Willy said:
ncSkeet wrote:
I missed the news... what's the gist of the story?
Here's a link:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/aol_axes_nullsoft/
Here's the gist:
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AOL axes Nullsoft - whither Winamp, Shoutcast?
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Thursday 11th November 2004 09:37 GMT
AOL split itself into four this week, and one of the casualties is the
team that provided its musical credibility. And of course, we don't mean
Spinner.com. After hemorrhaging employees for months, only three
Nullsoft employees are left after the shake-up.
The team, which AOL acquired in 1999 for $100m - two years after the
then 18-year old Justin Frankel - first released his Winamp MP3 player
for Windows. Nullsoft also founded the streaming community Shoutcast,
which has provided an arena for small webcasters for several years,
providing 70m hours of radio a month. Nullsoft can also take the credit
for AOL-disapproved projects such as P2P software Gnutella, which was
released for one day only in source code form and WASTE, a decentralized
encrypted file system named after Thomas Pynchon's secret postal service.
(Beta News' Nate Mook, who broke the news, has a nice recap of
Nullsoft's turbulent relationship with its parent here). Frankel himself
left in January.
Writing on his homepage, departing developer Steve Gedikian concluded,
"At this point, I feel like I no longer have the power to make any
positive impact on Winamp." He speculates that with only a skeleton
staff, further development of Winamp is unlikely. The team rescued a
buggy version 3.0 with version 5.0 recently, adding the ability to play
Windows media files, burn discs, and organizer your porn collection: so
there's really no excuse for Windows users to persist with the bundled
Media Player.
volunteer Mike
Darrah in a posting to the Pho mailing list. Which gives us another
reason to thank Nullsoft's attention to detail, and its wit. Who else
could put a lyric from a much loved 350lb schizophrenic onto 100m PCs?
"Please take a moment of your day to bow your head down in thanks to the
efforts and innovation given to the entire digital music revolution by
the Nullsoft crew through out the years," says Darrah. We will. Politics
always ends in failure, it's said, but the Nullsoft team used the
channels AOL allowed them (and sometimes didn't) to maintain an
important community, and valued quality to the very end - for which
we're grateful. ®
******************************************************************************
Like I mentioned in my original post, when something like this happens I
prefer to go ahead and start adjusting to a replacement program. I
appreciate all the suggestions. I've checked all of them out, and in my
opinion they are all good programs, but for now I've decided on
"Quintessential Player". It's got everything I was looking for, and
more. Most of the other players did as well, but I tried QP first, and
felt no need to explore further. QP has all the features I want, is
relatively small (smaller than Winamp), sounds great, has no mal/adware,
and is so far getting along just fine with my system.
Thanks again for the responses and suggestions.
_______
ncSkeet
