Justin Frankel
Encyclopedia
Justin Frankel 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. He's 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. In 2002, he was named to the MIT
Technology Review
TR100
as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Kathleen, worked as a rural mail carrier and in a health food store. Justin had an aptitude for computers at an early age. His skill eventually led him to running the student computer network of Verde Valley School
he attended, as well as writing an email
application for the students. He also wrote a keystroke logging
program that could record keystrokes of people using those computers, though he claims to have not actually used it. While in high school he started using the moniker Nullsoft
for his software.
in 1996, where he took 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..
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.
simultaneously acquired Nullsoft and Spinner.com
in a combined purchase worth approximately $400 million. In a July 21, 1999 SEC S-3 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.
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.
Frankel announced his resignation from AOL on January 22, 2004 on his weblog, 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."
which allows several musicians to make music together via the Internet.
Under his new company, Cockos
, he has been developing REAPER
, a multi-track audio and MIDI sequencer for Windows, with a version for Mac OS X in beta. The program has been developed using a release system wherein Frankel releases a new revision of the software approximately every 2 to 3 days.
According to his weblog, Frankel is also an enthusiast bagpipe player.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
computer programmer
Computer programming
Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
best known for his work on the Winamp
Winamp
Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...
media player application and for inventing the gnutella
Gnutella
Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
network. He's also the founder of Cockos Incorporated
Cockos
Cockos, Inc is an American digital audio technology company founded in 2004 by Justin Frankel. The company's stated goal is: "to develop software sustainably while preventing profit rationale from forcing engineering compromises...
which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER
REAPER
REAPER is a digital audio workstation created by Cockos. It is distributed with an uncrippled evaluation license with a nag screen explaining the license cost. It is currently available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X...
digital audio workstation
Digital audio workstation
A digital audio workstation is an electronic system designed solely or primarily for recording, editing and playing back digital audio. DAWs were originally tape-less, microprocessor-based systems such as the Synclavier and Fairlight CMI...
, the NINJAM
Ninjam
NINJAM stands for Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music.Creating music naturally relies on players' ability to keep time with each other. Latency between players causes natural time keeping to be thrown awry...
collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor. In 2002, he was named to the MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
Technology Review
Technology Review
Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
TR100
TR35
The TR35 is an annual list published by MIT Technology Review magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.Some of the most famous winners of the award include Larry Page and Sergey Brin , Linus Torvalds , Jerry Yang , Jonathan Ive , Mark Zuckerberg...
as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Early life
Justin Frankel was born in 1978 and grew up in Sedona, ArizonaSedona, Arizona
Sedona is a city that straddles the county line between Coconino and Yavapai counties in the northern Verde Valley region of the U.S. state of Arizona...
. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Kathleen, worked as a rural mail carrier and in a health food store. Justin had an aptitude for computers at an early age. His skill eventually led him to running the student computer network of Verde Valley School
Verde Valley School
Verde Valley School is an international college preparatory boarding and day school for students in grades 9-12. It is one of only a few U.S. boarding schools to offer the International Baccalaureate curriculum as its sole curriculum for 11th and 12th grades. The school is located in Sedona,...
he attended, as well as writing an email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
application for the students. He also wrote a keystroke logging
Keystroke logging
Keystroke logging is the action of tracking the keys struck on a keyboard, typically in a covert manner so that the person using the keyboard is unaware that their actions are being monitored...
program that could record keystrokes of people using those computers, though he claims to have not actually used it. While in high school he started using the moniker Nullsoft
Nullsoft
Nullsoft, Inc. is a software house founded in Sedona, Arizona in 1997 by Justin Frankel. Its most known products include the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server. In recent years, their open source installer system, NSIS, has also risen in popularity as a widely used...
for his software.
Winamp
After graduating high school with a 3.9 GPA, he attended the University of UtahUniversity of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
in 1996, where he took Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, 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
Donationware
Donationware is a licensing model that supplies fully operational software to the user and pleads for an optional donation be paid to the programmer or a third-party beneficiary . The amount of the donation may also be stipulated by the author, or it may be left to the discretion of the user,...
suggested in return for using the program, Frankel earned tens of thousands of dollars a month..
Frankel, along with Tom Pepper
Tom Pepper
Tom Pepper is a computer programmer best known for his collaboration with Justin Frankel on the invention of 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...
(who played a big part of the Winamp development and distribution), later completed SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast
SHOUTcast is cross-platform proprietary software for streaming media over the Internet. The software, developed by Nullsoft , allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or HE-AAC format, to be broadcast to and from media player software, enabling the creation of Internet radio "stations"...
