The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The Winamp era (Friends)

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

You won't believe the bizarre secrets Jordan Eldredge found investigating corrupt Winamp skins (#7 will shock you)! You also won't believe how long we can wax nostalgic about the era of Napster, Aladdin & Pearl Jam.

Winamp. Winamp. It really whips the... King of Nostalgia! Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about mainlining Winamp nostalgia. Thanks as always to our partners at Fly.io. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly and they just lowered their prices on NVIDIA L40s GPUs. Check them out at Fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Hey friends, I'm here with Brandon Fu, co-founder and CEO of Paragon.

Paragon lets B2B SaaS companies ship native integrations to production in days with more than 130 pre-built connectors or configure your own custom integrations. Brandon, there's a certain level of pain that a product team or an engineering team has to endure to, let's just call it rolling your own integrations. Help me understand that pain, that angst for those teams. Help me understand that true pain of delayed integrations for a product, not integrating or having to roll your own integration, this seemingly slower route to integrations. I think for context, one of the reasons we started Paragon is that today the average company uses over 130

different software applications. So that means if you're a B2B software company selling into the markets, there's over 130 of your customers' applications that you probably need to connect your tool to. Because customers today expect that any product they buy is gonna work seamlessly with the hundreds of other applications that they're using. Of course, we see this when companies come to us and they say, hey, we have

a backlog of 10 or 20 or 50 integrations that, you know, our sales team has told us we're losing deals because customers are asking us to integrate with all these different apps and we can't deliver on those integrations or maybe our competitors are integrating with these tools. And the problem that that results in for product and engineering teams, of course, is how do we build and maintain these integrations in a way that's scalable, that we can not just satisfy

what customers are asking for us today, but we can maintain those integrations in a way that's scalable for the next 100 customers, the next 100 integrations that we need to build. So for engineering, one of the challenges, obviously the backlog and prioritizing time for certain features or integrations that we need to build. So for engineering, one of the challenges, obviously, the backlog and prioritizing time for certain features or integrations. But then there's this other side where you got to really learn every single API and everything is hand rolled, custom, maintained. And over time, that kind of gets, I got to imagine kind of taxing on teams.

What do you think? So most engineers know that, you know, every API is completely different, can be completely different in terms of how they handle authentication, in terms of how they deal with different record types. And so it becomes this problem for engineering teams to basically have to become experts in other people's APIs, and what could be dozens or hundreds of different APIs. And to build those integrations, we've seen can take as much as three to six months per integration for a developer to write the code to build that integration. And it depends on the use case, of course, and the type of product that you're integrating with. But of course, that becomes a massive challenge at scale when you're

looking at how do we scale our product to support, product to support 10 or 20 or 50 different integrations. So again, Paragon was really designed to solve that problem and to distill the complexities and the nuances and the differences between hundreds of different SaaS apps into a single connecting platform, into a single SDK that your engineers can install in your app, and then easily connect your products to all these different SaaS applications in the market. Okay. Paragon is built for product management. It's built for engineering. It's built for everybody. Ship hundreds of native integrations into your SaaS application in days or build your own custom connector with any API.

Learn more at useparagon.com slash changelog. Again, useparagon.com slash changelog. That's U-S-E-P-A-R-A-G-O-N.com slash changelog. I'm going to steal your words, Jared. How deep does the web amp slash win amp rabbit hole go? That's what we want to know. Jordan, you're back. It's been too long. How are you doing? Doing pretty good.

It's a sunny day here in the Bay Area. Starting out a little early to meet with you all, but glad to be here and doing well. What time is it for you? 8 a.m., I guess, right? I was going to say, are you a night owl or what? Well, you know, 8 a.m. pretty early for software engineers. Sure. True.

Fair enough. Glad you set your alarm for us this morning. Happy to have you. Still, after all these years, still hacking on Winamp, dude. Or WebAmp or just the world of Winamp. You're still into it. Yeah. So it's been my little side project like

started back in 2014 i was looking it up this morning uh trying i started a decade yeah exactly it's crazy to try to sort of replicate winamp well this like sort of classic windows napster era mp3 player in the browser and yeah still 10 years later still sort of fiddling with things either directly on that or building on top of it sort of i don't know this would have been like a little playground for me to explore all kinds of different things yeah i'm sure we'll touch on this but this one i love most about the way you've leveraged this project, I would say, like leverages the proper word because you've explored different, as you've said, sub-projects because of WebAmp slash WinAmp and this fascination, I suppose, with the nostalgia of it, but then uncovering

more and more, like how can we take more and more of this to the browser? How can we take the animated cursors and the different things like that and how that interfaces with WebAssembly and TypeScript and all these different problems, I guess that come about. And then obviously the, the partnership, which I guess you could talk about with the internet archive and how that

played out. Like this has been this sort of interesting project for you. I imagine you'll go down in some version of history as like the web app slash win app person who just like cared enough to take it there. Yeah, it's been like a little, I was, I joke with some friends that it's like, it's been my like backfilled university education in computer science. I didn't go to school for, for software. And, you know, this has sort of been like a, like I said, a little playground where anytime I'm interested in some topic, I'm able to draw a line. So, you know, be that playing with things, you know, just browser APIs when I was just getting started all the way through to

file encoding and decoding and eventually compilers. I think it's just, you know, you have enough sort of context in one area. And then whenever something new comes along, you're like, oh, I can connect that back to this thing. And I have some context there, which either, you know, gives me an excuse to play with something or, or things like that. And it's just been really, really great. And yeah, also led to all kinds of, you know, interesting collaborations and opportunities to do work that actually ended up being kind of impactful in terms of, you know, like I said, the partnership with the Internet Archive, where we're able to preserve Winamp skins, which are like these sort of like

themes that people could create for Winamp and did in vast quantities. And yeah, that's felt like really, you know, like an actual meaningful thing to do to take all this, you know, work that amateur artists and people just getting started in their careers. So many people, you know, who work in design now or even software got their start sort of tinkering with this stuff and to be able to preserve it has felt really cool. So both an education for me and sort of accidentally some useful outcome for others. Well, Winamp has a lot of nostalgia for many of us, especially I would call us age mates, those of us in 30s and 40s who grew up really in the Web 1.0 era

when you were in the Napster era, for sure. Winamp and Napster were, for me at least, two programs that were just two peas in the same pod right like you download with napster and listen to it in winamp and too much free time as a youth and not really a robust internet you know like there wasn't just streams of video content that you could just flip through and watch so you really had to kind of tinker and toy to entertain yourself and so you're listening to that new album that you shared of your own CD and then download it off of Napster from yourself.

Cause it was all legal as we all did. And then you're just tweaking your look. I mean, it was very much like the digital equivalent of pimping out your ride, you know? Although because it's on a desktop in the 90s, like only people are going to see it are those who like come over and sit down next to you.

But still, it was still so, what's the word? I don't know, just fun. Enjoyable. There's a lot for you. It's just so much fun to do that. But I'm amazed at how many there actually are. I mean, the post that caught our eye, or Adam's eye, I think this time,

was the bizarre secrets you found investigating corrupt Winamp skins. And we want to, of course, hear all about that. But one of the things that you talk about is just how many Winamp skins there are. Like, your Winamp museum, your skin museum, has like 100,000 or something like that? How many are there? Yeah, so we sort of started this partnership with the Internet Archive. So I was trying to find different Winamp skins

to test my WebAmp project. And I was like, oh, I've got to find all these different Winamp skins to find all the edge cases. Because I'm basically reverse engineering this file format. And it's not documented. So the examples in the wild are the spec and that led to me collecting a few you know a few thousand and then i was like oh these are falling off offline

you know and you know websites that used to host them are you know no one paying attention to them and so i was like you know we should try to grab up as many as we can and someone put me in contact with jason scott at the internet archive And so we started a collection there. And they actually did like an integration where the Web Amp players actually like loads up on the Internet Archive itself. So you could actually listen to like all their audio files in Web Amp. But then that announcement created this sort of flywheel where people were getting in touch. And they're like, oh, I have, you know, a collection of these. And that's sort of what sparked, you know sparked the Winn-Epskin Museum. And yeah, we just crossed 100,000 unique Winn-Epskins.

Now that's like unique based on their MD5 hash. So there are some like, you know, re-encodings or version 1.1 point, you know, whatever. But yeah, it is like a pretty, I think a much larger number than I would have expected when I first started out on this on this journey that is a surprising number and i wonder if those are all ancient or if it's is it a is there a retro winamp skinning scene or are you just the one guy who's out there still doing stuff i think to the extent that there is it's like three people in the web amp discord you know but well when we did the um the partnership with the internet archive um luigi han who did sort of some of the like the great

sort of classic winamp skins i think most notably there's like a great zelda one that he did and he to sort of celebrate that partnership he made an internet archive winamp skin which sort of like is an ode to the building that they that they inhabit in san francisco and it's really it's really great so there are still sort of like here and there people come around and do one or two but yeah definitely dominated by you know historical artifacts and what makes up an actual skin i you i read it just a zip file but certainly certainly if you were to describe the spec, what would that spec say? So like many file formats, it's really just a zip archive by another name. That's sort of like the wrapper, I guess you could call it.

