy continuation of this iconic player from a healthy community producing a modern version everyone will want to get and use.

But at least we can have the code for ourselves now.

Reply 6 of 22, by soggi

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I'm not a programmer, but what I read sounds like "You program for us without getting any payment from us and we make the money by selling (y)our (yours is not free, it's our, read the license!) code in the future!".

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-27, 00:58:

I thought about posting this thread a couple days ago, but i'd rather not promote them (or any repositories of unclear/toxic legality).

maybe the best idea...

kind regards
soggi

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Reply 7 of 22, by doshea

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They also included some files which were from Dolby and not allowed to be redistributed, and removed them after someone raised an issue, but if you know an old commit hash (or find it in an issue which is still available on GitHub) you can still find the content of those files. It seems that whoever released the source doesn't know much about licenses but heard there's a way to get other people to work on your code for free? 😁

Reply 9 of 22, by Vynix

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doshea wrote on 2024-09-28, 05:02:

They also included some files which were from Dolby and not allowed to be redistributed, and removed them after someone raised an issue, but if you know an old commit hash (or find it in an issue which is still available on GitHub) you can still find the content of those files. It seems that whoever released the source doesn't know much about licenses but heard there's a way to get other people to work on your code for free? 😁

Not just that, but they also accidentally leaked the Shoutcast-3 server source (which, I don't even know if it's even meant to be available without a license or something)..

It's as if someone leaked the source code and thrown together a license to make it seem like it's an official release. (hell, the license is apparently illegal in some countries, there's a guy who said that you legally can't waive your own copyrights in Belgium and Poland! I wonder if this holds true for all of EU...)

Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 10 of 22, by gerwin

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leileilol wrote on 2024-09-27, 00:58:

Web3amp's repo is a wet fart of a dumpsterfire when everyone's either moved on and made cleaner, cross-platform modern clones sans 'dat nostalgia' brand power (qmmp, audacious).

Coincidentally I was messing around with Audacious past weekend. Really like these player's with WinAmp interface and skin support.
And indeed the whole cross-platform source code, in their different modules, is just the best way to go.
But I would also like these players to do Midi files, and for some reason they are lacking there, compared to WinAmp.
Current Audacious only has FluidSynth midi. Had to build a custom 'portable' Audacious 3.4.3 Linux-x64 to have an older version, with the interface to ALSA midi, as to use it with Nuked SC-55.
QMMP may have, or had, a Wildmidi module in Linux. Not sure, just that it is mentioned in the change-log. But the Windows QMMP has no midi options at all.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 11 of 22, by theelf

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Amazing!! i still use winamp 2.9 every day, in all my computers, best player ever

Tonight as soon arrive home i will download and try to compile

The only thing is that winamp 2.x is sooo perfect that i cant think anything to improve

Reply 12 of 22, by theelf

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guys, this is AMAZING

https://getwacup.com/

Finally... Geiss on modern x64 windows, im so happy. Normally i use windows xp, but in a laptop i have windows 10 because works stuff, and one thing i miss soo much was winamp+geiss, and new icons looks very nice

Reply 13 of 22, by DracoNihil

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gerwin wrote on 2024-09-30, 16:41:
Coincidentally I was messing around with Audacious past weekend. Really like these player's with WinAmp interface and skin suppo […]
Show full quote

Coincidentally I was messing around with Audacious past weekend. Really like these player's with WinAmp interface and skin support.
And indeed the whole cross-platform source code, in their different modules, is just the best way to go.
But I would also like these players to do Midi files, and for some reason they are lacking there, compared to WinAmp.
Current Audacious only has FluidSynth midi. Had to build a custom 'portable' Audacious 3.4.3 Linux-x64 to have an older version, with the interface to ALSA midi, as to use it with Nuked SC-55.
QMMP may have, or had, a Wildmidi module in Linux. Not sure, just that it is mentioned in the change-log. But the Windows QMMP has no midi options at all.

I don't know why the ALSA interface in the "AMIDI Plugin" was removed and the plugin stuck with only talking to libfluidsynth, there was nothing wrong with having the ALSA interface part of that plugin.

