Some of you may wonder, what happened to WinCue? The web site has not been updated for over four years, and there has been no activity whatsoever on the SourceForge project.

I recently received an e-mail from a user who wanted to report a bug. Here’s my reply:

_Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:16:27 +0200
From: “Anders Sandvig” <anders@wincue.org>
To: …
Subject: Re: WinCue bug

Sorry about the late reply, I don’t check this e-mail address as often as I should.

Thank you for your interest in WinCue. It’s great for me to see that people still use the plug-in, even after all these years. I feel a bit bad about “abandoning” the project, but my time has been limited, and I guess I have lacked the motivation to pick it up again. Personally I’m not very pleased with the direction that Winamp has taken, so I have been looking for other solutions.

I still think the core idea of WinCue is relevant, because even now that every media player on the market has a built-in media library with searching capabilities, I have yet to find a player that is as easy to use as the WinCue library. That is of course just my personal opinion, but I happen to know that there are a few other people out there who think the same.

Anyway, because of this I started thinking about creating a new media player with the WinCue media library sort of integrated. The plan was to make a general media library implementation with searching functionality and add that to an existing player source with a nice GUI on top. I even started implementing the new library for Wincue2 (the source code for the library in the new player and Wincue2 would be the same), but then I sort of stopped working on it due to lack of time.

I haven’t decided if I will continue with the Wincue2 project, but if people (like you) request changes to the existing 1.40 version, I might be able to fix that in much shorter time.

So, I guess my answer to your question is that I don’t really know what will happen in the future, but I will look into the possibility of releasing an updated version of WinCue 1.40.

Anders_

As explained in the e-mail, I feel a bit bad about abandoning the project. Now, this happened for several reasons, the two major ones being lack of time and interest. Up until now I was also under the impression that the previous user base of WinCue was long gone, and had moved on to better software for managing their musical experience. When I finally tok the time to go through my web site statistics, I was a bit shocked to see that www.wincue.org still has thousands of visitors every month. Even in April 2008, WinCue 1.40 had more than thousand downloads. As outdated as I feel the current version is, the numbers make me suspect that there are still people out there who use Winamp and my plug-in.

Again, I must apoligize for staying out of reach for so long. The site forum was hacked years ago, and I never bothered to fix it. I hardly ever checked my wincue.org e-mail, and the few times I did, I rarely took the time to write you back.

So, the question is now, what will be the future of WinCue? Should I pick up the project again, and if I do, should I fix bugs in the old version of rewrite the entire thing from scratch? Is Winamp even worth using these days? As I mention in the e-mail I have also thought about writing a new media player alltogether, but I realize this might be a huge and time-consuming project, so any suggestions are welcome.