And then there's a convention of files inside of it, which are actually just like sprite sheets. So they're bitmap files. And each file contains like all the buttons for the main window, but in like a very particular layout. And that's sort of the main bulk of it is these sprite sheet images. But then there's also some like INI files for like what colors should the text be? And there's even a um a region.txt file which says like define some like polygons of which areas of the skin should be transparent so there's yeah like a wide variety of just little different kinds of things that are in there and they all have you know file names that they're expected to be located at and do you know how people figured

that out originally? Like did they reverse engineer the default skin or were there instructions on how to build a skin coming from the Winamp folks? So I think the backstory is that originally they didn't have anything like that. They just, you know, distribute it as a a binary and then people in the community started kind of like game modding they would like unpack the binary find where these image you know assets were modify them and then redistribute it as a new exe and they saw enough people doing this they're like well this is a danger i'm saying that's not safe at all yeah and they're like well you know there's there's this latent interest in doing this which i guess speaks to you know what I would say that's not safe at all. sort of our generation, you know, that were coming of age and having, you know, I think as teenagers,

we have a special relationship to the music that we listen to in our teens. And we, I think our generation had a very special time there, right? That Napster was this completely unprecedented musical transformation. And as we sort of lived through that, our experience of that music and how we listened to it was, you know, really personal. And so it makes sense that people would want to sort of tweak it out and make it their own. And yeah, so that was the original. And then I think there was sort of minimal documentation from the actual Nullsoft Winamp people. And the community just sort of, there was sort of a canonical, I forget what it's called, like tutorial that everyone would sort of reference.

Maybe it was in like the forum or something like that, that one user maintained. Yeah. It's hard to overstate how groundbreaking and culture changing Napster really was for us. Like it was the killer app of the internet for teenagers. It was the reason that I got a computer when I was younger. It was like, I need to listen to music, you know? And like my friends were doing it and the stealing part wasn't even the

point. It was just like, all of a sudden you now had unfettered access, which is what everybody has today. So we take it for granted. Like, of course, if I could pay nine 99 or.99 or whatever it is a

month and be able to listen to every song pretty much in the world i would have just done that instead of the whole napster game because it was also a huge time sink and like failed downloads and you get the file and it doesn't it's like a really low bit rate version and you're like ah then you gotta spend all this time futzing with the id3 tags to make it look nice and like it was a ton of work for us thankfully we had free time but before that i mean access to music was not straightforward yeah i think especially as a teenager right like you're limited in your funds and you know you have to make sort of your really strategic moves as to which album you're gonna get and yeah i think it really did completely you know change how we interact with music and i think

it was both the unfettered access to just like everything and obviously the the price point was attractive of course but i think also there was like a feel of it too like the way as a teenager you feel when you're sort of like pulling one over on the man right and i think you tie that with music and you know i think teenagers like their music to be a little you know edgy and counterculture rebellious and this sort of played into that i feel like yeah for sure but the alternative was terrible i mean you you'd buy an album uh i guess singles were a thing but you'd spend 20 to 30 dollars okay used 9.99 for an album and you would only know one song a lot of the times like you'd hear a song on the radio and of course you can't just hit repeat or anything like that you got to either call in

request it or hope they just play it again. Oh my gosh, Jared. Can you remember actually like calling into a radio station and waiting on hold? Absolutely. Yeah. Gosh, nobody in this world today gets that. And I did it way less. I remember my sister did it more than I did because she was three years older.

And I don't know. I had like a fear of phones. You know, like calling strangers was difficult for me at that age. Yeah. Uh, not people my age, but older people, I don't know. It was like an anxiety is like, uh, I don't know what to say, but calling in a radio station was pretty straightforward. Cause all you do is just request the song you wanted. Still. I didn't do it very often, but my sister sure did it quite a bit and yeah, just hoping they play your, your track, you know, but then you think okay here's a song that i like i'm gonna go acquire that song so i can listen to it and you have to go

spend 20 bucks to buy an album and like nine times out of ten that's the only good track on the whole album i mean that's why we love albums that are good so much because like it's amazing back then to go buy an album and be like holy cow I can listen to all these songs when I really wanted the one I knew. And those are why I think our generation also has a album fetish, so to speak. We care about albums as an artifact more than songs. Not more than songs, but in addition to the songs individually. Whereas nowadays, a lot of new artists don't even release albums they just release singles over and over again and you know whatever works but for us and they're

called drops now oh yeah right not releases they're drops is that what they call it i believe so i believe so and like all of that is downstream of the snapster right like yeah that now the unit of distribution is the file and not right uh you know, the packaged CD. And we sort of all that, it was sort of at some point inevitable the moment Napster, you know, came on the scene. Yeah, there was no going back. like that you can know of like this is end to end i can push play on track one and stop at track 10 or 11 which is usually the number of tracks in an album maybe if a few more maybe it's eight somewhere between 8 and 12 that you can literally i mean i have one of mine so i'm curious if y'all have one of mine that's my favorite movie i can't do just one if you gave me a genre or like a an activity like rock classic rock see i can't even. That's, that's too big of a genre.

But if you said like, okay, you're going to go lift weights, then I would probably say ACDC back in black. Okay. Cause it's like the perfect kind of meathead weightlifting rock jock anthem like that's a perfect one front to back in my opinion but there's so many that it's very difficult to say but adam you have one in mind so please do i'm curious about jordan i'm gonna put you on the spot jordan i don't mind telling mine but i think it's the best ever so well i guess in keeping with the you know the the nap conversation, I feel like my musical interests were always a little,

not the jock anthem, but the sort of off-the-beaten-track things. Really? And I think probably my favorite artist is, I don't know how well-known he is. He has a cult following, but Tom Waits and his album Alice. Your hair is like meadow grass On the tide And his album is Alice. And actually my main love of file sharing was related to opera. So I studied music in college and I was doing classical singing in high school.

And so I was collecting all these opera recordings. So I think I have, if you were to ask my very favorite recordings on disc, it would probably be an opera recording. Wasn't Tom Waits the guy that Heath Ledger was channeling for his version of the Joker? I've never heard that before, but I can absolutely tell you that that's likely true having seen the movie. Really? Yeah, I think that's the case. I think he came out and actually said that he was inspired by Tom Waits and the way Tom Waits talks and sounds, which is very distinct and very interesting.

Just way of communicating with people. And yeah, once you hear that, then you watch the Joker, Heath Ledger, and you're like, oh, okay, makes sense. But Adam, you are going to tell us the best album of all times. I'm going to pause for one second and go one layer deeper on what you just said there. So, quick cursory search lends me on, of course, the awesome website Reddit.

And if this is accurate, it's two years ago. It says, a 1979 Tom Waits interview that some believe inspired Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning portrayal of the Joker. And this is showing it. So, I'll put the link in the show notes, of course. And it says, while Heath Ledger never confirmed this, the similarity between the vocals and mannerisms is uncanny. I've seen that video. I haven't watched it.

I'm just kind of watching it in silent mode. So here in the live version of the show, while it's being recorded, I can't confirm this, but I'm going to... Cue it up for yourself later. I've seen that video and it is uncanny. I travel extensively in Europe as well. I don't do half bad. They tell me you have a new market

now in Ireland. Is that true? I've performed in Dublin and done very well there as well. You look like a leprechaun. You should do well there. Well, I I'm also big in Philadelphia. Excuse me. I feel like I'm at my grandmother's.

Look, listen. I know why you choose to have your little group therapy sessions in broad daylight i know why you're afraid to go out at night the batman it's what convinced me i thought maybe he actually came out and said it but yes and he may have because this is not like i said it was like it's reddit you know it's one link i just click one link and so there's at least some version of of confirmation there okay so my favorite album of all time literally of all time i can put this in and it puts me in the mode led zeppelin album number four zoso hey mama said the way you move gonna make you sweat gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove. Black Dog, Rock and Roll, The Battle of Evermore, Stairway to Heaven.

I mean, it's a forbidden track. You can't play that on guitar in Guitar Center. They'll throw you out. Right. Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks, Going to California, and With a Levee Breaks. Eight tracks. Amazingness. That's their best album ever.

Sgt. Pepper's anybody? Come on. I mean, I'm a Beatle fan. That's too obvious for Jordan. I'd probably go like Revolver. Oh, really? I can't listen all the way through to Revolver myself, but there's a lot of variety in the Beatles. That's why everybody likes them.

Something for everybody. Side note, I did hear that Jimmy Page destroyed his voice because of his voice. There you go. What's that mean? He sang. Jordan, you probably know this because you probably

pay attention as a singer, but I've heard that Jimmy Page has this kind of screechy voice. He screams. He does some quite loud singing. Yeah. And I think he destroyed his voice over the years. And as the band got older,

they kind of had to stop touring because his voice just wasn't the same that people showed up for. Yeah, that's pretty rough. I think the voice is a delicate instrument. And if you got a rough touring schedule and you're doing that sort of ambitious, you know maybe not safe as a you know classical musician you spend a lot of time figuring out how do you project over an orchestra without hurting yourself and you know i think uh

you know you blow up as a rock musician i don't think you have any of that any of that training or also any of that patience or you know willing to compromise on your sound you got to make the sound you want to make how to make jagger do it because man the stones toured for so long you know how does how does one man's voice survive that level of use i don't know a lot of uh tea with lemon and that's what i just think a little gray and maybe i would say you know a voice coach can help you utilize your voice. Sure. Jordan, you know this. I'm sure you've had voice coaches or have been one yourself.

