Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Winamp as an ActiveX control

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• General

— orudge @ 02/10/2004 5:30 pm

I discovered an interesting thing today when working on someone’s computer (the usual reinstall Windows job): a version of Winamp as an ActiveX control. Doing some research, it appears that this was created by AOL, who wanted a small media player to plug into their software a few years ago. However, they were sued by the company who originally wrote the MP3 decoder which Winamp used, as being incorporated into a piece of software as large as the AOL client wasn’t in the original license agreement or something. That’s the only info I’ve found out about this ActiveX control: I’ve found no word of it otherwise.

Anyway, I’m currently playing around with it in VB, and it’s working very nicely. 🙂 It tends to crash the VB development environment once I’ve used it, but if I build an EXE, it works fine there. Just trying to figure out the setEQ function now, and how I should pass the EQ data… maybe the Winamp SDK will help me. I’ll post a tutorial about this on my site soon.

Fun, eh? 🙂