> nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now - Justin January 2026
> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...
I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:
The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.
Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.
EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618
EDIT TWO: You can run his Ademo demo on archive.org, type "ademo 1" at the C:\ prompt in the web based DOSbox to run: https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft
What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms.
It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2].
0 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page
1 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_i...
Peer-to-peer (back when P2P was all the rage), encrypted, decentralized private networks.
Group of friends and I used it post-college as a way to share files and chat, and was much better than AIM or other instant messaging at the time.
0 - https://tauri.app/ 1 - https://tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/
Except for rare unique products, the source code might not matter at all. They're after the business, brand, and customers.
Having been in acquired SmallCos a couple times: There are always plans and justifications involving the products being acquired, but most don't survive impact with the acquiring company. People in a BigCo have their little fiefdoms established and everyone resists the sudden appearance of new developers and new code that weren't under their control. To be fair it goes both ways and the SmallCo developers who were previously in charge of everything don't like giving up control of parts of the system to the established teams and procedures in the BigCo.
Sometimes the aquisition doesn't pan out as planned, or they were just after the talent or to snuff out a potential competitor / snag its customers (like Postini), or it was a dumb move in the first place and the numbers finally bore that out. BigCo's don't usually have the same determined, long-term dedication to their acquisitions as the people who the founded them, so you also see premature shedding of ventures that could have a ton of potential over time.
There's many reasons, but in general incompetence, malice and small crumbs problem.
I've done my small share of M&A DD work as an engineer, which was a lot of fun, but the results on my sanity and my outlook was bad.
On one hand, you get to go talk to a core founder of a company and they're entirely open to you picking their brain on "Why this" / "Did it pay off?" on pure eV math they did in their heads.
On the other, you see what happens after your recommendation and it is not within your control to change any of it.
Incompetence is generally "Please rewrite this software by our practices" devops hell or "Let's look for better customers for this product, ignore the old ones" in the ICP land. Google and dodgeball comes to mind.
Malice is more clear cut, where "Let's buy it and shut it down, so that we don't have a threat to our business" - I'm eagerly waiting to see what happens with Groq and Nvidia for example. AWS buying Groq would've been massively different. Classic case in point is Apple buying Fingerworks & shutting it down, but launching the iPhone.
Lastly, there's the small crumbs problem (or as it has been famously said "Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower").
A company can get bought and the product doesn't really add great value to the buyer, beyond getting a few people who really know the space. The small number of people them gets redistributed into a neat set of existing reqs where they just accelerate the existing company's products based on that knowledge or in general fail to surface back to make a significant ripple in the future.
For example, I am wondering what will happen to Promptfoo after OpenAI.
Edit: found it: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/
* Alice will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Bob) played X measures ago
* Bob will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Alice) played X measures ago
So for the measures mentioned above, Alice might conclude that things went very well, and Bob might conclude that things didn't jibe, and even if these were each true objective facts, they could both be correct as they are not discussing the same thing. There can be no retrospective discussion of a shared experience, only of individual experiences.
Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for the actual production.
Unless you're talking about some specific genre here, either music- or game-wise?
I couldn't more highly recommend it.
Nov 12, 20046:04 PM
When America Online purged its tiny Nullsoft branch of all but three employees this week, it lost arguably the most prolific division of the company. Not that you could really blame AOL for the mass layoffs—all of Nullsoft’s projects were spitballs tossed at the honchos upstairs. Before the AOL days, Nullsoft founder Justin Frankel and his team of whiz kids practically invented the MP3 craze when they rolled out their Winamp player and Shoutcast server. When AOL paid millions to buy the then-20-year-old Frankel’s services in 1999, he used his new gig to become what Rolling Stone called “the Net’s No. 1 punk.”
From his AOL office, Frankel posted applications (without his corporate parent’s permission) that made screwing the Recording Industry Association of America easier than ever, including the peer-to-peer program Gnutella and the covert file-sharing system WASTE. Frankel quit at the beginning of this year, and Nullsoft’s shutdown nails the coffin lid shut. There’ll be no more cool pirate tools underwritten by America Online.
