
Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013 - bulibuta
http://www.winamp.com/media-player/en
======
bbx
Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95,
which is allegedly the best version out there.

Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available:
lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept _simple_.

I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful
experience.

    
    
      Me: Can't I pause that song by hitting space?  
      WMP: No, there are no keyboard shortcuts!
      Me: I wanna play all the songs of this folder!
      WMP: Ok, but I'll mess up the order! By the way, are you interested in purchasing
      more songs from this artist? Cause I got a VirginMega link just right here!
      Me: No thanks...
      WMP: Why not? I mean, iTunes gets away with it, why can't I?
      Me: I just want to play some music.
      WMP: Really?? JUST that??
      Me: I wish.

~~~
sandGorgon
Did you ever try Foobar 2k - its arguably a better replacement for Winamp on
windows

~~~
delluminatus
I think foobar2000 was created by a (the?) developer who worked on Winamp many
years ago, before it was bought.

~~~
pit
Yes, Peter Pawlowski. According to Wikipedia, he is "a former freelance
contractor for Nullsoft."

EDIT: He's also been working on an audio player called Boom:
[http://perkele.cc/software/boom](http://perkele.cc/software/boom)

~~~
kevingadd
Peter was notable for maintaining a lot of the audio output backends for
Winamp. People who had problems with their Creative Labs sound cards (read:
basically anyone who owned one) causing playback glitches in Winamp would post
about it on the Winamp forums and peter would get really cranky and eventually
figure out how to fix it. (:

------
jaysonelliot
I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of
iTunes.

At least it's a real application that I can download and own for myself, and
doesn't stop working just because it's no longer being supported.

This is a great example of why I don't move all my data to the cloud, or use
browser-based apps for things that matter to me.

Hopefully they'll release the codebase to the world.

~~~
caycep
Why winamp? my understanding is that it's long been surpassed by other apps,
i.e. foobar, even VLC

~~~
jay_m
The main reason I use Winamp is because it has global keyboard shortcuts for
controlling playback. I'm not sure if any other media players have that, if
anyone knows of one that does I would love to know.

~~~
MetaCosm
AHK ([http://www.autohotkey.com/](http://www.autohotkey.com/)) -- Global
keybindings for any app you want.

~~~
criley2
Out of curiosity: I use AHK to do basic testing automation for a windows
application that I have literally zero ability to control programatically (to
achieve actually good automated testing). Anyone have a better option for this
kind of use case?

~~~
decode
AutoIt is a popular choice:

[http://www.autoitscript.com/](http://www.autoitscript.com/)

~~~
jbrooksuk
AHK is based on AutoIt v2.

------
Elepsis
Wow, the end of an era.

Maybe it's just that it's what I learned to use first, but for a scattered
library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven't
found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and _fast_ to find the songs I
was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.

I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn't how most
people consume music anymore, and the writing's been on the wall for a while.
But it's incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying
with a whimper. I'm not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for
Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3
data quality.

~~~
sharkweek
Nothing will ever beat the joys of finding new "skins" for the Winamp player
-- I had so many amazing ones lined up, and loved nothing more than switching
them all out.

Sad to see it go...

 _IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA 'S ASS_

~~~
weland
I still do that fairly often. Audacious can load Winamp skins. Sometimes its
interface borks on my collection (35,000+ songs), but it's responsive enough.

My desktop still looks very much like it did in the 1990s...

~~~
frooxie
Cool! I've used the Sumea skin for about 15 years and I'd like to keep it, so
I'm glad that I can use it with other music players.

------
tsumnia
There are ultimately two types of people in the comments right now: those that
will miss Winamp and those laughing it was still around.

Winamp worked. It played all your MP3s without any of the other fluff. It
played your music in a very lightweight program. What was also nice was this
was before every program auto-updated; so you'd manually have to go update it;
except, the newer versions were adding features, not fixing bugs. If you
thought Winamp was fine, there was never a need to upgrade. I remember never
upgrading Winamp until way into my college years.

People have mentioned it, but I didn't change to foobar because I always used
Winamp. Even when they made the modern UI, you could (and can) still go
Classic. Computer space and performance weren't issues because the extra bells
and whistles are easy to never use.

Only a few weeks ago did I make the move from Winamp to foobar; and it was
only to see the difference. Initial thoughts are I don't like how it displays
my music; but I do like the shuffle since its playing songs I never hear.

~~~
badman_ting
It worked for playing MP3s, but once you had a collection of a certain size it
didn't do a very good job of managing that collection, at least at the time I
stopped using it. You'd double-click an MP3 or a playlist and it would
completely forget about everything that was in there before. I got so sick of
that.

~~~
bartl
You can change that with a setting in the preferences.

~~~
badman_ting
Ain't that always the way.