The better you can understand the properties of your voice and how to protect them while utilizing them, I think, is what some folks just don't get. But I can't imagine. Why would Jimmy Page not have that? He's a rock star. A lot of singers, I think it's, you know, it may be that part of your sound is, you know, the production mechanism that isn't healthy. Right. Untangling, how do you compromise, you know, is it going to compromise your sound to make it healthy? And finding that, like, balance between what am I willing to compromise on in terms of how I want to sound and how I want to be longevity or can I, you know, do I have the sort of control over my physiology to do it? And I was loosely saying Sia because she's well known for like those breaks in her voice. And those breaks is where obviously it's called breaks for a reason.

I'm sure it's probably not good because there's something happening in your vocal cords that is not good. But it's also part of her signature sound as a singer. That's why I like her. I like her because she can really hit those notes while also breaking her voice. And it has a unique Sia only sound. Yes, I am a Sia fan. I already knew that about you. I got no problem with it, man. No room to talk because being a Tom Waits fan,

if anyone hasn't heard him, his voice is like, if you look up quotes online of describing Tom Waits' voice, there's a number of incredibly colorful descriptions, but it's like whiskey and broken glass or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like the most purely enjoyable sound that he makes, but it's so, like I said earlier,

it's just an interesting sound, you know? What is his most popular song? Ooh, good question. I gotta admit, I've never, to my knowledge, heard of the name. I may have heard of the music and heard the music, but I just don't know the name.

Down in the hole. I think the original, if you watch the wire, like the intro music was a song of his called down in the hole. And I think they did like each season, they did a different artist covering it, but I think the first season was him. So my one might be more recognizable to folks.

Okay. But yeah, it's this very sort of like louis armstrong-esque kind of raspiness but it has a lot of character probably not great for his voice though yeah well i'm listening to his most popular track and it doesn't ring a bell i'm gonna have to go back in time and listen to some of this because i was just never exposed to tom waits unfortunately yeah what a sadness man He sounds pretty cool, though. Go ahead, Jared. You got a layer deeper.

Go ahead. Well, I was just speaking to Jordan's interest in more obscure art. I think that was one of Napster's strengths, that when Napster went away and things that came after, specifically BitTorrent, for instance, we talk about the nature of protocols and how they inform certain things. BitTorrent is a protocol that was better the more people had the files. Whereas Napster was a situation where you could find really obscure, different, live stuff on Napster. And then I found later on, on BitTorrent for instance,

okay, if you have one person seating, you could still do it, but there was kind of this crowd effect on BitTorrent where everybody rushes to a thing, which is really great for big crowds because the more people are actually interested, the easier it is for everybody. The way it distributes out the downloads, you can grab this part from this person, this part from that person,

and it stitches it all back together again. I just found it really difficult to find obscure music because I also have very eclectic tastes. I like weird stuff that's out there as well as the classic rock stuff like ACDC. And man, you could just find anything on Napster. But then after that, there was kind of this like down period where it was harder and harder to, I don't know, satisfy that musical itch. Because you just get bored of the same stuff, especially when I was young. I just got so bored.

Whereas now, as an older person, I kind of just listen to that stuff that I found back then. I don't get bored as much. It's like nostalgia just carries me through. You know, I'm still listening to the same stuff I found when I was 16, 17. But when you're young, you just want like new, new, new, new, new. And like, first of all, more stuff is new to you because we just, you have less experience with music. But nowadays I wonder how it is. I guess everything's just available. So. I think music discovery is so strangely, I wouldn't say broken, but just never fixed. It's never been like, here's the way you find new music. I don't feel like that's even possible.

There's nothing in Spotify that attracts me. There's playlists that are made for me based on things, but they're still not helping me discover. I've never discovered Tom Waits, given that I'm a diehard classic rock, kind of in that era fan. And I think he's probably in that realm to some degree. Nothing's ever been great for discovery.

Classic, for sure. Yeah, definitely classic. I'm not sure about rock. More'm not sure about rocky yeah kind of i don't know how would you genre fi tom wait maybe bluesy folky yeah i would say like i mean he's i guess the cliche would be that he transcends genre sure but yeah definitely like blues blues and rock and maybe some sort of barroom jazz kind of stuff. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's interesting how all our algorithms are sort of designed to solve that problem. And I think to some degree they do. I feel like if you ask Spotify to play some artist and it runs out of tracks for that artist,

it'll be like, I'm just going to make up some more tracks to play for you that i think are similar and i feel like i have discovered some things in that way um which is interesting you know i think we have we had these systems of you know libraries and record stores and they had some discoverability built in but only sort of as an accidental artifact of you know oh well we need to find somebody to let you find the thing you want to buy and in the process well we have to sort of organize them and then we're going to end up with you know things organized by genre and you'll stumble across you know someone adjacent to the thing that you're looking for and i think you see this like in bookstores too where you're like browsing along you're like oh

look there's this like you know i'm in the you know sci-fi section and i never see this before this looks interesting and then when we went online and everything you know it's like well if you want the thing you just go straight to the thing you don't need to spend you know waste all this time browsing through but But along the way, we shed this accidental piece of like, well, we had this, you know,

browsing based discoverability. And in the name of efficiency, we sort of let that go, which I think is right. I don't, I'm not passing like a value judgment on it. But we're sort of now being like, okay,

well, we accidentally had a solution to that problem that maybe wasn't ever designed and it wasn't necessarily perfect, but we of dropped it now we're sort of okay how do we backfill that and i think sort of this algorithmic uh solution is what has emerged but yeah it does make you wonder if there's better or maybe those algorithms will get better over time and but it's uh it is interesting that we had it sort of as an accident and now we have to design it from scratch as an actual solution. Yeah.

Plus we have a gluttony of riches at this point. I mean, there's so much music that there's something for everybody and there's a lot for everybody. I mean, you talk about going off the end of a playlist and it just keeps playing. I mean, I hear good new stuff all the time but i don't really stop to catalog and be like who's this person and i'm gonna go ahead and dive into their whole back catalog like i used to maybe that's just a function of age or or time availability as well but there's like another good song coming on after

this and so maybe things are like less sticky because there's just especially when you're listening to a lot of the music i listen to is while working or while coding and i mean lo-fi and electronic and stuff like that stuff all just kind of flows into one long live track you know like i can't very easily break out individual pieces and say like wow whereas back in the day it was just like well sandstorm is all you had access to so we're all gonna like sandstorm aren't we yeah in the album era you probably did form a much closer sort of you know relationship with the artist because you're like well i i make this is my one album that i'm getting this month or whatever oh yeah and so like you know i'm gonna live with it and then i'm gonna sort of

make a really intentional decision about what i'm getting and now it is so you know okay well on to the next thing i would be interesting to see how you know sort of the younger generations i say as an old man sure we'll have a really different relationship with music that is maybe more track based and just i like the song i don't even know who the artist is or i don't know it'd be interesting to see i think there's also this connection there was actually an announcement i believe between it was meta's music deal jared you may have seen this in snacks today universal music group and meta expand their partnership as labels lean on social media so i think today's exposure for i

mean music is culture or it's representative culture at least and it's like the algorithm and what i was talking about like discovering to me is some version some pulse towards culture and that culture could be hey i'm xyz years old so my culture and desire to tap into it is different than somebody else's but it's this idea of like connecting me to culture that I find relevant to me or a culture I find worthwhile pursuing or understanding more

of or being curious about but this universal music group deal with Meta I think is representative of how I don't want to say young people either, but I feel like just generationally how we tap into or come to know more music. For example, I didn't know the Watermelon Sugar song from Harry Styles until I heard it via TikTok, and then it was blended. And I'm going to put it in this, well, maybe Jared, you can,

because you'll do the show, mastering at least. We have a track that we inspired by Watermelon Sugar and Seaside. There's this remix that was only on social media, only really available on social media. It was never an official track. I'm not even sure if Harry Styles and this other artist, I have no idea who the name is of this person, talking about how we don't connect with the artist

because it just sort of goes by so fastly. But at the same time, I thought it was a really cool blend between Watermelon Sugar and this song called Seaside. And anybody who hears it, you would think that this that version, that remix is the original. And if you were like me, the first time you ever heard it, you only heard this remix version. You're like, that's the OG. That's the original. And that's not true. But the point I'm getting at is that, is my exposure to this new music, even like Mekibah. Gosh, who's heard the song Mekibah? I have.

