Winamp is back from the dead

By Chris Szewczyk - PC Gamer


https://i.imgur.com/O3buOLX.png

One of the most popular MP3 players of all time is back! Though active development on Winamp ceased back in 2013, in 2018 word came through that development had restarted, and after a long period with little news, the Winamp 5.9 release candidate is now available for download(opens in new tab) (via Bleeping Computer(opens in new tab)).

Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 comes with a comprehensive changelog, beginning with porting to Visual Studio 2019, updated libraries, Windows 11 compatibility, codec updates and much more.

DJ Egg posted the following in the Winamp forum: ‘This is the culmination of 4 years' work since the 5.8 release. Two dev teams, and a pandemic-induced hiatus period in-between. 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.’

Judging by that, It appears as though there is some work to be done. There are known issues, including problems with the Milkdrop visualization feature and older plugins. Some of these should be relatively simple fixes to older .dll files. Other bugs are sure to be revealed as users get to testing.

Winamp holds a place in many PC user’s hearts. Before the days of streaming services, the MP3 was king. It wasn’t too hard to rip CDs and encode them to MP3. One of the things I loved was its support for lossless codecs including APE and FLAC, which weren’t widely supported back in the 2000s.

https://i.imgur.com/g9jt3Hq.png

Who can forget the infamous Napster and other similar pirating tools such as Kazaa, Limewire and eMule? It made acquiring (cough) MP3s ridiculously easy, and Winamp was arguably the best player out there.

I loved its simple interface, playlist management and particularly the visualizations. For so many years, I didn’t feel the need to upgrade my media player, though eventually VLC and Media Player Classic took over my PC, due to their superior video capabilities.

I for one am very happy to see that Winamp is back in active development. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to grab hold of this new version. I’m in the mood for some nostalgic llama ass whipping.

The question is, who needs this type of software anymore? :-s I stream everything other than a few mp3's I have for songs I like that aren't available on Spotify, and I can integrate those songs into my Spotify liked songs along with all the songs I stream. So there's no real need for a stand alone mp3 player.

I loved that program

Oh me too, I used the hell out of it. But why bring something like that now?

IDK, maybe its like playing records for people now :lol:

:lol:


I used to have thousands of mp3's and I have no idea what I did with them.

I still have thousands of mp3s and I know exactly where they are. I still listen to them. If I find a new song I like and it's on youtube, I'll rip an mp3 of it from the youtube video using an online stream ripper. I still use one of the old no-frills versions of winamp that you can grab from oldversion.com. One that doesn't check for updates automatically. I've been doing that for years now where winamp is concerned. The older versions work perfectly fine.

I've never bothered with Spotify or ITunes, and I only use Amazon Music occasionally.

As far as I'm concerned, these guys are wasting their time. All that visualization crap was a waste of resources to begin with. I get why upgrading to VS19 is important, but with windows's ability to run apps under older profiles of windows, then why bother with something as simple as an mp3 player?

maybe DJs use it

i love mr bungle :lol:

Winamp was the app with the wildly trippy visualizer right? We used to get high in college and throw that thing on someone's tv in a dorm room, good times :lol:

Like Lance said though, just can't see ever using a program like this again.

damn so many memories...trying to get the perfect Winamp skin, having multiple media players, then finding out the default settings on the ol WMP worked just fine and rarely caused any audio conflicts