![]() ![]() Of course, synergy is another word for 2 + 2 = 1, as AOL’s merger a year later with Time-Warner amply demonstrated. AOL got Winamp and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming server and protocol.ĪOL dreamt of synergy, where various properties could leverage each other and turn the company into a media content powerhouse. Nullsoft eventually accepted a buyout from AOL, back when AOL was still a big deal Frankel alone got $60 million in AOL stock. Since this was the dot-com boom, a pile of people wanted to get in on the action. Our screens were much lower-resolution back in the day. It was $10 shareware there were no extra features if you paid, but piles of people sent them $10 cheques anyway, netting them about $100,000 a month just from that. Winamp was a delight to use: it started, it played stuff, obvious buttons did obvious things, it behaved in sensible ways and had sensible defaults. (Though building a several-thousand-track playlist in Winamp took a while.) I spent weeks just rediscovering stuff. I downloaded some stuff off the original MP3.com, but my real digital enlightenment came several months later with the household MP3 server, the thousand-disc CD changer of legend. Some J-Pop thing called “Forces”, I forget who by, that I didn’t think much of (though it was catchy enough I can still remember the chorus). ![]() Winamp’s straightforward usability rapidly made it the player of choice. Frankel saw MacAmp and was inspired to write his own. A few players, including Fraunhofer’s original shareware MP3 encoder and player, were circulating in the college dorm server underground, but there was nothing to organise and play your MP3s with anything like the convenience of a CD. Justin Frankel started Winamp (and the company, Nullsoft) in 1997 at age 18. I asked friends on Facebook earlier and am surprised at how many people I know still swear by it. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. ![]()
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