We’ve heard the following news often over the years: Winamp is dead! Winamp is resurrected! Winamp is dead again! And now, a new one is added to this line of news. Revived Winamp is here with version 5.9. However, there are very few mp3s that can be played anymore because now everyone prefers to listen to their music from streaming services.
The transition from purchasing music on physical media such as compact discs to distributing it digitally directly to computers and mobile devices has been quite painful. It has always been relatively easy to rip CDs or transfer the digital files they contain to a PC, but due to their small file size, most MP3s have made digital music files portable and easy to share on the internet, causing confusion over piracy. Music sharing apps like Napster, Bearshare, and Limewire have come and gone, but despite all this, one app has remained a loyal companion to users with huge music collections. Winamp offered an extremely lightweight yet full-featured media player alternative to bulky programs like Apple’s iTunes or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.
When the music industry finally found ways to securely sell music files online and eventually switched to streaming services where users didn’t need thousands of media files stored on a device, the need for a standalone media player like Winamp disappeared, and after the app changed owners several times, its active development began in 2013. Released at the end of , it ended with version 5.666.
Now Winamp is on the scene once again. Of course, computers have changed a lot since Winamp’s heyday, but the player follows the old tradition and doesn’t seem to have changed much. But the development team knows there’s a lot of work to be done to modernize Winamp, and with the successful transition to VS2019, they can start adding support for modern digital audio formats and maybe even a few popular streaming services.
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