The always insightful Eliot Van Buskirk just posted an entertaining interview with Justin Frankel, the programmer behind Winamp, Gnutella, and some visionary new music programs like Reaper and NinJam. In the interview, Frankel shares his design philosophy, discusses his own music, and explains why DRM is a bad idea. He even reveals the origin of the mythical Winamp Llama.
When I reviewed NinJam for Make magazine a year ago, I was struck by how concise the interface was. Developers have been showing me Internet jamming applications for a decade, but NinJam was the first I've seen that embraces the demon latency and turns it into a musical tool. The parts you hear your remote bandmates play are multiple bars late, which—surprisingly—facilitates listening and responding.
For more on Reaper, see Peter Kirn's overview at Create Digital Music.
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Read More Entries by David Battino.
To save you a couple clicks, the bottom of the second page says that the llama statement is a quote from an email that someone sent to Nullsoft. Justin guesses that it was an homage to Wesley Willis.
If you feel like inflicting possibly irreversible damage to your sense of pitch and wasting precious minutes of your life, try listening to Willis' "Rock and Roll McDonald's" or "Cut the Mullet".