The MP3 and TTPlayer Era: Lyric Displays, Skins, and the National Music Player Written by One Person

The previous article, “The Download Tool Wars,” was about how people got files back onto their computers; this one is about what they did after that—nine times out of ten, they listened to music. The MP3 format used the magic of “dividing size by ten” to fit the entire music industry onto hard drives: a CD could hold only a dozen or so songs, while a 40GB hard drive could store ten thousand. Collecting songs, cutting ringtones, copying lyrics—the “music library” became private property for ordinary people for the first time. In the old software listing pages restored by the Winzheng Software History Archive, all the players in this audio revolution are there—even their rises and falls in editor ratings.

The Llama Stirs: Winamp and Its Dedicated Section

As usual, the inspiration came from overseas. Winamp’s official slogan was wildly arrogant—“It really whips the llama’s ass”—but the product lived up to it: skins, an equalizer, a plugin ecosystem. For the next decade, the feature lists of domestic Chinese music players were almost all copied from it. Its status in the Chinese-speaking world has one piece of hard evidence: in the archive, other software is crowded into the “Media Playback” category, while Winamp has its own dedicated section—“WINAMP Section.” Inside are Winamp v5.551 Multilingual Edition with a five-star editor rating, the community-made Zhou Mingbo Chinese Localization Enhanced Edition, also rated five stars, the audio enhancement plugin DFX for Winamp for adding bass and spatial effects, and MiniLyrics, which scrolled lyrics on the desktop. When a piece of software was powerful enough for a download site to give it its own category, that was treatment not even the former king of streaming media, RealPlayer, received. Audiophiles, meanwhile, worshipped the austere foobar2000: an interface so plain it looked like Notepad, but sound tuning treated almost as a matter of faith—five stars, 2.8MB.

TTPlayer: The National Music Player Written by One Person

But the software that truly settled into the bottom-right corner of Chinese desktops was written by a single person. TTPlayer, known in Chinese as Qianqian Jingting, was created by Zheng Nanling and was said to have been named after the song “Qian Qian Que Ge.” In the archive, this listing page for TTPlayer v5.5 Beta carries a five-star editor rating, and the file size column reads 2.7MB—2.7MB that contained lyric display, a skin engine, a ten-band equalizer, and format conversion, as well as the youth of a generation. Its killer feature was lyric display: automatic search, automatic download, karaoke-style line-by-line scrolling. The era of copying lyrics by hand at school desks ended there. It was free, clean, lightweight, and ad-free—in an age overrun by rogue software, putting those four words together was almost miraculous. Its platform status is also documented in the archive: audio plugin giant DFX released a dedicated DFX for TTPlayer Special Edition, while community-made beautified enhanced editions and clean modified editions appeared one after another. When a music player reached the point where others made plugins and modified builds for it, it had become an ecosystem.

After the Acquisition: Traces of Transformation in the Archive

In the summer of 2006, Baidu acquired TTPlayer. The changes did not happen overnight, but the archive faithfully recorded the traces: the changelog for V5.7 Beta1 included “added speed limit settings for online songs” and “support pausing playback while songs are buffering”—a local music player was quietly becoming a client for an online music library. The description on the listing page also changed its wording, from “player” to “a music resource sharing and mutual-aid platform.” The editor rating slid from five stars in v5.5 to three stars in the 5.7 era. Tools becoming portals was the fate of all acquired software in that period, and TTPlayer was merely one of the most regrettable examples.

Music Boxes Strike from Above: Listening No Longer Required Collecting Songs First

What truly hollowed out TTPlayer’s foundation was that the “music boxes” changed the rules: why did listening to music require collecting MP3s first? KuGou Music 2009 has a telling detail in the archive—it was not categorized under “Media Playback,” but under “File Sharing.” Its description at the time was blunt: “professional P2P music and file transfer software based on the Chinese platform.” Type a song name into the search box, download while playing, and tens of millions of computers became one another’s music libraries—the logic of the local music library was uprooted. Kuwo Music Box likewise entered with a five-star rating. But the other side of that prosperity is also visible in the archive: the proliferation of listings such as KuGou 2010 Ad-Free Green Edition shows that ads had become so numerous that users would rather download community-modified versions—the same script as FlashGet in the previous article, replayed word for word.

The Other Path of the White Earbuds

At the same time, another path was working in a parallel world. The combination of iTunes v8.1, with a five-star editor rating, and the iPod created a closed loop for “buying legitimate digital music,” and white earbud cables became a status symbol. The Chinese internet’s attitude toward it was highly pragmatic: the archive contains Winamp plugins such as ml_iPod—using Winamp to take over the iPod and bypass iTunes’ all-in-one control. As for where the songs on the iPod came from, everyone understood without saying. Along the way, small tools such as MP3 Splitter and Converter remained popular for years—mobile ringtones had to be cut manually, and whether you clipped the chorus intro precisely was both a technical skill and a matter of face.

The Endgame: This Time, Tencent Won

Longtime readers of this series are familiar with the recurring segment where “Tencent enters, as usual.” In earlier articles, it won with Lianzhong and lost with Xuanfeng. This time, the entrant was QQ Music—at first, merely one participant in the music-box melee. What ended the melee was not product design, but copyright: around 2011, the wave of legitimization arrived, and the gray zone of free MP3s was gradually cleared out. In 2013, TTPlayer was merged into Baidu Music, and the name “Qianqian” disappeared from desktops. Later still, KuGou, Kuwo, and QQ Music arrived at the same destination by different routes, merging into Tencent Music. The player war thus became a war over copyright libraries, and exclusive rights and Green Diamond memberships took over the role once played by “dedicated links”—once again, what songs you could listen to was no longer up to the player.

Epilogue: What 2.7MB Taught Us

Looking back, what TTPlayer left behind was not just lyric display and skins. It proved something that sounds almost like a fairy tale today: free software written by one person could be fast, clean, and dignified, and could settle onto the desktops of hundreds of millions of people purely through word of mouth. Back then, internet users chose music players by looking at editor ratings; today, developers choose large models by looking at independent evaluation data. The logic has never changed: reputation cannot be faked, and it cannot be rushed.

The original listing pages for these players—version numbers, file sizes, editor ratings, and descriptions from the time—have all been restored and brought online in the Software History Archive. The archive’s newly opened Old Articles Archive is also gradually recovering original software tutorials and news pieces from that era. The archive is for historical preservation and research only, and does not provide any downloads. The first five articles in the series are: “The 2008 PC Installation List,” “The Free Revolution in Antivirus Software,” “The Input Method Wars,” “The Internet Café Era,” and “The Download Tool Wars.” What was the first MP3 song you collected on your hard drive? Share the secret signal in the comments.