WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Opinion Yup, I called that one wrong. Twenty years ago. I bid farewell to WinAmp, the PC music player of choice. It had been made redundant by Windows Media Player getting better, WinAmp's owners getting bored, and the iPod blowing the doors off everything.

As one of the first accessible Windows MP3 players, WinAmp was openly fun and introduced the world to party playlists and, briefly, the idea that early adopter geekery could confer actual social cachet. It was iconic, I sighed, but it was dead. Twenty years on, it's the iPod that's dead. WinAmp lives on - still iconic, but now for all the wrong reasons.

Let's be plain: it deserves its immortality. It still matters, and many still care. WinAmp at its best had two distinct personalities. If you loved tweaking skins and tripping out to psychotechnic visualizers, it was there for you. If you just wanted to be left alone with your music, free to compile playlists and navigate your library the way God intended, it was there for you too. The iPod captured that extreme simplicity, but it has gone leaving nothing simple behind. You cannot recreate the iPod experience on any platform, let alone all platforms.

Yes, there are many options, just none you could give to anyone and say "Here, this will play your music, you will understand how, it won't try to take your money nor sell you anything." Remember how software used to be? How music used to be?

As a mighty blast of trumpets marking the reboot of those days, the release of the WinAmp source code last month should have woken the dead. It was back, it was feisty, it was ready to whip some serious llama ass. Instead, it tailed off in a wet Bronx cheer. All your code seemingly does not belong to us. A combination of what looks like over-enthusiastic opening of the cage doors and under-enthusiastic reading of what licenses were involved led to the repo being pulled long after the beast itself had bolted.

Thus, WinAmp burnished its credentials as the wrong sort of icon. After 2004, instead of resting peacefully in its grave while sad fans sang of former glory, it entered a shadowy demi-life. Perhaps you could dig out a good old version, perhaps you'd end up with some odd thing put out by whoever got their mitts on the rights. Like with so many great brands, as its perceived value diminished its reputation was milked until the animal expired of neglect and overwork.

Yet nothing dies on the internet, not until the last copy has gone from the last online archive - or even the last offline backup, if its owner cares to re-upload. Nintendo will learn this shortly. As part of an aggressive campaign to shut all such things down, Nintendo just squelched Ryujinx, an apparently legal Switch emulator by what may be a carrot/stick combo. It's not the first time nor the last a large company has set itself up as a power over the rebellious hive mind of coder scofflaws. Not the first nor last failure in the making. I said 20 years ago that WinAmp was dead, and I was wrong. I'm saying now that in 20 years' time the Nintendo Switch emulation scene will be lively indeed, and I'm right.

It is similarly unlikely that, having had a month gamboling in the Githubbery shrubbery, WinAmp code or something very much like it will be out sooner rather than later. Codec IP doesn't last long and can be worked around by various methods - any released code, whether or not it uses a fully open source license can be nominally encumbered by format handling. Meanwhile the erroneously included Shoutcast server code is as necessary to modern needs as a Roman sponge on a stick is to 21st century hygiene. In any case, there are no licensing issues that can't be worked around with enough effort on one side, and lack of effort to stop them.

It's just as sad that such an equation can end up with a lot of effort being expended on an outcome much easier to achieve through other means. If you find yourself either wishing for or having some responsibility over the attempted release (albeit under a custom non open source license) of a previously entirely closed product, do not underestimate the degree to which even small licensing issues can trip everything up. There is no alternative, for any remotely complicated proprietary package, to a component-by-component eyeball check of who actually owns what.

Carelessness here, or when documenting a mid-license product, can leave snares for future liberators no matter how well intentioned. That makes releasing code look sillier than it needs to be, and discourages others from doing similar work.

In the end, you can't keep a good llama down, no matter how many scrapes you put it through. The world needs the WinAmp spirit, and ideally in the form of WinAmp itself. No matter what some ill-informed tech hack said two decades ago.

It isn't dead yet, nor will it be while large local MP3 collections remain a source of pride and inspiration. Which they do and are. Let WinAmp's current woes be short lived except as a lesson.

Let's move forward to the privacy and freedom that this great piece of software once stood for, and will again. ®