Okay, good. I didn't want to be alone here. Jordan? I may have, but I don't recognize it by name. Well, it's a viral thing right now. It didn't want to be alone here. Jordan? I may have, but I don't recognize it by name. It's a viral thing right now. It's a very catchy song. Yeah. There's several like that that at least I've discovered,

not through pushing play on Spotify or WebAmp or WinAmp or some different version of listening to music. It's been through a swipe or a click or something like that, and it's been the track to someone building something or someone making cookies or whatever it might be. So that's kind of interesting how music exposure has not come from pushing play or an algorithm or a playlist. It's come through interest and following of different creators or influencers or whatever you want to call those folks it's that cultural press or swipe that happens that the music comes with it and i think the labels have now found the new napster is a swipe away on social media it's not and it still

is free like you're not paying necessarily for tiktok or instagram you're you're sort of there and your data is the payment so to speak yeah the the social media specifically tiktok instagram reels and then probably in third place youtube shorts but as i've been i post our stuff to these places it's's all the same content. People at this point are just posting to everything. But that's definitely become like the new exposure for new artists. Like you, you want to go TikTok viral. And so that's changed the actual music as well, because now people are then, what do we do? Well, we feed the beast and they're like, well, what does the algorithm want? Well, these are the kind of songs that are catchy and short and have like you know 0.7 seconds before the drop or whatever it is like you're gonna get that there's people out there trying to figure it out and writing music for that

which you can kind of say it's a shame because you know you want to write music for other reasons but i think it's just a fact of history that the the medium very much is the message. It always has been. And so when people were making albums, they were writing albums. And when people were trying to get TikTok viral, they're going to make TikTok music, you know, that's just kind of how it probably always has been. And so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you think about, I mean, even going back to classical music, right. The sort of publication of music for, you know, to be played in the home is like the original album was like a book that you would buy and play at your home piano. And then that goes all the way through to, you know, how did artists write their music

to fit on an album? Well, they had to think about their music as a cohesive, you know, nearly hour long piece or whatever. And maybe that was great. Maybe that inspired some artists who wanted, who were great. And that was how they would inspired some artists who wanted who were great and that was how they would have wanted to create anyway but then we got to you know the sort of radio play and it's like well now you got to write for the radio and you know we're now in our in our sort

of new era but i think there's something interesting about the you know you were saying like discovery of music being both personal but i think there's also this like longing for some kind of, you know, as we have gone, everything is personal, right? On the internet, everything is tailored to you. Everything is exactly what you want, you know, exactly tailored to your taste. There's a gluttony of options available to you for, you know, tailor made to exactly your tastes. But I think then we also crave this sort of connection of like, well, what are the pieces that pull us together? You know, that we can sit down in this, you know, in this podcast and have things in common. We're like, oh, yeah, the watermelon sugar song.

Like, yeah, we all know what that is. And I think there's like sort of two different pieces. There's like, what is the thing that is like perfectly going to resonate with me? But also, what is the thing that's going to, you know, I'm going to get to talk about with my co-workers or you know in the schoolyard or whatever it is yeah schoolyard nice the playground we're on the playground for the for the youngsters for the youngsters out there in the schoolyard gosh well i mean that brought up a memory like literally as you said that when i actually i said playground that brought the memory up but you brought the memory because you said that when I actually I said Playground that brought the memory up but you brought the memory because you said what you said full backstory I remember the very first Guns N' Roses

album when I was like fifth or sixth grade on the Playground talking about my good friend Jason Kolek shout out Jason we were on the swing set we were talking about you know Mr. Brownstone or whatever like that's crazy how far back that goes for me to remember that album. And I'm still listening to the album, like almost to this day, not on the daily, but I will definitely turn on welcome to the jungle and be a very happy person because it's like,

and let me, like you said, Jerry, let me go lift some weights or throw some kettlebells with that track. Cause that's, it's very rocky for sure. Well, friends, I'm here in the breaks with one of my new friends over at 1Password, Martin Shosh, software developer at 1Password on the SDK team. 1Password now has SDKs as well as their CLI that allows you to build secrets management integrations using Go, JavaScript or Python.

And they're available right now. So Martin, how can developers use these SDKs today? Give me some examples. Yeah, so the CLI was built more for managing your 1Password account and accessing it from the terminal and writing various scripts for local automations. But the SDKs really go a step beyond that, where you can build these automations into other pieces of software. You can run them in cloud functions. You can build them into your natively running desktop apps, which now are also able to leverage functionality such as loading data from 1Password, rotating secrets in 1Password, creating new items and more. Yeah. So in addition to this awesome new

functionality you're going to give developers to leverage 1Password in such unique ways, I think it's also worth noting how you built these SDKs. You have a core Rust library that generates these various SDKs. What's the backstory? When we started the SDK project, one of our goals was to really build the SDKs in a scalable way where a relatively small team can maintain multiple SDKs at the same time. And we can add support for more languages and also add more functionality to them as time goes on. To achieve that level of scalability, we designed the SDKs in a way that they all leverage a shared Rust library that's written once and it has all the features of all the SDKs inside of it. Now to make this library accessible in each language, we generated a wrapper for that library

in each of the supported languages. This wrapper code is automatically generated. So this gives us even more speed, agility when adding new features to the SDKs because we just add the feature to the SDK core library and each of the SDKs automatically gets updated to expose the new functionality in all of the languages. That's so cool. Okay. The next step is to go to 1password.com slash changelogpod.

They've given our listeners an exclusive extended free trial to all the developers out there to use 1Password for 28 days. That's not 14 days, but 28 days. They doubled it. Make sure you go to 1Password.com slash changelogpod to get that exclusive signup bonus or head to developer.1password.com to learn about 1Password's new SDKs available right now. Their amazing developer tooling, their CLI, their SSH and Git integrations, their CICD integrations, and so much more. Again, 1password.com slash change all pod or developer.1password.com to learn more.

Do you remember who told you about Napster? Or what was that like on the schoolyard as well? I think for me it was in the yearbook, whatever room the yearbook class was in. I was talking with someone there and there was a computer and they're like, oh, look at this thing. I remember mine as well. But even more distinctly, I remember my very first exposure to grunge music and Nirvana in specific because I went to a birthday party. I think it was fifth grade going into sixth grade.

So like going from grade school into middle school. And it was a birthday party with some people that I didn't know quite so well. So it's kind of like a new group of kids. And up to that point, I was basically that I didn't know quite so well. So it was kind of like a new group of kids. And up to that point, I was basically listening to what my sister was listening to. She's three years older and a girl. And so she liked boy bands. I mean, it was like New Kids on the Block and that kind of stuff.

Boys to Men, a lot of R&B, stuff like that. So prior to that, my only tape, which now I'm dating myself, I had a tape of, I think, Aladdin, which good tunes for Aladdin. But, you know, that's the kind of music that I was listening to. Aladdin and New Kids on the Block. Aladdin? Like the movie Aladdin? Yeah. Okay. You know, it's got a great soundtrack. It does.

Go back and check it out, dude. Yeah, I'm down. Robin Williams is on that. Lots of good people. Recently reintroduced that movie and album to my eight-year-old daughter, and it holds up. It's really good. good yeah really good music but i go into this birthday party and like the very first time I heard Nirvana specifically it was

in utero was the album. It was not Nevermind which is what was that most people were spinning smells like teen spirit but this was in utero and I just couldn't believe like I'm like what are these sounds? What else should I be? All apologies.

In the sun, in the sun, he is one. In the sun, in the sun, Mary. But I also had to act like I was like, I'm like, oh yeah, I know these guys. You know, like just playing it cool. I had no idea. I was listening to Aladdin on the way over. And now, and it was like, from then on out,

I was like, I was Nirvana boy for like two and a half years until I found Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots and the whole grunge scene really just swept over me when I was in middle school. STP for life, man. Yeah. Pearl Jam for life. Absolutely.

Evenflow, right? Oh, yeah. Pearl Jam's still out there. They're still doing stuff. Eddie Vedder, man. Just slaying it still yet. I don't know how they do it. Unfortunately, Nirvana

and Stone Temple Pilots had unfortunate ends. Yeah. I mean, that's how it works out, I guess. Speaking of tape or a cassette tape tape i should be more specific that zoso album was i owned it on tape and you had to flip it right like you had to get to like track sometimes you had to stick a pencil in there rewind it you ever do that when it gets i suppose i think i had like my honda crv no crx not crv that was

that was the it was a 1985 honda crx it was red tape deck in it oh yeah i mean just terrible speakers jordan did you ever own a tape deck i did i had like some i feel like i was mostly like you know i didn't think i have like like legit tapes i had, you know, I didn't think I had like legit tapes. I had like, you know, tapes that a friend copied off of his dad's tapes or something like that. And then I had like, you know, going to the eclectic musical taste, I think I had like two Weird Al tapes. So definitely like a lover of novelty music. Yeah, I still listen to Weird Al with my boys. That was the era of parody for him at least. He definitely did a great job of that.

He was the best. You know him at least he definitely did a great job of that he was the best you know parody i gotta admit this though like i didn't get to enjoy napster like you all did no and the reason why i was looking at this because we now have lms you can ask any question it will give you a pretty brief but hopefully mostly not true whose hallucinogenic answer probably equal equal uh you know equally hallucinatory as our recollections of the past well let's see tell me if this concurs then because i just asked it what year what was the year of napster because i was thinking i i do recall a time with napster but it was brief and i was trying to figure out like why and And so Napster, according to GPT-4.0, was launched in June of 1999. It was one of the first widely used peer-to-peer, P2P, file sharing services primarily known for sharing digital music files, MP3s.

And it says, only one more sentence, Napster quickly became popular but also faced significant legal challenges for the music industry leading to its shutdown in 2001 and so the reason why first does that does that translate to what y'all remember in terms of timeline that matches my hallucination yeah yeah absolutely I would have probably dated it a little earlier okay it definitely is probably true I would have been wrong so I was thinking like one year later, potentially, in terms of a shutdown, but I could be wrong, like 2002. But I think it's probably 2001. Okay, so the reason why was because I went into the military in 1998. And I don't know what you all know about going to the military, but like we're deprived of most things that culture really gets access to. We're meant to be soldiers. We're meant to be soldiers.

