Justin Frankel

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Justin Frankel
Geeking out with Justin Frankel screenshot (cropped).jpg
Frankel in 2022
Born1978 (age 45–46)
Education University of Utah
OccupationProgrammer
Notable work Winamp, Gnutella, SHOUTcast, REAPER
TitleFounder of Cockos
Website www.1014.org

Justin Frankel (born 1978) is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor.

Contents

In 2002, he was named in the TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. [1]

Early life

Justin Frankel was born in 1978 and grew up in Sedona, Arizona. Frankel had an aptitude for computers at an early age. His skill eventually led him to running the student computer network of Verde Valley School, which he attended, as well as writing an email application for the students.

Winamp

After graduating high school with a 3.9 GPA, he attended the University of Utah in 1996, where he majored in computer science, but dropped out after two quarters. A few months later, he released the first version of WinAMP under his newly formed company's name Nullsoft. By 1998, more than fifteen million people had downloaded the program. Since many people had sent in the $10 donation suggested in return for using the program, Frankel earned tens of thousands of dollars a month. [2]

Frankel, along with Tom Pepper (who played a big part of the Winamp development and distribution), later completed SHOUTcast, which allowed ordinary users with an Internet connection to broadcast, or "stream", audio over the Internet. He also created the Advanced Visualization Studio, a plugin for Winamp which enabled users to create their own music visualizations in real-time, without any programming knowledge required.

Sale of Nullsoft to AOL

In June 1999 AOL simultaneously acquired Nullsoft and Spinner.com in a combined purchase worth approximately $400 million. [3] In a July 21, 1999 SEC filing by AOL, the transaction was recorded as a payment of 2,863,053 shares of AOL common stock to the 54 stockholders in the two companies being acquired. On July 20, 1999, the last reported sale price for AOL common stock was $113.1875 per share. Frankel's stake of 522,661 shares in the acquisition was worth approximately $59 million. [4]

AOL

On March 14, 2000, Frankel and Nullsoft colleague Tom Pepper released gnutella , a public peer-to-peer file-sharing application, using Nullsoft's corporate web servers, without AOL's knowledge. Gnutella was a new peer-to-peer file-sharing system like the original Napster system, which was used by users to share their MP3 collections with everyone who ran a Napster client. Unlike Napster, however, gnutella allowed users to share any type of file, not just MP3s. It also did not have the single point of failure that Napster had: centralized servers that indexed where all the shared content was stored. Whereas Napster could be (and was) shut off just by turning off the centralized index servers owned by Napster, gnutella did not rely on any centralized servers to find out what users had what content, so once a gnutella network was created, it could not be shut off.

Since AOL was at the time merging with Time Warner, gnutella seemed like a conflict of interest to Nullsoft's parent company, which knew that Time Warner was one of the parties taking legal action against Napster at the time. AOL ordered gnutella to be taken off the Nullsoft corporate servers. However, thousands of people had already downloaded the software before it was removed from Nullsoft's web site. The source code was released later, supposedly under the GPL. Gnutella continued to be developed without Frankel's assistance, and became one of the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks of its time; compatible clients that were developed included BearShare, Morpheus, Gnucleus and LimeWire.

AOL watched Frankel very closely after that, taking down other projects that he tried to release to the public, such as an MP3 search engine and a patch for AOL Instant Messenger to block advertisements in the application. Frankel threatened to resign on June 2, 2003, after AOL removed his program WASTE , a private peer-to-peer file-sharing program, from the Nullsoft website. He stayed with AOL after that in order to complete Winamp version 5.0, a hybrid of the Winamp v2.x series and Winamp v3.

On December 9, 2003 AOL shut down Nullsoft's San Francisco offices and laid off 450 employees. [5]

Frankel announced his resignation from AOL on January 22, 2004 on his blog, stating "Won't repeat it here (in two words: I've resigned). So begins chapter 3... or something cliché/poetic there. Or wait, does I've count as a single word? ha ha."

Post-AOL

Some of Frankel's current projects in development are a programmable effects processor called Jesusonic and a piece of software named NINJAM which allows several musicians to make music together via the Internet.

Under his new company, Cockos, he has been developing REAPER, a Digital audio workstation for Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Related Research Articles

Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Napster</span> On-line peer-to-peer file sharing software

Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer</span> Type of decentralized and distributed network architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winamp</span> Media player for Microsoft Windows

Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.

eDonkey2000

eDonkey2000 was (is) a peer-to-peer file sharing application developed by US company MetaMachine, using the Multisource File Transfer Protocol. It supported both the eDonkey2000 network and the Overnet network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nullsoft</span> American software company

Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona, in 1997 by Justin Frankel. Its products included the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server. In later years, their open source installer system, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) became an alternative to commercial products like InstallShield. The company's name is a parody of Microsoft. Mike the Llama is the company's mascot; this is frequently referred to in promotional material citing llamas. Frankel introduced the llama in Winamp's startup sound clip, inspired by the lyrics of Wesley Willis: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!"

