Kostya's Boring Codec World
Breaking news from the Slowpoke News Channel™: a source code base for Winamp has been released (just last month). So it’s a good occasion to talk about it and what interesting (for me) things can be found in the third-party libraries.
I think I used the software a bit back in the day when MP3 was still rage (and there were CDs sold proudly featuring MP3 at 256kbps) and I still was using Windows (so around 1998-1999). I even briefly tried K-Jofol player (does anybody remember that?) but I didn’t see much point in that. About at that time I finally switched to Linux as my main OS and started using XMMS and XMMS2 (I actually met one of its developers at FOSDEM once—and saw a llama or two when I visited a zoo but that’s beside the point). Also there was a plugin for XMMS2 that added VQF support (again, nowadays hardly anybody remembers the format but it was an interesting alternative; luckily Vitor Sessak reverse engineered it eventually). But with the time I switched to MPlayer for playing music and nowadays I use my own player with my own decoders for the formats I care about (including MP3).
First fun thing is that the source code release looks like somebody was lazy and thinking something similar to “let’s just drop what we have around and tell not to do much with it—it’ll create some hype for us”.
