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Winamp: Media player debuted 25 years ago on Windows 95

Apr 24, 2022

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Exactly 25 years ago today, on April 21, 1997, the first version of the popular media player Winamp from Nullsoft, which was particularly widespread around the turn of the millennium, was released as shareware for Windows 95 and quickly established itself to the new standard for the playback of MP3s.

High phase with the emergence of MP3

The “old” Winamp media player had its heyday with the advent of compressed music in MP3 format and dueled against competitors such as AIMP and Foobar2000 at the turn of the millennium. But after more than 16 years, Winamp came to an end in 2013, version 5.666 from December 12, 2013 remained the last to this day. Only Beta 5.8 Build 3660 from 2018 improved a little bit in terms of Windows 10 compatibility.

History of Winamp

Winamp 2
Winamp 3
Winamp 5
- Winamp 5.5< /li>
- Winamp 5.6
- Winamp 5.7 Beta
- Winamp 5.8 Beta

The media player developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev for Nullsoft and acquired by AOL in 1999 for $80 million was distributed as shareware from 1997 to 2013. On December 20, 2013, Radionomy bought the media player and only released Winamp 5.8 as a beta version.

Winamp supports the playback of MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and WMA and was one of the first media players that could play the free OGG Vorbis audio format.

< h2 class="text-width text-h2" id="section_winamp_6_erschien_trotz_ankuenigung_nie">Winamp 6 never appeared despite the announcement

In October 2018, Radionomy then announced Winamp 6 as a complete new edition , but has not yet been able to deliver a finished product.

With “Winamp – The ultimate media player” the company went on the offensive again in September 2021 and was actively looking for beta testers. To this day, nothing has changed in this status and even a public beta is still not in sight.

The official website of the ” reveals whether and how it should continue. new” Winamp.

Update 04/21/2022 3:54 p.m.

Winamp is maintained by the community today

Once again, the community of the ComputerBase forum has come up with a very useful addition to the editor's contribution, namely the venerable media player Winamp is still being maintained with updates and extensions today.

< p class="p text-width">Winamp is maintained by the WinAmp Community Update Project (“WACUP”), which provides a plug-in pack based on Winamp 5.666 via the official project website.