Today I read an article that spoke of the demise of one of my favorite pieces of software. I ever used, WinAMP.
For those who don’t know WinAMP was the software MP3 player in the early days of digital music that allowed skinning, library management and cool visualizations known as AVS. Ultimately what killed the player was mismanagement via an AOL acquisition and the iPod + iTunes combo. But it was nice to know it was still there. In the same way that knowing your childhood house still exists.
That is to say I am truly sorry to see this little nugget of the Web 1.0 go away. This piece of software was the most used program on my computer from 1999-2002. I loved the attitude it had and the fun easter eggs hidden through out it and AVS. My high school Senior Project involved some AVS programming that responded to tracks by The Who; something I did on a much larger scale for my MFA thesis and much better results.
I also sometimes catching myself thinking about WinAMP's cool RTA and graphic EQ built into the player that I would be mesmerized by. I even setup my computer to be a router so I could stream my music collection over SHOUTcast. (Soon I hope to be streaming my song writing sessions in a similar way on Ustream.)
In the end I think this piece of software turned me on to so many different aspects of my future more than anything else outside of drama club did in high school and for that I will be eternally grateful to Justin Frankel and the rest of the WinAMP team.