------
xal
Thank you Justin Frankel for this wonderfully whimsical piece of software and
all the code you have shared over the years. I wouldn't have been a programmer
if it weren't for you being providing such a stellar role model.

~~~
MrBra
And I bet many people don't even know that after Winamp Justin Frenkel started
making his hands dirty with digital audio workstation coding and made a
fantastic one! [http://www.reaper.fm/](http://www.reaper.fm/) with a
unbelievable set of features for 4 Mb (yessir!) and super competitive
licensing options (but you can still try the full software free with no
limitations whatsoever!). If you make music with your Pc or Mac this will
shock you on many levels, starting from filesize! This guy knows what he's
doing! Thanks Justin! If winamp code will be made public there will be a lot
to learn!

~~~
zem
love this bit from
[http://www.reaper.fm/purchase.php](http://www.reaper.fm/purchase.php):

Honest Business Model We offer a good product at a fair price.

We don't spend money and effort on marketing, complicated piracy protection,
or other things that do not directly improve REAPER and the user experience.

We think the good will generated by playing fair and being responsive to users
is more valuable to our business than short-term profits.

------
corford
People laugh at me for still using winamp but I love it. It's fast, low
memory, never crashes and the ui hasn't significantly changed for well over a
decade.

More than that, it's one of the few pieces of software I still use every day
that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens when I was first
getting seriously involved with computers.

Its death sort of marks an end of an era for me :'(

~~~
zamalek
> few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all
> the way back to my mid-teens

Same here :(. I pirated it for so many years and it was the first license that
I purchased after being able to afford it (after getting a job).

I would really like to know why :(. Winamp is one of the very few companies
that I feel deserves many more pennies than they asked for.

------
atwebb
Well this really sucks the llama's ....

Thanks for all the skins and memories!

~~~
MrBra
llama's aass! :) had to be said the right way!

------
bluedino
I remember as a teen talking to the developers on IRC, in one of the Windows
development channels. I remember thinking they were crazy because they didn't
want to use the standard Windows components to do the UI. I also remember
wondering why anyone bother spending a half hour downloading 1 song over a 56k
modem when you could just set your Sony Discman on top of your computer!

Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went
totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the
internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that
and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and
effort into a project.

~~~
da02
Do you have any similar experiences like this with other teams or products?

------
computer
I always used Winamp on Windows, so when I switched to Linux I tried basically
every single open-source alternative that worked with my workflow: Per-song
ratings, a nested Genre/Artist/Album/Song library browser, global hotkeys,
able to handle a collection of >100 GB and a useful playlist/queue system.

For anyone else looking for the same thing: the one that I ended up choosing
was [http://gmusicbrowser.org/](http://gmusicbrowser.org/). See
[http://gmusicbrowser.org/screenshots/ListsLibraryContext.png](http://gmusicbrowser.org/screenshots/ListsLibraryContext.png).

~~~
sanyi
I did the same thing, ended up with cmus:
[http://cmus.sourceforge.net/](http://cmus.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
wooptoo
MPD is pretty popular too [http://www.musicpd.org/](http://www.musicpd.org/)
It has a client/server model and you can create your own music streaming
service by controlling it remotely and streaming back over http. ncmpc/ncmpcpp
is a client for mpd that resembles cmus quite a lot.

~~~
kinleyd
mpd with ncmpc has brought my music very close to me - just a couple of
keystrokes away.

Regarding Winamp, I've always loved it's tagline "Winamp kicks the llama's
ass" (or was it butt?).

------
AndyKelley
This seems like a good time to plug my latest open source project: libgroove
[1]

It's a cross-platform music player backend C library. It's meant to be generic
enough to be the backend of any music player.

I use it as the backend for Groove Basin [2] which just might hit milestone
1.0.0 around December 20.

[1]:
[https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove](https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove)
[2]:
[https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin](https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin)

~~~
endgame
Nice interface, but what does groovebasin offer that mpd doesn't?

~~~
AndyKelley
I'll just name one: perfect replaygain. Meaning it uses the same code to
decode and play audio as it does to scan and detect loudness. MPD does no
replaygain scanning and only understands APEv2 tags. You have to manage
replaygain scanning yourself, and if you have audio that does not support
APEv2 tags you're shit out of luck. Groove Basin on the other hand does lazy
multi-core replaygain scanning and everything it can play (which is everything
that libav can decode (in other words anything that VLC can play)) it can
scan. So you never run into that situation where you are listening to a quiet
song, turn the volume up, and then a loud song blasts your ears off.

There are a bunch of other flaws in MPD's design which I've carefully fixed in
the design of libgroove/groovebasin. I know because Groove Basin _used_ to be
an MPD client until I got stuck by all of the issues and then finally ripped
out MPD and wrote my own backend to use instead.

I have a WIP blog article that goes into more detail about this stuff. This
Winamp article might just be the kick in the pants I need to get it finished
:)

------
eli
Ars had a really nice article about the history of Winamp and of what went
wrong: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-
greatest-...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-
mp3-player-undid-itself/)

~~~
AsymetricCom
I think what "went wrong" can be summed up in a sentence. The player was never
built to be a publishing platform or had any other monetization angle built
into it.

As soon as it started getting features that would support this, the technical
audience saw it coming a mile away and never adopted the required usage
patterns needed to leverage such a monetization strategy. And not just because
they wanted to avoid paying for music, but because the service model is just a
pain in the ass compared to the self-service model.

