> 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
Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield.
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].
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1]
> 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
Publishing Gnutella while being acquired by a greedy media company was such a baller move.
show comments
Fwirt
For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
show comments
tolerance
This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0]
Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives.
The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too.
Anyway.
It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them.
[0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
jweir
Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco
That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).
ruszki
Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.
I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?
show comments
Lapsa
/me also keylogged teacher's computer. shortly though as I quickly learned how shitty behavior that was
mauricio
Looking back at this, has there been a maverick company like Nullsoft since then? It's sad, but AOL may have killed off the last one.
show comments
jsLavaGoat
Really whips the llama's ass.
zkmon
Winamp! My first experience of listening to serious music from computer.
show comments
gonesilent
I was part of this pre-aol and after. Good times! We all still hang out on an IRC server.
kazinator
I use NSIS for the Windows installer of TXR. Does the job.
ethagnawl
It's a shame some of those other names mentioned didn't wind up fading into obscurity.
For those who might not know:
> 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:
https://www.reaper.fm/
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
Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield.
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...
2 - https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1]
> 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
[0] https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3
[1] https://www.askjf.com/
My favorite Nullsoft software that came out the end of this era was WASTE [1].
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
Publishing Gnutella while being acquired by a greedy media company was such a baller move.
For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0]
Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives.
The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too.
Anyway.
It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them.
[0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco
https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523
That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).
Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415
I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?
/me also keylogged teacher's computer. shortly though as I quickly learned how shitty behavior that was
Looking back at this, has there been a maverick company like Nullsoft since then? It's sad, but AOL may have killed off the last one.
Really whips the llama's ass.
Winamp! My first experience of listening to serious music from computer.
I was part of this pre-aol and after. Good times! We all still hang out on an IRC server.
I use NSIS for the Windows installer of TXR. Does the job.
It's a shame some of those other names mentioned didn't wind up fading into obscurity.
Winamp still the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8