Xing MP3 Player

» see xingtech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

xing technology was a small california company that made some of the earliest streaming and mp3 software for windows. their mp3 player was on a lot of dial-up era computers in the late 1990s, before winamp became the default. their mp3 encoder was even bigger, partly because most people did not pay for it.

in 1998 i was 14 years old and on a 56k modem in turkey. mp3 was new. you would download mp3s from random ftp servers and napster precursors, then need a player to actually listen to them. xing's player was one of the obvious options. winamp was still rising. xing was already there. i had both installed at one point, switched between them, eventually settled on winamp once it had skins and the llama.

xing player was utilitarian. white-gray skin, equalizer, playlist. it played mp3 files. that was about it. the value was that it existed, ran on a windows 95 box without much bloat, and came with the same name as the encoder you were probably using to rip your own cds.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the encoder ~

xing was actually more famous for its mp3 encoder than its player. in the late 1990s, encoding mp3 was a paid product. fraunhofer's reference encoder cost around 50 dollars per license. xing sold a faster commercial encoder, also paid, slightly lower quality at low bitrates but acceptable for the bandwidth most people had.

then it got cracked. someone reverse-engineered xing's encoder dll, packaged it as l3enc, and posted it on warez sites. by 1998 every dial-up kid had a copy. you could now rip your cd collection to mp3 without paying anyone. fraunhofer was furious. the riaa was furious. but the encoder was already out there. you could build your own ripping tools on top of it.

this matters because mp3 piracy could not have scaled without cheap encoding. people forget that part. the leak of xing's encoder is what enabled napster's catalog to exist. the entire late-90s mp3 explosion runs on cracked xing software.

~ how it died ~

realnetworks bought xing in march 1999 for around 75 million dollars. realnetworks already had realplayer, which played streaming audio and video. xing brought mp3 expertise plus the streamworks streaming product. the deal was strategic on paper.

in practice, the xing brand disappeared inside realplayer over the next year. xing mp3 player got rolled into realplayer's mp3 support. xing's other products got renamed or shut down. by 2000 nobody downloaded xing anything anymore. you went straight to winamp or you used realplayer for streaming.

~ what remains ~

mp3 democratization. without the leaked xing encoder, mp3 ripping would have stayed expensive for at least another year or two. that delay would have given the music industry time to figure out a digital strategy before napster arrived. the encoder leak compressed that timeline into months. the entire napster-kazaa-limewire-itunes arc flows from here.

xing as a name is now a small footnote. people remember winamp and fraunhofer. xing rarely comes up. but for a brief window in 1996-1998 they were one of the few companies that defined what mp3 software looked like on windows. then realnetworks ate them and the brand evaporated.

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