Winamp was a popular music player for Windows in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it still has some loyal fans to this day. Following four years of development, and several leaked beta patches, a new testing release is available for Winamp
Winamp Overview:
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. 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.
Version 1 of Winamp was released in 1997, and quickly grew popular with over 3 million downloads, paralleling the developing trend of MP3 (music) file sharing. Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions were widely used and made Winamp one of the most downloaded Windows applications. By 2000, Winamp had over 25 million registered users and by 2001 it had 60 million users. A poor reception to the 2002 rewrite, Winamp3, was followed by the release of Winamp 5 in 2003, and a later release of version 5.5 in 2007. A now-discontinued version for Android was also released, along with early counterparts for MS-DOS and Macintosh.
Winamp New Update 2022
According to Winamp News Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 was released on July 26 for Windows, with many small improvements and bug fixes — Windows 11 is officially supported, you can play audio streams over HTTPS, and the VP8 codec is now properly recognized. After the new update for Winamp, the new version also no longer works on Windows XP or Vista. Most of the work in this release has been modernizing the code, so future updates don’t take another four years.
The development team said, “To the end-user, it might not seem like there’s a whole heap of changes, but the largest and hardest part was actually migrating the entire project from VS2008 to VS2019 and getting it all to build successfully. The groundwork has now been laid, and now we can concentrate more on features.”
The effort to maintain the classic version of Winamp is happening alongside the company’s other music-related ambitions, which includes an updated cross-platform version, a ‘Winamp Foundation’ that funds musicians, and NFT sales. The Winamp team said in March that Winamp 6 will be a “cross-platform app for Android, iOS, web, etc.,” and Winamp 5 for Windows is “not dead.”