WASTE is a peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend protocol and software application developed by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft in 2003 that features instant messaging, chat rooms, and file browsing/sharing capabilities. The name WASTE is a reference to Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, W.A.S.T.E. is an underground postal service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital music store</span> Online retailer of audio files

A digital music store is a business that sells digital audio files of music recordings over the Internet. Customers gain ownership of a license to use the files, in contrast to a music streaming service, where they listen to recordings without gaining ownership. Customers pay either for each recording or on a subscription basis. Online music stores generally also offer partial streaming previews of songs, with some songs even available for full length listening. They typically show a picture of the album art or of the performer or band for each song. Some online music stores also sell recorded speech files, such as podcasts, and video files of movies.

In computer networks, download means to receive data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar systems. This contrasts with uploading, where data is sent to a remote server.

Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.

Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp creator, Justin Frankel and was first shipped in version 2.0a4 with Winamp 2.61. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. AVS is currently at version 2.83 and is included with Winamp, though the distributed version has later been reverted due to compatibility issues. Winamp currently ships with version 2.82 for Windows Vista and 2.81d for older Windows versions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hotline Communications</span>

Hotline Communications Limited (HCL) was a software company founded in 1997, based in Toronto, Canada, with employees also in the United States and Australia. Hotline Communications' main activity was the publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software product named Hotline Connect, informally called, simply, Hotline. Initially, Hotline Communications sought a wide audience for its products, and organizations as diverse as Avid Technology, Apple Computer Australia, and public high schools used Hotline. At its peak, Hotline received millions of dollars in venture capital funding, grew to employ more than fifty people, served millions of users, and won accolades at trade shows and in newspapers and computer magazines around the world.

Tom Pepper is a computer programmer best known for his collaboration with Justin Frankel on the Gnutella peer-to-peer system. He and Frankel co-founded Nullsoft, whose most popular program is Winamp, which was sold to AOL in May 1999. He subsequently worked for AOL developing SHOUTcast, an Internet streaming audio service, with Frankel and Stephen "Tag" Loomis. After leaving AOL in 2004. he worked at RAZZ, Inc. He continues to collaborate with Frankel on independent projects like Ninjam.

This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ninjam</span>

NINJAM stands for Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music. The software and systems comprising NINJAM provide a non-realtime mechanism for exchanging audio data across the internet, with a synchronisation mechanism based on musical form. It provides a way for musicians to "jam" (improvise) together over the Internet; it pioneered the concept of "virtual-time" jamming. It was originally developed by Brennan Underwood, Justin Frankel, and Tom Pepper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer file sharing</span> Data distribution using P2P networking technology

Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network to locate the desired content. The nodes (peers) of such networks are end-user computers and distribution servers.

Decentralized computing is the allocation of resources, both hardware and software, to each individual workstation, or office location. In contrast, centralized computing exists when the majority of functions are carried out, or obtained from a remote centralized location. Decentralized computing is a trend in modern-day business environments. This is the opposite of centralized computing, which was prevalent during the early days of computers. A decentralized computer system has many benefits over a conventional centralized network. Desktop computers have advanced so rapidly, that their potential performance far exceeds the requirements of most business applications. This results in most desktop computers remaining idle. A decentralized system can use the potential of these systems to maximize efficiency. However, it is debatable whether these networks increase overall effectiveness.

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include removable media, centralized servers on computer networks, Internet-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking.

Cockos, Inc is an American digital audio technology company founded in 2004, most notable for their digital audio workstation software REAPER.

Metallica, et al. v. Napster, Inc. was a 2000 U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California case that focused on copyright infringement, racketeering, and unlawful use of digital audio interface devices. Metallica vs. Napster, Inc. was the first case that involved an artist suing a peer-to-peer file sharing ("P2P") software company.

References

  1. ↑ "2002 Young Innovators Under 35". Technology Review . 2002. Retrieved August 16, 2011.
  2. ↑ "Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself". Ars Technica . June 24, 2012.
  3. ↑ Beth Lipton Krigel (June 1, 1999). "AOL buys Spinner, Nullsoft for $400 million". CNet News. Archived from the original on July 28, 2012. Retrieved 2007-05-04.
  4. ↑ "America Online Inc S-3 filing". Securities and Exchange Commission. September 21, 1999.
  5. ↑ Paul Festa (December 9, 2003). "AOL lays off 450 California employees". CNET .
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