Eulogy for Winamp

I'm sorry that this post isn't about speakers, but it is about a very important tool I rely on when designing and enjoying my speakers. Pardon my blubbering.

I was a freshman in college when a friend asked me, "Have you heard of this new thing Winamp? I've seen a few kids using it in the dorms, and it's amazing." I downloaded a copy, and tried a few of these new-fangled mp3-thingys, and yes, it was amazing. I'd been there since the early days of compressed digital audio, and everything I ever heard up until then sounded absolutely awful; mp3 was some sort of miracle codec, able to achieve 10:1 compression, and still sound pretty much like the original CD. Unbelievable. Oh yeah, and then there was that Winamp thing--although pretty much the only alternative was a Command-Line-based player. No joke.

From that point on, Winamp was my go-to tool for playing back audio, and remained so for the last 15 years! Allow me to expound on its awesomeness:

• The visualizations: namely Geiss, Milkdrop, Smoke, and Tripex3. Like the light organs of decades past, re-born in a "I can't believe this is real" sort of wayPlayback for obscure file formats. This was extremely useful during my time writing music for video games, as a lot of my music was composed using Impulse Tracker (.IT) and Scream Tracker (.S3M) files, and Winamp allowed me to share my ideas with others quickly.

• The versatility of inputs and outputs. By using the "output to .wav" function, I was able to easily record my tracker music into more practical formats for future listening.

• Double-clicking a file = Enqueue to Winamp. I could be browsing any of my plethora of folders of music and sound files, be they .wav, .mp3, tracker, whatever. If I saw something I wanted to hear, I could double-click it, and it would queue up in Winamp. Players nowadays want to locate all your music and organize it into a library... that just doesn't work for me. My stuff is in folders, and it's everywhere--spread across my PCs, on network drives, and on removable media The meta-tags are often missing, and stuff moves around all the time. And Winamp hummed right along, never complaining about my mess of media, and double-click whims.

• The Graphic Equalizer. I haven't told many people this, but this is my secret weapon when designing speakers. It's actually a very simple 1 band per octave EQ, but that's really all I need when trying to hone in on problem frequencies. Other media players sometimes include this, but it's either way too busy or not dockable.

• It took up very little desktop real-estate. Here is what Winamp looked like on my desktop. Just a narrow strip with just enough features, but not too much. Just enough chrome, but not too much. Form and function in balance.

• It wasn't ugly and confusing! While there were always skins for Winamp, they were never of much use to me, because Winamp actually was aesthetically pleasing enough as it was. It featured good interface design, and an artist's finesse with regards to colors and use of space. Most other media players out there are such a confusing, unintuitive mess that you spend several days tweaking the interface trying to get some sort of flow going, all while trying not to gag at color schemes that look like they were designed by engineers and sci-fi nerds.

Now that the plug has been pulled on Winamp, I know the time has finally come to move on. I realize that there are other media players out there, but I fear that I'll never again find one that did so many things right the way that Winamp did. Rest in Peace, my friend.