We're meant to be focused and mission-minded. And so as a young 18-year-old going on 19, I did not have the luxury of having extra cash for things. And so at that time, I think I actually bought my very first Discman. Yes, Discman. Oh, yeah, Sony Discman. Not a Walkman, a Discman. Oh, yeah. Walkmans were before that, but it was Discman. Yes, Discman. Oh, yeah. Sony Discman. Not a Walkman, a Discman. Oh, yeah.

Walkmans were before that, but it was Walkman. Discman was terrible because it just skipped all the time. It did skip. But then you had the anti-skip, which meant it would have a 10-second buffer, which was amazing. It would just sit there for a while. The coolest tech ever, but it would still skip a little bit.

Yeah. Right. So I'd actually bought CDs, not have a digital download didn't have a computer so access to this connectivity was limited to a lot of people that time although there was a large part of culture large part of culture that actually had access but i was in the military from 98 till 2001 so i was in this a lot You missed the best year in movie history. You missed Napster. Exactly, 1999. So I was in this multi-year depravity because of the military,

which was great in many regards, but I didn't have access. Now, towards the end of my military career, my battle buddy had a computer and we were doing some of these things. But even then, I didn't have time, really. I mean, just didn't have, my i mean just didn't have my focus was elsewhere but later on in 2001 i do recall napster downloading a bunch of stuff then it as you

mentioned you're turning a bit torrent then it was the thing called tracker tracker do you recall tracker tracker well there was a bunch of stuff so right when napster died right because it went like the lights went out you know because it was a legal action, it was shut down. And when that died, there was a bunch of stuff that sprung out. BitTorrent was the eventual, I think, replacement, so to speak, of that kind of content. But there was LimeWire, and there was Nutella, and there was probably Tracker Tracker. Just like when the lights come on and the cockroaches scatter, we were all scattering to find some other way of getting some music you know and there's tons of stuff well i think like the one one of those examples going back to winamp was

you know winamp obviously sort of blew up and became very popular and then eventually sold slash sold out but you know you got to do what you got to do yeah to aol for like you know 10 million dollars or something which was huge at the time and its founder uh justin frankel you know he went on at aol to you know he sold out maybe but he didn't sort of sell out in his soul and you know he was like a troublemaker there at aol really you know at this time where they're trying to merge or be acquired by or whatever it was with time warner obviously giant you know music catalog and he was like releasing peer-to-peer file sharing software like on aol servers like just like an open source thing that he wrote or like a you know freeware thing he wrote

and there's like here it is and they're like no you can't do that he's like i don't know i i kind of just did is he still around is he still out yeah yeah i got a chance to meet up with him and you know chat a bit with him about you know about webamp and about winamp obviously yeah and yeah he's he's working on um a daw digital audio software called Reaper. And yeah, he sort of like has a small group of people and they just work on this audio software. And I think he like plays music

and is kind of living his best life. Cool. I have to get him on for an interview at some point. I'd love to hear his exploits back in the AOL days, just going rogue at aol yeah that's hilarious well speaking of going rogue we brought you here to talk about people who just shoving random crap into their skins right like like you went about unzipping folders and just found a bunch of weird stuff is that what happened basically yeah so this was actually back in 2001 you know i was sort of collecting up all these files as part

of the the museum that i was putting together and you know occasionally i would come across one that wouldn't parse correctly like i would try to load it up in webamp and it would like fail for some reason and of course sometimes that means oh it's a bug in my thing right i'm not correctly understanding the um file format and so you know started to investigate like, what's going on here? And so, you know, at this point, it's, you know, 100,000 things you sort of have to get automated. So I sort of had been, you know, downloading the skins and then extracting them and like putting the information about them into a database and so i had sort of like a collection of like you know here's all the different things and and i can sort of step

through them with with code and so it's like okay let's take a look at some of these ones that don't you know that don't parse as winamp skins and you know it's a it's like its own file format you know it's like its own file extension wsz it's not a zip file but yeah i came across just like a bunch of really weird stuff so i think like the the first one i found which i think just like set the stage perfectly for like what a weird adventure this was going to be i was like okay i got this thing it doesn't parse let's like open it up and look inside and it just had a single pdf file like a, you know, eight and a half by 11 advertisement for renting a like giant like bowling pin mascot costume. Like a seven foot tall bowling pin mascot. And like, I just like, like, can you think of a more random like digital artifact to stumble across yeah and like

it just was sort of a worm like a rabbit hole you know going down from there yeah and you have a a picture of that pdf on the blog post which we'll link to yeah it has like a like a line drawing line drawing illustration of like this you you know, giant bowling pin guy. A giant man walking around a bowling pin man. Yeah. He looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but he's a bowling pin. Yeah. I want to know why.

Like what made people do all these obscure things like Bob's car and like worm.exe. Well, that one makes more sense. That one does make more sense, but then it's not a worm. Oh, it's not? No. Okay, that makes less sense now. So what's the point? What are you trying to do here?

I mean, so there was sort of like a large, there was a variety of things, right? There were things like the bowling pin one where like I have to assume someone meant that as a zip archive and like it got renamed somehow and then caught up in my sort of, you know, the community sort of scraping efforts like, well, it's got the right file extension. So maybe it was some someone was confused about what that file extension should be or some something somewhere caught it up in the in the, you know, because obviously it never would have worked as a Winamp skin. And there was one when bobscar.wsz, it's just like you open it up. It's like, oh, yeah, it's like a guy's car. Like not like a particularly cool one. Just like a guy's or a person, I guess, picture of their car. And so, yeah, I think some of them are like that.

Some were, I think, just like Easter eggs, you know, that people place. I think that's another thing that, you know, has we've gotten away from in our modern software era, this idea of like Easter eggs and even on albums. Right. Remember, like hidden tracks on albums. I don't think there's really much of an equivalent in the sort of Spotify era. So I think some of them were like, you know, someone's creating something they're in this era of, you know, even Winamp itself had like a bunch of little Easter eggs. Like if you typed in a special pattern of characters, the like title bar would swap out for a different title bar. And as a skin author, you could provide the like Easter egg version of your skin. So like, it kind of makes sense right you're sort of in that mode you're designing your skin well you you get your chance to add your version of the easter egg into it sorry i'm gonna pause for one second my mic has like slipped precariously and i'm like hunching over okay that makes back continue where you were you leaving off at yeah so the you were prompted as a skin author to add your own

Easter egg. It was right there in the file format that there was a little place for you to put in what your title bar was going to be in Easter egg mode. And I can imagine that put people in this mindset of like, oh yeah, what other little things should I hide in here for the curious to discover and i guess probably for many of these that one curious person was me you know that sort of finally found it and so yeah things like you know text files one or like some of them included like encrypted zip files inside of them that was like one of the things i found and it was just very yeah lots of little hidden things so i think that was another class on top of just like things that accidentally got

renamed to be um skin files yeah very peculiar and then just like things that like just like photos like there was one that's like a photo of like some friends hanging out by a basketball hoop. It's like, I don't know why you included that. I wonder though, because those are user generated, if they're not like just a way to share. Yeah, could be. I mean, I suppose you could have just emailed the photo. That might have been slightly easier, but maybe it's like this reward system or I don't know. Cause I'm thinking like, it's like, it's not quite a hack, right? An Easter egg is not really a hack.

It kind of is. It's really meant to be a reward for the enjoying parties. A creator puts something in something. One of the most famous examples of, I think, maybe even the first Easter egg in the world, maybe not first in the world, modern world maybe, was the Game Adventure from Warren Robinette. It was the, and this is famously in movies and in storylines and elsewhere, it was for the Atari 2600.

Like if you didn't win the game, but you instead tried to find this path of the dark tunnel, et cetera, and you would land in this room and you got truly what was meant to be the winning thing. I think there's a backstory to that and everything too, but I just wonder like if they were just trying to share with obscure weird things with the world, not just simply like, well, here's a photo of me and my friends with the basketball hoop.

Maybe they were trying to like, I don't know, like it seems strange, but share in a unique way with the world, maybe reward somebody shape or form the future Jordans who will eventually spelunk all these Winamp skins and find the corruption. i think also and maybe this was just like my friend group or whatever as a teenager but i think at that time in the early 2000s there was this like this sense of like like quote-unquote random being like a very like funny kind of way to be

and that like quoting random things or identifying things that are like totally quote-unquote random was seen as like very like of of the era and i wonder if there was some element of that like what's the like weirdest sort of random thing i could include in here and you know i i think we're you know having been down the rabbit hole and found all these things it's like yeah i guess a bowling pin rental flyer is like a pretty random thing. So mission accomplished, I guess. If you found multiple skins with similar contents,

I would then conjecture that some of these might be signatures. Because sometimes people have a calling card. And I imagine skin authors would author, once you learn how to do it, and if you have a calling card and I imagine skin authors would author, once you learn how to do it, and if you have a knack for it, it probably feels good to have your skin out there for people. And so I imagine there's people that did, you know, a handful of those and who's going to see these files except for other skin authors, right? Those are the people who are trafficking inside of these files and yourself, like archaeologists.

