You're both right!

https://web.archive.org/web/20131219003849/http://www.winamp...

> What happened to Winamp 4? You're not imagining things. Yes, we skipped a version number for the following reasons: a) Winamp 5 combines the best aspects of Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 into one player. Hence Winamp 2 + Winamp 3 = Winamp 5! b) Who the hell wants to see a Winamp 4 Skin :P c) We think that a Fibonacci sequence for versioning might be pretty damn cool. d)We improved so much in Winamp 5 that we figured it warranted skipping a version. ;)

I still don't understand. What's wrong with Winamp 4 skins?

Edit: Maybe I have to sound it out. Is it because 4 skin sounds like foreskin?

You got it :)

They thought a Winamp 4 skin would leave a bad taste in people's mouths, so they scratched it.

Well that definitely blew up in their face.

Downvoting this comment is like kicking someones dog.

Snipped it.

Supposedly they're still going to call it Winamp v6 assuming it happens. They've lied a number of times over the past 8yrs so don't hold your breathe but the new site is somewhat indicative of their disregard about why those still using Winamp (or clones of it) do so.

-dro

If the new website is any indicator of the quality of the new Winamp, it's going to be a huge nope from me.

They may win for the worst scrolljacking I've seen to date

>the clowns that made that awful new Winamp

You don't have to be like that.

The site didn't have to like that either

> not because v2 + v3 = v5 but because nobody would want to download a Winamp 4 skin

I wish the people who named Gimp image editor were this thoughtful! Searching for image masking info has caught me out multiple times :/

on multiple occasions when i've needed to know command line syntax I've googled 'man find'

While learning jQuery and figuring out how to retrieve elements of the DOM, I googled "how to get head".

Get the TLD for python.org wrong and it's less than work appropriate.

Or school appropriate. I made this mistake circa 2008 lol

"how to get head" expertsexchange

Not to mention the hard coded file names a certain Linux screen capture utility leaves behind…

NB four and fore are sound the same in some accents

Thank you for so delicately pointing out the problem/joke here -- I hadn't noticed it, not even back then.

My question is: in what English accents do "four" and "fore" *not* sound alike?

This is the Horse-Hoarse merger. [1]

> Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents as well as some African American, modern Southern American, Indian, Irish, and older Maine accents.

If my understanding is correct, in some accents that don't pronounce their "R"s at the end of words, the vowel shape changes slightly while pronouncing "four," but "fore" is pronounced with a simple vowel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

Wiktionary sometimes comes handy in such musings, because it has IPA spellings and recordings of pronunciations, and marks the dialects—not always but frequently for more popular words.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fore

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/four

The IPA suggests that pronunciations of the two words are identical both with and without the merger, but I'm no specialist.

Just dug a little deeper, and I've arrived at this conclusion:

In accents with the merger, "four," "for," and "fore" are all always homophones.

In accents without the merger, "four" and "for" are never homophones.

And in some subset of these non-merged accents, "fore" may be pronounced identically to "four" (as listed in the IPA guide in your first link). In another subset, it may be pronounced identically to "for" (as implied by the "Homophones" section in that same link).

Fascinating. Thank you.

It is extremely hard for me to even _imagine_ this, as apparently my native accents both contain this merger. This is a rare experience for me, but a previous occurrence was discussing the rhotic-R phenomenon.

Thank you. This is what it took for me to realize why version 4 might be an issue. If I just saw "4 skin" I certainly would have gotten it. Somehow adding Winamp in front made it hard for me to interpret it the alternative way.

And now I have a totally different view on the smooth jazz band named fourplay

Definitely true for American accents.

If memory serves, the latest unbloated version of WinAmp was called Winamp Classic, and its versions were in the 2.9x range.

5.x is just the 2.x base continued with newer plug-ins & newer apis for those plug-ins. Unchecking things during installation (e.g. choosing the lite install) or just removing the unwanted plug-ins was always an option to make a 5.x into a comparable 2.x install.

-dro