I wish there was a MusicBee version for Linux, just because that’s my fallback if Windows ever goes off the rails, and I think MusicBee might be the only Windows software I use often that isn’t available for Linux. We all enjoy listening to and organizing our music in different ways, and thus are going to have different preferences in software sometimes. There are some minor things I’d do differently, but I think it’s the best on the market for me, personally- totally subjectively speaking, I realize that no one program is going to be the best for everyone. So, I finally tried MusicBee, and it’s great so far. I wound up falling back to Sony’s Media Player for a few years, and then that got discontinued in favor of a new thing that I didn’t like. Many years ago, iTunes became buggy (Including one serious bug that messed with library management for years) and unsuited for my use case.
That assumes they are going to continue to do nothing significant with it if it’s kept all in house, which seems like a good bet at this point. If it happens to drive more people to your core services or rejuvenate the value of your IP, that’s a bonus. You make them happy, while generating some goodwill and positive karma. Someone could then theoretically still put out a version of it with a different name and logo, minus the tie-in to the streaming services, but I’ll bet the branded one would get more downloads, and anything has got to be better than nothing for a company that’s not developing or using the IP anymore (IP that is becoming less and less valuable by the year- that was already a sort of nostalgic thing that was losing the media player race by a considerable percentage even when they bought it.). They could then post the new open-source WinAmp developed by the community on their site with the name and logo, plus a tie in to their streaming services.
A community develops to work on it, maybe with an employee or two from the company that owns it assigned to it, as well as the volunteers doing it from home “for the love of the game” (Having a paid employee or two on it could also make sure the less sexy but necessary code gets written- you know, the stuff that people doing it for “fun” don’t want to work on). Maybe they could open-source the code, and keep the rights to the name, logo, and website. It’s been four or five years since they bought it, the intellectual property isn’t doing them any good as-is. Maybe the company that bought it out could even be persuaded to open-source their existing code at this point.
Whether Winamp 5.8 Final will ever be released is up for debate what is clear is that lots of users seem to be interested in Winamp despite it being more dead than alive for a long time.Īt this point, in the absence of corporate support, if there are any developers out there who are willing to do it, wouldn’t the best decision to support people attached to WinAmp be to do an open-source clone of WinAmp (Minus the name and any copyrighted imagery, and with all new code) that gets updates and moves forward for the remaining WinAmp community? Or at least a skin/add-on for an existing music player, if a full project is too ambitious to be done by the developers who are willing to volunteer in the time they have available to devote to it?
Winamp 5.8 is fully compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 8.1.The beta version comes with quite a few important changes including the following ones: There you find listed the version and the release date of the build (which is October 2016).Ī scan on Virustotal returns three hits out of 62 different engines likely false positives. Select Help > About Winamp to check the version of the player.