And so perhaps they're left there in certain cases for the other skin authors to see or come across. And maybe it's a calling card or maybe it's just a funny random, like you said, of like, oh, wait till somebody tries to see how I built my skin. They're going to find out that there's a bullying pen for rent. That one was correct that one was totally corrupted i guess yeah but then didn't you find something that were just encrypted skins like it was just it was just a skin at the end of the day wasn't it but it was just encrypted yeah there were a few that were so like zip has its own encryption like option right um so you can like built into the format there's like the option to encrypt and there

were a few that were just like named you know dot wsz but were actually encrypted zip files and you know knowing what you know people's notions of passwords were back in the day i was like i bet these could be cracked these days so i that was like you know going back to my point about like this has sort of been my like education like this was a you know i've always been like man i'd always like to know like how do you like crack passwords like you know you going back to my point about like, this has sort of been my like education. Like this was, you know, I've always been like, man, I'd always like to know, like, how do you like crack passwords? Like, you know, I've got some rainbow tables, brute force. That's exactly like, I know there are like cool like tools and brute forcing, you know, different techniques.

And it's like, maybe I'll get to play with that. And so, you know, I downloaded some of those things and write up on them and was able to get them running. And yeah, I mean, like, I think the password on the first one was just like Honda, which obviously was like, like in the, you know, in the dictionary. Right, right, right. Easy to brute force. Yeah. And like, that was just like a skin that somehow had been encrypted and I have no idea. Maybe someone thought it was clever. Like, I don't think Winamp, I actually, I know for a fact,

Winamp would not prompt you for a password or anything or maybe it's like got like swept up in something else like yeah i don't know but then there were some that like were you know had like a readme file in them that said like you discovered the secret the password is you know xyz and then alongside there was one then alongside it in the archive was another zip file that was itself encrypted and now we're having fun and yeah but the password didn't work when i tried it i was like i've got i've got a text file telling me the password and i've got an encrypted zip file like they're like i'm so close to discovering the super cool secret you know inner thing and then it turned out that it was like a case sensitivity issue and they had written the password in caps and i just needed to try it in lowercase okay yeah and so then i i did you know

i was able to unpack it and i just had like a bunch of like music visualizer plugins inside okay but you know it was like you know like you said the reward for the people who were who were digging deep but the in terms like signatures, it was conventional to include like a read me file, text file in each one. And so that has actually served the museum really well because I'm able to, you know, I don't have, you know, I'm not the site that they uploaded these things to. So like, I don't have their like, oh, I uploaded it and I'm going to write my description and I'm going to give my author name and I'm going to, you know, give it as a title. And so being able to access those readme files has let me index them. And so now if you search, we can like search through all the contents of the readme files. And so even though I don't have

that sort of side metadata, they are discoverable. But yeah, people definitely had their like signatures and sign off lines inside those readmes. I was looking at this one where they mentioned the fellows playing basketball or at least holding onto the hoop and they're drinking Canadian beer. Like it's literally a beer from Molson. It's called Canadian. Like it's so funny. I mean, that's like, it's a beer called Canadian. There you go. It's very popular in Canada. I don't know if it's still popular to this day, but I know this era of photo

looks like it may have been early 2000s, 99s, you know, obviously, because it's a Winnipeg skin. As this post of mine made the rounds, it was really interesting reading the different comments people had on it. And like that photo in particular, which is like the most nonddescript photo right it's like

not an action shop just like some friends hanging out by a basketball hoop and it's called like what's it called again do you have it in front of you standing around the hoop.jpg yeah standing around the hoop.jpg and like it was really interesting how many people in the comment sections of various places this was being discussed like latched onto that image and they're like that like feels like my my teenage years that feels like my friend group that you know there's something because it is you know it wasn't like published in a magazine it wasn't it's just like some you know random people's photo that they took you know themselves hanging out and yeah it's so funny how many people have like

latched onto that they're like that touches something about my childhood that i haven't like thought about in a long time maybe just because it is so unproduced yeah something about it is just like yeah that's that's a snapshot that we can all relate to i say we all meaning people who were really in this era that feel the nostalgia not just the new that is from the old i mean even things like these pictures from dom's baby joe like what's up with that yeah dropping photos up in this thing like uh here's ellie yeah ellie's in front of some sort of obscure wall coloring maybe she's looks like she's painting it and she's got a rack behind her some sort of like gear i don't know i could speculate maybe she's a school teacher or something like it looks like maybe it's school potentially some sort of building what the heck is ellie doing

she's painting the wall i'm not sure why i think the relatable thing is like and i think the reason that these have been so fun to poke apart but also to like preserve is that these are like created by just regular people yeah and i think you know there's something very like human about it they're not these are not professional designers right these are like you know teenagers or 20 somethings or whatever, you know, like in their copious spare time, putting these things together. And there's something really unique about, I guess you can call it art. It's a type of art that is, you know, of the people. And as part of that, you get this sort of snapshot of real life sort of tucked in the corners of it. That, yeah, just like random people.

It's like someone put a picture of someone painting a wall. I don't know why, but you know, there it is. Maybe that was an important person to them or they thought it was random. I don't know. It could have been included by accident. I mean, it's not impossible. I don't think that's true, but it's possible. You know what's cool?

What's cool, Derek? Is that I'm going to take stayingaroundthehoop.jpg and le.bitmap, although now it's a PNG, and I'm going to embed those as chapter data into our episode. And so those files are going to live on inside of an MP3 file. That's kind of cool, right? Like there's like a whole new life for these files because they were dug up and enjoyed. And I think that's cool.

Now there's new life, a new embed. But now you've spoiled the Easter egg by telling people you got to keep it hush hush. Okay. Let's just make a weird like voiceover noise during that whole sentence. So actually speaking of voiceover, there were some audio files too. And I think these were some of the most like, and maybe these could be in the podcast itself. Oh yeah,

absolutely. But there's one that was, it was called like cool.mp3 or something like that, which is again, the most, like if you ask someone to like, imagine the most random sound you could, like you would come up with this

this is so that was like very random of course let me tell you how the story of cool.mp3 came about then because i know please please i'm gonna hypothesize but i'm gonna act as if i know it okay some kids 16 year olds 14 year olds were just horsing around maybe listening to jerky boys making some prank phone calls maybe you know listening to some napster tracks for sure downloading very slowly and like hey while we're waiting for this file to arrive the multi parts of this file to eventually arrive they just are just messing around like kids do they make this thing the other friend is like tinkering with this winamp thing making themes here and there he thought he could he's like i'm gonna put cool.mp3 this thing we just made today in this theme and let's see if somebody finds it eventually and they're like what the heck is this

that's how cool.mp3 became a thing i think you're right i think you're right yeah it's totally people just messing around this is a snapshot of just people messing around just like pushing the buttons of whatever the buttons are and in that era it was when amp skins finding files like today there's no real recollection of files for tracks for song tracks like it's it's kind of erased in a way it's hidden behind i suppose you can still download do people still download from like amazon music and apple music or is it pretty much just gone it's just streaming right like who's buying the mp3s there are some hardcore people probably i mean i would be buying them if i didn't have a subscription yeah yeah i don't think anyone you know even like i think when ios came out it was eye-opening to me that like you know they're so actively

deprioritizing the idea of a file like users that was an implementation detail that users shouldn't need to think about and see i don't don't think we're encouraged to think in that way. Yeah, it's an absolute shame because, I don't know if it's an absolute shame. I think it's progress. I'll stick to my guns. It's an absolute shame. Kids these days. Yeah, exactly.

Now our old men yell at clouds. But I mean, you know. Literally yelling at clouds. Yeah. Just being able to create a literal file and distribute it in some way, shape, or form. This form of creation, sharing, is becoming owned. What's up, friends? I'm here in the breaks with Dennis Pilarinos, founder and CEO of Unblocked.

Check him out at getunblocked.com. It's for all the hows, whys, and WTFs. Unblocked helps developers to find the answers they need to get their jobs done. So Dennis, you know we speak to developers. Who is Unblocked best for? Who needs to use it? I think if you are a team that works with a lot of co-workers, if you have like 40, 50, 60, 100, 200, 500 co-workers, engineers, and you're working on a code base that's old and large, I think Unblocked is going to be a tool that you're going to love. Typically, the way that works is you can try it with one of your side projects, but the best outcomes are when you get comfortable with the

security requirements that we have. You connect your source code, you connect a form of documentation, be that Slack or Notion or Confluence. And when you get those two systems together, it will blow your mind. Actually, every single person that I've seen on board with the product does the same thing. They always ask a question that they're an expert in. They want to get a sense for how good is this thing? So I'm going to ask a question that I know the answer to. And people are generally blown away by the caliber of the response.

And that starts to build a relationship of trust where they're like, no, this thing actually can give me the answer that I'm looking for. And instead of interrupting a coworker or spending 30 minutes in a meeting, I can just ask a question, get the response in a few seconds and reclaim that time. Yeah, I love that. So I've set up Unblocked on our code base for changelog.com. And I did the same thing. I asked it something I knew the answer to, and I was just like you said, blown away. But I know my aha moment, you know, tell me you've met with lots of customers, you've talked to different folks. What are the aha moments for those you

speak with? I think there's two aha moments or there's two pain, sorry, I should say there's two pain points that people face. The first is if they're the ones asking questions, how long it takes to get a response. The second is if you're a person who's been around code base for a long period of time, how often your day is interrupted with questions. I've been on and I still am often on both sides of those. I think the most frustrating part of it is when I've answered a question repeatedly. Like I had that conversation a month ago and it appears again. Engineering leaders will hear their most talented engineering folks say, I don't get any work done because I spend all my day in meetings answering questions for folks. That is like if you experience that pain point, Unblocked is basically perfect for you. The next step to get Unblocked for you and your team is to go to getunblocked.com.

