History Prehistory

1997

April

21st

WinAMP 0.20a is released, providing a GUI to Tomislav Uzelac's AMP MP3 decoder.

May

WinAMP 0.92 is released, with the beginnings of winamp's classic user interface.

June

7th

Winamp 1 is released.

November

Peter and Mikael Alm develop and release X11Amp, with a GUI inspired by Winamp. Their motivation at the time is to develop the player 'because of the lack of good mp3 players for linux'. 1 Though originally a closed source release, X11Amp eventually switches to an open source licence.

1998

September

18th

Winamp 2 is released, and the player's popularity continues to grow.

1999

March

24th

Winamp 2.10 is released, with the infamous 'Llama' demo.mp3 sample.

June

10th

4Front Technologies decides to sponsor development of X11Amp, and the project is renamed to XMMS.

1999 - 2002

XMMS grows in popularity, on Linux and other UNIX-like platforms, being bundled as the default audio player on Linux distributions such as RedHat.

2002

March

11th

GTK+ 2.0 is released, superceding GTK+ 1, on which XMMS is based. However, the XMMS team has no plans to switch to the new widget toolkit.

Late 2002 - 2003

• As the number of applications using (or switching to) GTK2 grows, users grow dissatisfied with the XMMS team's intertia, regarding GTK2 support. Milosz Derezynski forks XMMS to begin the Beep Media Player project, while Mohammed Sameer does the same and names his effort 'XMMS2'. Sameer's project is eventually abandoned, and he relinquishes the 'XMMS2' name.
• Peter Alm and Tobias Rundström begin conceptualising XMMS2. See History/Ancient.
• Meanwhile, other open source music player projects start growing and gaining popularity, especially those inspired by iTunes on Mac OS X and Windows. These projects include Rhythmbox (which uses GTK2 and is targetted at GNOME users) and amaroK (using Qt and targetted at KDE users).

2003

March

(Approximate) Music Player Daemon (MPD) is developed and released by Warren 'shank' Dukes.

The rest, as they say, is history!