winamp 珍藏

Twenty years ago Winamp was the future. Now it’s a distant memory. What happened?

二十年前，Winamp是未来。 现在是遥远的记忆。 发生了什么？

Winamp (Windows Advanced Multimedia Products) came out on April 21, 1997—back when listening to music on computers was a novel concept, and most people didn’t know what “MP3” meant. Winamp wasn’t the first PC music player, but it did make it easy to create a playlist: drag files over to the playlist window and start listening. This, combined with early file sharing networks like Napster, changed the way people discovered and listened to music. Winamp rode that wave, growing until it had 90 million users, only to become irrelevant.

Winamp(Windows Advanced Multimedia Products)于1997年4月21日问世，当时在计算机上听音乐是一个新颖的概念，大多数人都不知道“ MP3”的含义。 Winamp不是第一个PC音乐播放器，但是它确实使创建播放列表变得容易：将文件拖到播放列表窗口并开始收听。 结合早期的文件共享网络(如Napster)，改变了人们发现和听音乐的方式。 Winamp随波逐流，一直发展到拥有9000万用户，然后变得无关紧要。

Hardly anyone uses Winamp these days. Where did it go? And could you use it today, if you wanted to? Let’s dig in and see what we can find.

这些天几乎没有人使用Winamp。 去哪了 如果您愿意，今天可以使用吗？ 让我们深入研究，看看我们能找到什么。

Winamp发生了什么？ (What Happened to Winamp?)

Winamp was lightweight, customizable, and made listening to music easier than any player that came before it. It quickly became a hit, despite only having a four-person team behind it. Part of the appeal came from the community: a plugin and skin ecosystem allowed designers and developers to customize things in surprising ways, and music nerds loved having that kind of control.

Winamp轻巧，可定制，并且使听音乐比以前的任何播放器都容易。 尽管背后只有一个四人团队，但它很快成为热门。 部分吸引力来自社区：插件和皮肤生态系统允许设计师和开发人员以令人惊讶的方式自定义事物，而音乐书呆子则喜欢拥有这种控制权。

Our story’s ending begins with a buyout, like many other 90s tech stories. In June of 1999, AOL acquired Nullsoft (the company behind Winamp) for $80 million. That’s quite the payout for a four-person team, but AOL never really knew what to do with what they bought. Page views to the Winamp website brought in a big chunk of ad revenue, sure, and thousands of people paid $10 for the Pro version of the software, but that was about it regarding revenue.

就像许多其他90年代的高科技故事一样，我们故事的结局始于买断。 1999年6月，AOL以8000万美元收购了Nullsoft(Winamp背后的公司)。 对于一个四人团队来说，这是相当可观的支出，但是AOL从未真正知道如何处理他们所购买的东西。 可以肯定，Winamp网站的页面浏览量带来了很大的广告收入，成千上万的人为Pro版本的软件支付了10美元，但这与收入有关。

AOL, meanwhile, was still making ridiculous sums of money with its infamously sandboxed dial-up service. That massive revenue stream made it hard to prioritize other projects—even those for which AOL paid millions. Eventually, AOL decided software like Winamp was a promotional opportunity for the dial-up service, and soon installing Winamp meant declining offers for “free” AOL subscriptions.

同时，AOL仍然以其臭名昭著的沙盒拨号服务赚钱。 如此庞大的收入流使得很难确定其他项目的优先级，即使是AOL为其支付了数百万美元的项目。 最终，AOL决定像Winamp这样的软件是拨号服务的促销机会，很快安装Winamp意味着“免费” AOL订阅的报价下降。

This was a major turnoff for Winamp users. Here’s Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica in a very good feature about Winamp’s decline:

对于Winamp用户而言，这是一个主要的问题。 以下是赛勒斯·法里瓦(Cyrus Farivar)， 他为Ars Technica撰写有关Winamp衰落的一个很好的文章：

[Winamp’s] primary users were music fans, geeks, and people who cared about what bitrate their MP3s were encoded at—in other words, the key users of Winamp in the early 2000s were allergic to AOL as a company.

[Winamp]的主要用户是音乐迷，极客，以及关心MP3的比特率编码的人们，换句话说，Winamp在2000年代初期的主要用户对AOL过敏。

Bundling AOL software and offers with Winamp cheapened the software in users’ eyes. Then something new came along.

捆绑AOL软件和Winamp提供的功能使该软件在用户眼中便宜。 然后出现了一些新东西。

In 2001 Apple launched the iPod, and it caught on in a big way. By 2003 iTunes came out for the PC and that was the beginning of the end for Winamp. Everyone who bought an iPod switched to iTunes for listening to music, because iTunes was more-or-less required for loading up an iPod with music—and a lot of people bought iPods.