What kind of snot-nosed brat takes millions from AOL and then publishes software perfect for ripping off Time Warner’s entire catalog? Frankel, a grunge-dressing slacker from Sedona, Ariz., was a teenage college dropout in 1997 when he wrote Winamp, the first program that made playing MP3s on a PC point-and-click simple. He’s not the world’s greatest programmer, but Frankel has a knack for finding simple and clever solutions to huge engineering problems. While he’s got a prankster’s streak—one of his high-school hacks was a keystroke logger for the teachers’ computers—Frankel didn’t write Winamp so he could steal music. All he wanted was a better way to listen to music on his PC. Apparently, so did several million other people.
As the shareware checks for Winamp piled up, Frankel kept hacking. While big software companies elephant-walked in circles trying to develop online music distribution systems, he created Shoutcast, an MP3 server that streams music over the Net. Winamp and Shoutcast became the default way to play, drawing tens of millions of fans in less than two years. That’s when AOL rewarded Frankel by buying Nullsoft for $100 million in 1999.
Lots of geeks who couldn’t make it through engineering school became multimillionaires in the boom. But Frankel remained an unreconstructed kid in a field of hackers-turned-entrepreneurs. Like Kurt Cobain, he used his money to challenge the people who gave it to him. As AOL was merging with Time Warner in March 2000, Frankel published Gnutella, a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that addressed the fatal flaw in Shawn Fanning’s Napster. Fanning relied on a bank of central servers that would eventually be shut down by record industry lawyers. Gnutella, by contrast, was completely decentralized. The only way to shut it down would be to go after every single user.
When Frankel posted Gnutella on Nullsoft’s site it came with a cheeky, half-apologetic note: “See? AOL can bring you good things!” AOL was not amused; they had him remove the program immediately and disclaimed it as an unauthorized side project. But Gnutella had already been spread around the Net and reverse-engineered by eager programmers who set to work improving Frankel’s gift. Years after Napster’s servers went dark, Gnutella traffic is still growing.
For most people, flipping off the man once would be enough, but Frankel kept at it for years—he even posted a tool that removed the ads from AOL Instant Messenger. Finally, in mid-2003, as the RIAA was preparing lawsuits against random Gnutella users, Frankel concocted a counterstrike: WASTE, a private file-sharing system whose traffic is encrypted from prying eyes and whose networks are invitation only. (The name comes from the underground postal system in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.) If snoops can’t see what WASTE users are sharing and RIAA stoolies can’t hop onto the network to lure copyright violators, there’s no way to gather evidence of copyright infringement short of raiding homes and seizing computers.
Frankel toldRolling Stone that he tried to persuade AOL to release WASTE themselves as a way to revive their fast-falling customer base. When they rebuffed him, he released the program on the fourth anniversary of AOL’s acquisition of Nullsoft—May 28, 2003—as a means of confronting the company. Again, AOL took the program down and disowned it. Not long after spilling his guts to Rolling Stone, Frankel resigned. “For me, coding is a form of self-expression,” he explained in a blog post that he would later remove. “The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave.”
With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar, the old Winamp/Gnutella gang probably won’t get back together for one more hit. Conventional wisdom says Frankel is more likely to join the millionaire has-beens who dot the hills in my San Francisco neighborhood or become a trophy hire at a tech startup, like contemporaries Fanning, Marc Andreessen, and Linus Torvalds.
But I wouldn’t count him out yet. Most dot-com heroes come across as self-promoting one-hit wonders, but Frankel does his best work when you try to shut him up. It’s happening again: In August, federal agents raided five homes and an ISP where they had managed to track down WASTE-like private networks. Having successively hacked his way around the limitations of CDs, MP3s, Napster, and the RIAA, Frankel may next try to find a way to thwart the FBI. As he’s proven over and over, he doesn’t need AOL’s backing to do it.