Audacious is a good media player but almost nobody seems to want to maintain plugins for it. I was lucky enough to find vgmstream for Audacious and it builds cleanly. But, there's still a lot of stuff that needs addressing: Proper GSF, 2SF (and that Nitro Composer thing that took over), PSF/PSF2, DSF, and SSF plugins. A better NSF, HES, SPC, KSS (and so on) plugin that's not based on "Game Music Emu", give the libopenmpt plugin a proper menu with every single option configurable rather than this preliminary nonsense and also put the subsongs into the playlist when detected... it's just a lot of stuff. Way too much stuff needs to be done to make it a proper Winamp replacement for Linux.

_
Back on topic here though; this whole thing with Winamp's source code supposedly being "open" just seems like a legal minefield I don't think anybody wants to get involved in.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 14 of 22, by gerwin

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DracoNihil wrote on 2024-10-11, 08:04:

I don't know why the ALSA interface in the "AMIDI Plugin" was removed and the plugin stuck with only talking to libfluidsynth, there was nothing wrong with having the ALSA interface part of that plugin.

Yeah, I even considered filing a request, but it is intentional:
https://audacious-media-player.org/news/27-au … us-3-5-released

The plugin API has been cleaned up and simplified. D-Bus support has been migrated from dbus-glib to the newer GDBus library. libaudgui has been expanded to replace some of the functions that were deprecated in GTK+ 3.10. As a consequence of these changes, a few features from previous releases are no longer supported:

DracoNihil wrote on 2024-10-11, 08:04:

Audacious is a good media player but almost nobody seems to want to maintain plugins for it. I was lucky enough to find vgmstream for Audacious and it builds cleanly. But, there's still a lot of stuff that needs addressing: Proper GSF, 2SF (and that Nitro Composer thing that took over), PSF/PSF2, DSF, and SSF plugins. A better NSF, HES, SPC, KSS (and so on) plugin that's not based on "Game Music Emu", give the libopenmpt plugin a proper menu with every single option configurable rather than this preliminary nonsense and also put the subsongs into the playlist when detected... it's just a lot of stuff. Way too much stuff needs to be done to make it a proper Winamp replacement for Linux.

I suppose it is all very personal, which formats and features are important. When the developers themselves don't really care about something, it tends to get neglected.
Another complication is that Audacious switched between two GTK revisions and then QT5, for user-interface back-end. The plugins, especially with configuration dialog, had to be adapted to these changes. This also prevents the use of the older ALSA Midi plugin with a newer version of the main program, together with the API change mentioned earlier.
Audacious has become quite big in binary size, and slow in loading, when all features/plugins are enabled. This is kinda expected when relying on libraries such as ffmpeg, QT5 etc.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 15 of 22, by leileilol

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Sounds like a potential plan for a compatibility fork (hopefully with a shorter name and not confused with the editing tool). When upstream decides the fate of application capabilities due to maintainance apathy, that's when to act. Almost feels like the WA skin support could be deprecated as a whole for QT too given the "legacy" references.

I do wonder if a WA-like could be started from bashing a bunch of the stb header libraries together to stay independent of big bloated platform-regressive libraries, and compile for gcc 4.7.2...

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long live PCem

Reply 16 of 22, by DracoNihil

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gerwin wrote on 2024-10-11, 16:04:

I suppose it is all very personal, which formats and features are important. When the developers themselves don't really care about something, it tends to get neglected.
Another complication is that Audacious switched between two GTK revisions and then QT5, for user-interface back-end. The plugins, especially with configuration dialog, had to be adapted to these changes.

Oh I'm WELL aware of that conundrum... There's effects plugins that don't have a Qt version of their menu thus do not get built if Audacious is built for Qt instead of GTK. That's still a problem to this day; but that's just the problem with open source software. People lose interest, it stops becoming a "hobby" especially. And there's always the problem of bad blood and arguments between devs.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
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Reply 18 of 22, by Norton Commander

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As mysteriously as it appeared it subsequently disappeared.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/openso … amp_goes_badly/