苹果在2001年推出了iPod，并大获成功。 iTunes于2003年推出了PC版iTunes，那是Winamp终结的开始。 购买iPod的每个人都切换到iTunes收听音乐，因为将音乐加载到iPod或多或少都需要iTunes，而且很多人都购买了iPod。

Even if you didn’t own an iPod, iTunes was attractive. It could identify and rip your CDs in just a couple of clicks. The search was basically instant. And while Winamp’s interface was a bit cluttered, the iTunes interface (at least at the time) was clean and easy to use. Winamp was made up of several windows; iTunes only had one. Winamp offered thousands of fan-created themes and plugins; iTunes wasn’t really customizable at all.

即使您没有iPod，iTunes也很吸引人。 只需单击几下即可识别并翻录您的CD。 搜索基本上是即时的。 尽管Winamp的界面有点混乱，但iTunes界面(至少在当时)是干净且易于使用的。 Winamp由几个窗口组成。 iTunes只有一个。 Winamp提供了数千个由粉丝创建的主题和插件。 iTunes并不是真正可定制的。

A lot of geeks preferred Winamp, but iTunes appealed to a much bigger audience who just wanted to rip a bunch of CDs and listen to them. Winamp tried to fight this by offering unofficial support for transferring music to an iPod, but it wasn’t enough. Apple took the music player market and ran with it (and then spent 15 years turning iTunes into the cluttered mess we all hate today.)

许多极客喜欢Winamp，但iTunes吸引了大批观众，他们只是想翻录一堆CD并听它们。 Winamp试图通过提供将音乐传输到iPod的非官方支持来对此进行反击，但这还不够。 苹果公司占领了音乐播放器市场并进行了竞争(然后花了15年的时间将iTunes变成了我们今天都讨厌的混乱状况)。

Winamp’s userbase declined, and by 2013 AOL decided to shut it down entirely. That plan changed at the last second when Nullsoft was sold to Radionomy. Since then the Winamp website has declared a new version is “coming soon,” but five years later and we’ve seen nothing. There are occasional developer rumblings about new builds, but nothing substantial so far.

Winamp的用户群下降了，到2013年AOL决定完全关闭它。 当Nullsoft被出售给Radionomy时，该计划在最后一秒钟发生了变化。 从那以后， Winamp网站宣布新版本“即将推出”，但是五年之后，我们什么也没看到。 偶尔会有开发者对新版本的喧声 ，但到目前为止，还没有实质性的消息。

您今天可以使用吗？ (Can You Use It Today?)

So you might be wondering: can you install and use Winamp right now? The answer: sort of. The WinAMP website, unchanged for five years, points to a forum thread when you request a download. This thread points to a simplistic website where you’ll find Winamp 5.666 for Windows. This software dates back to 2013, but it works.

因此，您可能想知道：您现在可以安装和使用Winamp吗？ 答案：有点。 当您请求下载时，五年未更改的WinAMP网站指向一个论坛主题 。 该线程指向一个简单的网站 ，在该网站上您将找到Windows的Winamp 5.666。 该软件的日期可以追溯到2013年，但是可以运行。

I installed Winamp on a modern Windows 10 machine and quickly noticed a problem: nothing here is scaled properly on high-resolution displays. You can solve this in any modern skin by adjusting the Scaling settings, like this:

我在现代Windows 10机器上安装了Winamp，并Swift注意到一个问题：在高分辨率显示器上，这里没有适当缩放的东西。 您可以通过调整Scaling设置在任何现代外观中解决此问题，如下所示：

If you’re using a classic skin, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+D to double the size of the main window.

如果您使用的是经典外观，则可以使用键盘快捷键Ctrl + D来放大主窗口的大小。

Winamp once offered a vast directory of skins and plugins, but that died in 2013. Happily, Winamp heritage offers a large collection, so check that out if you want to try out anything you remember from back in the day.

Winamp曾经提供过大量的皮肤和插件目录，但该目录于2013年去世。幸运的是， Winamp Heritage提供了大量的外观和插件，因此请检查一下是否想要尝试回想一下过去的事情。

I don’t think Winamp has aged well. But it does work, and if nothing else is worth firing up for the nostalgia factor. Sure, it’s a little buggy, and the UI looks pixelated on modern displays after you adjust the scaling. But it’s Winamp, and that’s worth something. Give it a spin and remember the early 2000s. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even use it full-time.

我认为Winamp的年龄还不错。 但这确实有效，如果没有其他值得怀旧的因素。 当然，这是个小问题，调整缩放比例后，UI在现代显示器上看起来像是像素化的。 但这是Winamp，这是值得的。 旋转一下，记住2000年代初期。 谁知道？ 也许您甚至会全职使用它。

Photo credit: Al Pavangkanan

照片来源： Al Pavangkanan

翻译自: https://www.howtogeek.com/369298/what-happened-to-winamp-and-can-you-use-it-now/

winamp 珍藏