> 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
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?
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...
0 - https://tauri.app/ 1 - https://tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/
These days, I would personally use NSIS for small stuff. Wix installer for anything bigger/more enterprisey. Last I checked SharpDevelop's WYSIWYG editor was pretty decent for Wix dialogs.
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.
> 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
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.
I couldn't more highly recommend it.
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.