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Khali
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Winamp may live on under Microsoft

Fri Dec 20, 2013 5:19 pm

Just came across this today. Seems AOL has some one interested, rumored to be Microsoft, in buying Winamp and Shoutcast. Microsoft, really??? Please say it isn't so. If its true they might as well let Winamp die because I'm sure MS will mess it up to the point of being useless.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/19/winamp-will-never-die/
 
LostCat
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Re: Winamp may live on under Microsoft

Fri Dec 20, 2013 5:24 pm

I'd guess the rumors are just to rile people up. Seems unlikely.
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Re: Winamp may live on under Microsoft

Fri Dec 20, 2013 6:49 pm

I can't imagine what Microsoft would want with it now. About the only way I could see this rumor being true would be if Microsoft believes that AOL might Open Source the Winamp codebase if they can't find a buyer, and wants to prevent that from happening.
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confusedpenguin
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Re: Winamp may live on under Microsoft

Fri Dec 20, 2013 8:54 pm

I never was too fond of aol since the post-dialup era. It has always seemed like a 3rd-tier cheap company to me since the downfall of it's popularity since the dial-up days, but all the time that they have owned WinAmp, it seemed they did a pretty good job of not messing it up. I've always liked winamp, other than I could never get ASIO to work in 64-bit Windows, other than that, the pro version of winamp is my favorite pick for ripping cd's. AAC-HE v2 encoding was a nice feature to see, although I preferred to rip everything to Ogg Vorbis or just plain 320 Kbps constant bitrate MP3 with normal stereo(joint stereo sucks for us audiophiles). I hope Microsoft doesn't buy winamp. It would be better maintained under a GNU license in the Linux community. Microsoft would just butcher it into oblivion, or buy it and toss it away, kind of like Apple did to Lala.
 
Melvar
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Re: Winamp may live on under Microsoft

Fri Dec 20, 2013 9:35 pm

Unless they get some big patents with the property I can't see MS wanting this. I suppose they might buy it just to keep it from going open source and being a bigger competitor, but both sides of that seem unlikely to me.


confusedpenguin wrote:
but all the time that they have owned WinAmp, it seemed they did a pretty good job of not messing it up.


They basically did nothing. I recently went back to using Winamp for audio after many years of not using it, and it hasn't changed at all.

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