![]() ![]() The Mp3 gave way to a musical revolution where suddenly, online music sharing was a craze (driving the industry wild). An Mp3 that isn’t too compressed can be as much as 10x smaller than the original WAV version! To most people though, Mp3 is good enough and the lower sound quality is totally made up for by the file size reduction. To audiophiles, the difference between WAV and Mp3 is night and day. Now if a lion is roaring at he same time, you’ll hardly hear the meaow anyway, so screw it, it doesn’t need to be included. Think of it like this, if a cat is meawing you can hear the sound and that’s great. There is also the more complex psychoacoustics process, where layers of audio that are dominated by others can also be removed. To nail this, Mp3 files mostly take out frequencies that the human ear doesn’t do so well in picking up in the first place. Lossy compression formats such as Mp3 play a fine game of trying to nail the sweet spot where the file is reduced significantly, but the quality of the audio is still acceptable. ![]() Audio transmitted through FM sounds a lot better, but it’s more difficult to broadcast an FM signal to a longer distance compared to AM. As an example, think of the difference in quality between AM and FM radio. The more data you take out, the lower the quality is going to be, but the size will get smaller too. Lossy compression is a process where some of the data in a file is removed in order to reduce the overall file size. Thankfully Mp3 compression came along, where file size was drastically reduced through lossy data compression. In the stone age of computing, it didn’t take many songs to fill your drive to the brim. If and when you managed to download a WAV format track, you’d have to take care not to let your music eat up all the space on your hard drive. WAVE format music files ripped from CD’s were huge and on dial-up modem connections, downloading a WAV format song could take days. There is, sadly, no Linux client.Back in the day, sharing music online was a bitch. If you’re keen on some nostalgia and good old-fashioned llama-whipping, download Winamp 5.666 here. Will Apple allow them to piggy-back off their network somehow? It’s unlikely. There will be some synergy with Shoutcast, an online radio platform also available from Radionomy, but it’s integrating the right access to other clients that will be key. Winamp launches straight into a market dominated by Apple iTunes, Google Play Music, and Spotify. Whether it can compete on this level is the big question. Saboundjian also makes it clear that Winamp 6 is geared towards a “mobile audio” experience, which means it’s not going to be as full-featured as the original app, and it will be cross-platform. If you’ve ever used Pidgin, that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here. Saboundjian’s vision for Winamp 6 is that it acts as an aggregator for multiple services, pulling data in from sources that aren’t related to Winamp itself. And we want people to have it on every device.” I think Winamp is the perfect player to bring that to everybody. “You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built. “There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience,” said Saboundjian. Instead, version 5.8 for the desktop will be the last old-style client available, and all work and manpower will switch over to the new version, Winamp 6, due out next year. In a TechCrunch interview with Radionomy CEO Alexandre Saboundjian, it was revealed that the new version of Winamp won’t be anything like the original or even Winamp 5.666, the currently shipping desktop version. The company’s userbase declined steadily until it was acquired in 2014 by Radionomy – who’s now announced that a brand new version of Winamp will arrive in 2019, fully modernised for modern-day operating systems. Winamp’s popularity reached its peak right around when Windows Vista came onto the scene and, thanks to Microsoft’s meddling with sound APIs, things didn’t sound as good as they did before. In 2001, Winamp had more than 60 million registered users (along with millions more who didn’t have an account), and it was the most extensible, efficient, and skinnable media player of the day. Winamp used to be the most-used media player on the planet as the calendar ticked over to into the new millennium. ![]()
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