Yourself, your team can now find the answer they need to get their jobs done and not have to bother anyone else on the team, take a meeting or waste any time whatsoever. Again, getunblocked.com. That's G-E-T-U-N-B-L-O-C-K-E-D.com and get unblocked. I mean, I don't want to turn this conversation to the dark side, but like the creation mechanism to some degree lives. I mean, I'll go one step further and go back to that thing I mentioned earlier from snacks. And I thought it was pretty interesting because there was one layer deeper on this, which was the takeaway. The labels need social media fees to succeed, right? So like we're going

back to the day of Napster when they're like, damn you kids sharing files accidentally or on purposely in this way, shape or form that subjugates and subverts our ways of profiting. And then you fast forward 22 years-ish later, and now there's a headline that says, or at least a sub-headline, a takeaway headline that says, labels need social media feeds to succeed. And it took a large hit. This is UMG, one of the most popular, you know, labels out there. They had Q2 results that were saying, you know, there's like sort of the creation of a file. We sort of lost that artifact. But at the same time, like I feel like we're now in the area where everyone is a content creator, right? Like the idea of creating something and sharing it with the world is like second nature, right?

It's been definitely like commoditized in a way, but also at the same time, I think we've gone to a world where there's just so much creation going on. But because there's so much creation, there's so much content to see. And so the ability to like, well, you know, if there's 50,000 people creating things every day, probably not all of them can, you know, make that their profession. And again, the, what the role that the, the labels were playing in terms of paying the upfront cost to get artists recorded. It's like, well, the cost of actually recording something has gone way down the cost of marketing, you know, artists, well, the way you market now is totally different and is much more, you know, based on social media. So the whole, like what role they're playing, I think has also changed dramatically. That's why I'm over here thinking like, who needs a label? No wonder they need the social media platforms because who needs them anymore? I'm sure there are things they bring

to the table, but nowhere near what it used to be in order to get your music out to people. Now, yes, there's more noise than there ever has been, but it's always been the case, at least in American history, that very few people could make their living by making music. I mean, it's not a mass market job. It's a very rare person that can get that done. I would argue it's easier today. There's probably more people making a living off of their music creations than in the past, because it's easier to find your a thousand true fans and you're not maybe going to be a multimillionaire, but you can probably make a living that way because you don't have to go city to city to actually literally find them. Now, once you've got your fans, it is harder to make money, I think, which is why touring again

has become the way that artists are making a living now. It used to be their album sales, and the tour was kind of to promote the CD, and now it's the music promotes the tour, and the tour is how you make money and you sell merch, and you can make a living that way. It's a hard job.

A lot of people burn out and don't survive touring. It's not an easy life to live, although it's probably a very exciting life so i just wonder what what are the labels bringing today in 2024 that is a value compared to what they extract i don't know what that equation looks like yeah i i think it's it's really hard to know and i i don't i mean i'm sure there's there certainly is like uh an ideal role that they could play in you you know, producing albums, like giving artists the time and the space to, you know, be in the studio, to take the

time to write the music and to not have to be, you know, working their, you know, their other job. But increasingly it feels like, like you said, you know, they need the social networks, like they're only signing people who already have meaningful followings. And so it is a kind of a question mark like what value are they really providing but your point about like you know there's more people making music today i think it's absolutely true that there's like a lot more music and art and content being created by people but i suspect it is and i expect to sort of like a like you end up with a lot of people a really long tail of like just people making stuff that maybe it's not their

profession right they're sort of in their side time and maybe that's good right that we have more people being creative more options as a listener to hear things even from people who don't make it their full-time job but But then I suspect that there is a flattening where there just are fewer people who are able to make it their living. That's my suspicion. And I think it is all downstream of Napster, right? Spotify had to emerge as a competitor to Napster.

And they just couldn't extract the same amount of value as the record labels could before. They had to be competitive with free which is a pretty tall order yeah absolutely my thought on labels is they probably compress the time potentially there's convenience factor in there there's maybe a network factor in there where hey we have xyz producer who produced for x y and z and so the artist is like yeah yeah, I can go take my time and try and find a producer.

Maybe they can, maybe they can't. But then, like you said, Jordan, maybe the label's like, hey, you don't have to work for these next month and a half while we're just pampering you to create this album or this next drop, as I said earlier. Right, well, they cut you that upfront check. That's pretty much what they're doing. Yeah, they take out sort of the hard part.

I don't know if that's pretty much what they're doing yeah they take out sort of the hard part in a that's actually trump just hypothesizing clearly from what i think may be occurring but potentially they're just enabling this space for creation and access to different talent to different you know studios that have just thousands and thousands of dollars worth of gear just already set up, fine-tuned, a repeated pattern of success. It's almost, I wouldn't say it's foolproof, but I'd imagine it's pretty well-oiled because they've just churned so many folks through this process that it's almost on repeat, like automation in a way. But like Jordan said, they're only signing people who've already

arrived like once you've made it then they're interested in you and so you already know how to make music that people love and so I understand access to producers I understand the allure I think what they're bringing is a legacy institution that has a lasting

I don't know you call it cloud around it and that's probably not the best word, like an allure to it, similar to like mainstream television. Like everybody would love to see themselves on TV, even if they're like YouTube stars have all these millions of followers. And then finally they're on like NBC. And it's like, even for them, that's a moment. Cause they're like, there's this thing about being on television.

I think there's a thing about being signed by a record label, which is very attractive because of the history of what that meant. And I think it means less and less. And I think that's going to wear off over time, but it's probably still like a trailing indicator. And I think people want that upfront check because now they've made it quote unquote made it, even though there's so many strings attached to that check that you better check yourself. And they also want the street cred of like, I've been signed by RCA or whatever it is. And that just gives them this instant clout, which is just because of the history

of what those institutions were. I just wonder that even things like Swift, Taylor Swift, like she was very, very popular. And now she's like the name you hear everywhere. And I don't think it's just because of her music I think it's and this is totally hypothesis either a hypothesis ation or whatever you want to call it I'm hypothesizing how this may have happened but I gotta imagine like these labels not just having access to the studios and the producers they also have their hands in the pocket or literal ownership

of media, which is message distribution. It's idea implanting, right? You don't think so? I think Taylor Swift is unique in that she was sort of the first mega star to realize the power of social media and that she could own her own audience without needing the labels and that's what went into her taylor's version releases where she sort of reclaimed all of her content back from her labels by re-releasing everything they owned all the masters to the original tracks and so of course anytime they got played they got you know a cut of it and she was like nope you know i I can go on Instagram and I can say, hey, all my Swifties, stop listening to the old version.

I re-released it. Listen to this version now. And they're like, yep, I'm on board. And she didn't need to go on a talk show or a radio morning chat show or something to reach those people. She's got a direct line. Point taken. I understand that. I think they used to do that.

And I think that that's probably what I'm talking about, this trailing legacy. Because it used to be like the old formula was, you know, you toil away in obscurity and you play dive bars and weddings and whatever you got to do, right? Like open mic nights. And eventually some talent scout from a record label comes and to do, right? Like open mic nights. And eventually some talent scout from a record label comes and discovers you, right? Like that's the person who just understands what raw talent looks like, you know?

And they discover you and they bring you in and then they sign a deal with you and then they push you out to the world. And that's a great story and it used to be true and I just don't think it's as true anymore as it used to be true. And I just don't think it's as true anymore as it used to be. But there's just this like wake of that being the case for so long that everybody still gives them more credit than they currently bring. But, you know, we're all just prognosticating from the outside. I'm sure if you're inside the industry, then you are probably

thinking these fools have no idea what they're talking about. I feel like there's a parallel with like, you know, internet venture capital, right? Where the record labels were historically the venture capital of the music industry, where they would identify someone who didn't, you know, wasn't a sure thing. And they would, they would produce a lot of albums with a lot of upfront costs. And most of them would fail. And most of them would not become superstars, but a small number of them would become you know superstars which is like the vc unicorn and that would subsidize all the losses they took on producing all those other records and so a lot of artists who didn't end

up becoming successful did get records produced as a byproduct of that which is you know probably was good for the overall you know our ability to hear interesting music. But now in the sort of social media era where it's like, well, we're just going to wait until you've sort of already proven that you have a resonance, then maybe those albums that aren't commercially viable maybe never get produced.

