Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

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

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/

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.

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

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?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415

Winamp! My first experience of listening to serious music from computer.

It's a shame some of those other names mentioned didn't wind up fading into obscurity.

Winamp still the best.

[dead]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8