Ars Technica recently published a 15-year retrospective on the venerable Winamp multimedia player, prompting bouts of nostalgia and revelations of “Huh? That program is still around?” from many readers. I was among them.

I remember first using Winamp in 1997. I remember finding a few of these new files called MP3s online and being able to play the first 20 seconds using the official Fraunhofer Windows player– full playback required the fully licensed version. Then I searched for another player and came up with Winamp. The first version I ever used was v1.05 in the summer of 1997. I remember checking the website often for updates and trying out every single one. I can’t imagine doing that nowadays– programs need to auto-update themselves (which Winamp probably does now; I can’t recall the last time I used the program).

Video Underdog
The last time Winamp came up on my radar was early in 2003 when a new version came with support for a custom, proprietary multimedia audio/video format called Nullsoft Video (NSV). I remember the timeframe because the date is indicated in the earliest revision of my NSV spec document (back when I was maintaining such docs in a series of plaintext files). This was cobbled together from details I and others in the open source multimedia community sorted out from sample files. It was missing quite a few details, though.

Then, Winamp founder Justin Frankel — introduced through a colleague on the xine team — emailed me his official NSV format and told me I was free to incorporate details into my document just as long as it wasn’t obvious that I had the official spec. This put me in an obnoxious position of trying to incorporate details which would have been very difficult to reverse engineer without the official doc. I think I coped with the situation by never really getting around to updating my doc in any meaningful way. Then, one day, the official spec was released to the world anyway, and it is now mirrored here at multimedia.cx.

I don’t think the format ever really caught on in any meaningful way, so not a big deal. (Anytime I say that about a format, I always learn it saw huge adoption is some small but vocal community.)

What’s Wrong With This Picture?
What I really wanted to discuss in this post was the matter of graphical user interfaces and how they have changed in the last 15 years.
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