, which allowed ordinary users with an Internet connection to broadcast, or "stream
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
", audio over the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. He also created the Advanced Visualization Studio
Advanced Visualization Studio
Advanced Visualization Studio , is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp's creator, Justin Frankel. 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...
, 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 AOLAOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
simultaneously acquired Nullsoft and Spinner.com
Spinner.com
Spinner is an AOL Music property, which bills itself as "the ultimate music blog for free MP3s, free CD listening, [and] discovering new artists."...
in a combined purchase worth approximately $400 million. In a July 21, 1999 SEC S-3 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.
AOL
On March 14, 2000, Frankel and Nullsoft colleague Tom PepperTom Pepper
Tom Pepper is a computer programmer best known for his collaboration with Justin Frankel on the invention of 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...
released gnutella
Gnutella
Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...
, 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
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
system, which was used by users to share their MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
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
Single point of failure
A single point of failure is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. They are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system.-Overview:Systems can be made...
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
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...
, gnutella
Gnutella
Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...
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
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
. Gnutella
Gnutella
Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...
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
BearShare
BearShare is a peer-to-peer file sharing application originally created by Free Peers, Inc. for Microsoft Windows, and now sold by MusicLab, LLC .- History :...
, Morpheus
Morpheus (computer program)
Morpheus was a file sharing and searching peer-to-peer client for Microsoft Windows, developed and distributed by the company StreamCast, that originally used the Opennap protocol, but later supported many different peer-to-peer protocols...
, Gnucleus and LimeWire
LimeWire
LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing client program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems supported by the Java software platform. LimeWire uses the gnutella network as well as the BitTorrent protocol. A free software version and a purchasable "enhanced"...
.
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
AOL Instant Messenger
AOL Instant Messenger is an instant messaging and presence computer program which uses the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time. It was released by AOL in May 1997...
to block advertisements in the application. Frankel threatened to resign on June 2, 2003, after AOL removed his program WASTE
WASTE
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...
, a private peer-to-peer
Private P2P
Private peer-to-peer systems are peer-to-peer systems that allow only mutually trusted peers to participate. This can be achieved by using a central server such as a Direct Connect hub to authenticate clients. Alternatively, users can exchange passwords or cryptographic keys with friends to form...
file-sharing program, from the Nullsoft website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
. 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.
Frankel announced his resignation from AOL on January 22, 2004 on his weblog, 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
Frankel has been quite active after his resignation from Nullsoft. A couple of Justin's current projects in development (according to his weblog) are a programmable effects processor called Jesusonic and a new software named NINJAMNinjam
NINJAM stands for Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music.Creating music naturally relies on players' ability to keep time with each other. Latency between players causes natural time keeping to be thrown awry...
which allows several musicians to make music together via the Internet.
Under his new company, Cockos
Cockos
Cockos, Inc is an American digital audio technology company founded in 2004 by Justin Frankel. The company's stated goal is: "to develop software sustainably while preventing profit rationale from forcing engineering compromises...
, he has been developing REAPER
REAPER
REAPER is a digital audio workstation created by Cockos. It is distributed with an uncrippled evaluation license with a nag screen explaining the license cost. It is currently available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X...
, a multi-track audio and MIDI sequencer for Windows, with a version for Mac OS X in beta. The program has been developed using a release system wherein Frankel releases a new revision of the software approximately every 2 to 3 days.
According to his weblog, Frankel is also an enthusiast bagpipe player.
Quotes
- "For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave." - from a blog posting announcing his resignation from AOL
External links
-
(c[a,o s[a,o][s] de justin)], Justin Frankel's blogBlogA blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in... - The World's Most Dangerous Geek; Interviewed by David KushnerDavid KushnerDavid Kushner is a writer who has contributed to publications including Wired, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, IEEE Spectrum and Salon. From 1994 to 1996 he worked as a senior producer and writer on the SonicNet website. The first edition of his non-fiction book, Masters of Doom, was published...
; RollingStone.com; January 13, 2004. - Justin Frankel Reveals Life After Winamp; Interviewed by Nate Mook, BetaNews, January 3, 2005.
- Turn Off The Internet; A site made by Steve Gedikian and Justin, as a joke.
- Interview with Justin Frankel on Winamp and the Reaper; In depth interview on the design and the history of Winamp. Digital Tools, April 2008.
- The Men Who Stole the World; By Lev Grossman, Times, November 24, 2010