Yeah, the distribution, I think, is really what changed most. And now the record label are downstream of distribution, which is why they're trying to go sign deals with the social media companies, because they are the distribution at this point. Whereas it used to be cutting a bunch of CDs and shipping them around the world

to be sold in record stores and all that was a lot of cost for any band or individual, like too much to do. And the record labels had that. But yeah yeah now that it's been flipped on its head with distribution who needs them that's all i'm saying who needs it explain to me this i've been thinking about this this is like today's pop culture how was snoop dogg the mascot slash person the the front person for the olympics you know that wasn't because he was like let me do this i think that was a job somebody offered that to him and that had to be it could

have been kevin hart i think there's times when you know different comedians are different people within culture and it's not that snoop is irrelevant like the guy makes wine even you know i think there's like all these different things these artists get their hands in. But I wonder like, is that part of a label relationship or has he transcended this need for a label to be like, okay, there's a job out there, Snoop. You want this interview to be the front person

for the Olympics this year and you gotta be there. And obviously he's gonna enjoy it anyways. I don't think he was by any means acting in terms of his zeal and excitement for what was going on but he was on camera it was very much Snoop Dogg like how does that happen is it because just Snoop Dogg and his agents like hey I got a job opportunity for you or is it because there's some sort of larger conglomerate connection that has paid media access that gets a job that suddenly Snoop Dogg is now even more embedded into today's pop culture than he was you know prior to the Olympics for example are you are you signing up for next year you're putting in your bid

to be uh take Snoop Dogg's place yeah they're gonna be like yeah let's get Adam in there Adam who I don't know I mean he just he I guess at some time, at some point you, like Taylor Swift, right, you transcend from musical artist to like cultural personality. Right. And then you can go do whatever you want. Yeah. And I guess if you're good at it too. Snoop Dogg has stood the test of time beyond rap.

By the way, Snoop Dogg has put out so many tracks in his life. Lots of bad music, just one man's opinion. He's got some good music as well. But there's a guy where quantity has always been higher than quality. But he's just transcended culturally because of his aura or whatever it is. That's who he is. I don't know the details of his label relationships. I do know that in the rap game, especially when he was coming up,

you work with a label long enough until you can create your own label. And so there's a lot of label battles and hatred between rappers and labels and a lot of labels taking advantage of young rappers. And so I would be surprised if a, if a label deal was involved in this deal, I think probably NBC went to his agent and said, we want Snoop, you know, I don't know. It was a great idea by whoever thought of that because he really did add something to the Olympics that just has never been there before. I mean, it was kind of strange, but it was like kind of a like sideshow Bob kind of a thing like oh and snoop's there and he's dancing and you're like who's not gonna love

snoop dog dancing and cheering it's like it's just he's he kind of oozes joy doesn't he it was cool was there did that happen before was there ever that kind of front person for the olympics i don't know if i recall i recall i want to say snoop did it before or there was i don't know yeah definitely not the expert in this uh none of us are experts here we're software developers talking about culture yeah we're not talking about the olympics necessarily a lot of interesting things this year for the olympics some controversial some not controversial some absolutely hilarious like the break dancing oh yeah the the Australian breakdancer this we're all Raygun article out there

I believe I just saw my buddy John Daniel Trask who is the co-founder of literally Raygun the software not paid

but they're error tracking we love them they're awesome at least I do I think it's Raygun.io is their URL I believe you sure that wasn't paid

that was not paid I just know that that seemed pretty John Daniel Trask I think it's raygun.io I think it's it could be raygun.io could be

raygun.io slash changelog yeah exactly I think that's a domain slash Adams and Koviac well if there's if there's a connection there maybe they'll come back

and sponsor again I know we were contacted recently but we're not haters you know we're not haters we're here to promote a lot of folks out there we're the

the dev rel for the dev rel for the dev world yeah I think it's kind of cool what Snoop did I think you're right he did bring some

really interesting pieces to it and I think like anybody who transcends I think Jordan you've transcended simply

just your role on the relay team at Meta you know to this Winamp world this this WebA world, really, where you're sort of spelunking all these unique things.

And I think it's interesting how you've been on the front page of Hacker News for using SQLite in production and just all these different things that have allowed you to, you know, push the edges, even work with the Internet Archive, like all these cool things you've gotten to do just because of our history and nostalgia for Winamp and the skins and all the things you've learned as a result of just spelunking this intense, crazy Winamp world. I think it's wild how you've gone deeper into TypeScript, deeper into WebAssembly, uncovered secrets in these skins, this corruption stuff. And I think to even give one credit here, you added, I believe, what was it, 56 additional skins

that were skins within skins that you found, and 54 of them were not already in the museum, so you were able to upload those as well. So now we've got 54 more potentially bad potentially good skins to enjoy but still yet like your your commitment to this is uncanny like we had you on the show how many years ago was it jared five 2018 it was 2018 too long ago and then you know i found this article where you're talking about corrupted skins and you obviously shared a few more things with us which will link all these up in the show notes of course but it's just wild how something as simple of taking

winamp to this idea of webamp how it can be such a rabbit hole to explore and discover i think it's you've done such a great job oh thanks yeah it's been it's just been really fun. And I think there is something about it that like touches on a lot of people's nostalgia, but I think also a lot of people's like frustration with to share something that I've worked on in this vein, I feel like it's had an outsized resonance in terms of how it gets talked about because of what a sort of important role Winamp played and what an important role the sort of user-generated themes, these skins played. Yeah, it does feel like it resonates. So it's been a great experience for me to sort of have this thing to come back to and have a little playground to try out all different things that I'm curious about.

And then, yeah, I think the way that it resonates with other people is a lot due to just what an interesting piece of software Winamp was and at an interesting time and perhaps in stark contrast to where we are now. Do you think you've plumbed its depths or do you think the rabbit hole goes even deeper? Probably.

Well, let's chat again in another six years and we'll find out. Sounds like a plan. So the museum is at skins.webamp.org. I was slow there for drama. skins.webamp.org. Very dramatic. Very dramatic.

You can check that out. Slash Adam Stachowiak sent you. That's right. Slash, well, there's some UTM data on there that we'll somehow find a way to put in the voice there. Yeah, I'm just enamored by what you've been able to do with this. I think it's so, really just so cool. I think the only last question,

maybe this is a good closing question, i'm on your github profile and either i'm blind and i don't see it or it doesn't exist but you're not taking any sort of sponsorships for this and now i imagine you got a job so you're okay with that but i'm sure there's like some way not so much you can profit from this but at least get back money for your time is there a reason why you haven't set up a sponsor page or allowed the community to do anything to support your efforts? Yeah, I think I actually have been sort of well rewarded for this work over time. I think I've always found that, I mean, very directly, I first published the WebAmp project and I got picked up on Hacker News and shortly thereafter, a recruiter from Facebook at the time reached out.

And that ended up in a job offer and something I've been doing for the last seven years, which has obviously been pretty good in terms of compensation for that work. And so, yeah, I think I found that the compensation comes more in just like the opportunities it's led me to in my career and, you know, both in terms of where I work, but also what projects I get to work on and things like that. You know, a lot of stuff that I've learned through this project. And so, yeah, it's, it actually, the skin museum does have some costs in terms of hosting and whatnot. I've done my best to try to minimize those, but yeah, I think I'm happy.

I'm happy to subsidize it. It's certainly, I've been rewarded just fine. And to celebrate all the artists who made all these really cool pieces of art, I think it feels a little bit nice to have it just be a thing that's clean and free and just a thing that's done out of goodwill. Well said.

I dig it. Skins.webamp.org. Less drama this time around, but you can endlessly scroll skins, click on them, find out more details, see them animate, do some cool stuff.

I think it's cool that you've done this. And I think it's cool that you got that job offer. I didn't, I don't, I didn't recall that detail that you published web amp and then got the, you know, an offer or connection to Facebook, then Facebook, now Meta on the Relay team. I do know that part of your history, but I didn't know

it was connected to, you know, the publishing of this. Not many people are happy to subsidize though. I mean, some are, some are not, but when there's such an easy access to sponsorship, I don't know. You do you, man. You do you. Yeah, if you want to sponsor me, you can donate to the Internet Archive. I think that's a great way to do it. That is a good way to do it. I'm glad you said that.

At the same time, you can go to webamp.org, not just skins. because that's where the project lives at. I'm just wondering, I'll leave this one for the bonus. We'll give this to the Plus Plus folks. Let's say goodbye, because I've got the project lives at. I'm just wondering like, maybe I'll leave this one for the, for the bonus. We'll give this to the plus plus folks. Let's say goodbye.

Cause I got one thing for you, at least an idea. Maybe you'll like it. Maybe you won't. Who knows what's left. Anything left? I think all's left. We had to say this is bye friends.

Yes. Thanks Jordan. Bye friends. Great to be here. Thank you. Okay. So if you grew up in or even close to the Wind Amp era, like the three of us did, you probably loved this trip down memory lane.

If not, well, I hope you at least enjoyed some of Jordan's surprise findings and maybe a few of the tracks and images that we embedded throughout the episode. If you dig it, please do let us know in the comments. We'd also appreciate you sending the episode link to other people who might enjoy the episode. If you dig it, please do let us know in the comments. We'd also appreciate you sending the episode link to other people who might enjoy the show. Word of mouth is still, in 2024, state of the art when it comes to podcast discovery. Weird but true. And other thanks to our sponsors, Paragon, 1Password, and Unblocked. And of course, to our partners at Fly.io and thank you to Breakmaster

Cylinder for beat freaking for us and for stitching together that llama stab on super short notice. Next week on the changelog, news on Monday, a crossover episode on Wednesday, and we're catching up with another old friend, Suze Hinton, on Friday. Have a great weekend, leave us a five-star review if you haven't already, and let's talk again real soon.