Since it appears this happened 8 years ago, and uh, I can't say that I've seen a single MP3 file since then, perhaps nobody still cares.

If you're building a music library, and you're NOT using some sort of lossless format, I'd love to know why. I know a lot of people with massive libraries, medium libraries, and just shit they like one song at a time and not a one of them isn't using FLAC files for it.

They might transcode into something occasionally, but it's always something like AAC or OPUS, not MP3.

About a year ago I was saying how I wanted Winamp to come back. Then they tried coming back, but making their old player open source. But they totally didn't grasp the concept of open source. The whole thing blew up when people took the source code and......get this......forked it! gasp!

Still to this day, I don't see how Winamp didn't see that coming. Well it turns out, their source code had dependancies that THEY didn't even have authorization to use. So they tried asking everyone to not fork their source code, but also, here it is, please be good boys!

Now some people swear that Winamp are just idiots. Other people swear that they HAD to know that would happen. Like it was deliberate.

Whereas I believe that the most simple explanation more often than not is the right explanation. So if they WERE that dumb, let's take a look at the implications of that. That would mean that there were executives up top who got word that people would like an open source product. These executives would have to have had ZERO understanding of what that meant. At all. And I like to think if they had somebody on their payroll who relayed the message that open source was being requested, that the messenger at the very least, could have informed them of what that means. This implies that NOT AS SINGLE PERSON ON STAFF STOOD UP AND SAID "HEY, WHOA! WHAT ARE WE DOING???"

So that doesn't seem too simple. That seems like a stretch.

Well then the other option is that it WAS deliberate, and that they knew exactly what they were doing. One problem is, I don't know what they were doing. If this was deliberate, what's the end goal here? You get people to fork a source code and find dependencies that you don't have the rights to distribute. Which then in turn opens YOU up to a legal vulnerability if Microsoft decides they want to be assholes. Then, on top of this, you start threatening legal suits against ANYONE who forked your code. I'm not getting the intention here. No matter how this plays out, it already feels like a stretch to say this was intentional.

So, if it wasn't them being blundering idiots, and it wasn't them deliberately doing this.......what the fuck DID happen?

My only takeaway is that I no longer want anything to do with winamp. It really just seems like the Chernobyl of audio players at this point.

yt-dlp uses m4a but sometimes I like my library to be mo3 just for nostalgia :(

I haven’t looked into this so deeply in a while. Thanks for the post! I use VLC, precisely because it plays most anything I throw at it. Cell coverage is spotty, so it’s common to play from files rather than stream. We have a bike ride, doubtless like many cities, social ride meets on the regular. Since Bluetooth, and everyone has a speaker. When I’m riding solo it lets people know I’m coming. Safer that way. I’ve heard people complain they don’t care to hear that cyclists taste in music, which tells me you heard them and weren’t harmed. You’ll hear that music, for a moment, and safely continue on your way. On the group ride everyone plays their own music, call it The Cacophony, if you will. Sometimes the music to the left, to the right match up in interesting ways.