"It could have been Pandora" ignores the fact that Pandora basically sucks and
people just tolerate it. People want to be in control of their software
despite what the business fucks running "IT" think now, conceptualizing a
"service" where none is needed, trying to pull infinite profit from such
trivial functions such as routing packets correctly or parsing compressed
audio and routing it through hardware to a speaker without pointless and
pathetic DRM algorithms trying to detect time-skewed copyright audio.. sigh.
by setting the bar so low that people think that shitfuck-suck software is
what you have to put up with unless you have "long term support" or other
wedges into your conceptual/computational sovereignty to do something as
simple as publish a document and expect it to be readable on another computer
in 10 years, a problem that was solved 200 years ago is now the cutting edge
of business technology and development, fueling well known multinationals such
as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Computing never was meant to be a platform for economic revolution, it just
abstracts away paper work. You still have the exact same problems as with the
internet as without it. I won't say the internet bubble is over until the
world is actually simpler with computers instead of way, way more complicated
and outright retarded in many aspects.

NO, WINAMP DIDN'T FAIL, in contrary, economic motivations failed to make
Winamp suck, failed to steal a public resource and public work. Failed to co-
opt the direction and passion of artists. AOL failed to capitalize on selfless
engineering that actually solved a problem the correct way, it failed to
corrupt the best solution with advertising indicators and economic feedback
loops built into a market, shoehorned into an audio player. It failed to take
us back instead of forward, like technology is supposed to.

I think the clearest indicator that WINAMP is a success, is the fact that XMMS
exists, the fact that people use version 2.x without AOL's "support", 10+
years since release. It's a simple idea: a media player that supports plugins
via a standardized API. (a real standard, not a "living standard" business-
oxymoron) People still use it, for business and personal usage, and it doesn't
tax them to do it, any more than a screwdriver taxes you, but not like the way
a "service" taxes you.

~~~
AsymetricCom
Also this: [http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/](http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/)

------
GBiT
Please open source it. It is still best player around with classic skin.

~~~
aram
My thoughts exactly. It would be great if they would open-source the code.

~~~
atlbeer
After this many years.. I'd be really interested to see how clean/mangled the
code is

------
gordaco
I'm another long-time winamp user. I got stuck on 2.91, never needed to update
since it worked perfectly. The biggest reason why I never switched to another
player (aside from all of them having zero features that interested me) is
that the plugin system was extremely easy to use and had a community of
devoted developers. I can reproduce like 20 or so different formats that the
"naked" winamp cannot (mostly console chiptunes, like .vgm, .spc or .psf). I
know that other players support those plugins, but for me, there's simply no
need to switch. There's nothing I miss.

I strongly associate winamp with the early days of P2P, when I was just a teen
and got fascinated by the possibility of, at last, getting (at 5k/s; way
better than nothing) all those songs from a foreign music TV channel that
never played in the local radios... and using Winamp to play them. But it's
not just nostalgia: what makes Winamp such a great piece of software is that I
still use it every day and it doesn't show its age.

~~~
bemmu
There was something magical about spending forever downloading an MP3 with a
modem, then playing it at 22kHZ because computer was not fast enough to run
Winamp at full quality :-)

Now I have every song I could possibly want to listen to in Spotify, which is
magical in another way.

------
vanwilder77
Is it only me, or there is some JS <script> tag in winamp's <title>?

<title><div id="ad_play_300"><script type="text/javascript"> <!--
adSetType("F"); htmlAdWH("93301178", "300", "250"); adSetType(""); //\-->
</script></div></title>

~~~
Eyes2design
Its a A(W)OL failed code.

------
codegeek
Nostalgia. I remember the good old days just a decade ago when we would
download any song we want (courtesy napster/kazaa) and the default music
player would be: yep Winamp hands down. Keyboard shortcuts were so convenient.
It just seems like we have headed in the wrong direction with how music is
managed on our computers/devices etc. Not to mention the beautiful skins that
we could apply for funkiness. RIP winamp and you will be missed.

------
51Cards
Too bad, I liked their Android player as well. One of the few pieces of
software I have used continuously for... oi... longer than I care to admit.
Makes me sad.

~~~
lnanek2
Android user here too. I remember just a year ago I tried a dozen apps for
ShoutCast playing and it was the best. Sad to see it go. Used it a lot back on
Windows back in the day when that was my OS as well. Was one of the few
players with lots of high quality skins, including large size ones, and game
pad controls, great for parties.

------
AndrewKemendo
I still use Winamp as my main musicplayer - it's customizable, import/exports
to iPod easily, doesn't spam me with updates, doesn't force me to buy things
through it, reads basically every format and above all it is really light.

It's a shame - seems like it died because it doesn't have a content purchasing
mechanism forced on the user.

------
fetbaffe
This is a sad day in computer history. Winamp was my first default music
player and first true love of a computer program. It was in the end of the
1990s and ICQ ruled internet chatting and mp3s was new thing.

I used Winamp everyday. We shared music from dorm to dorm on the campus
network. Everyone had Winamp. Parties had a dedicated Winamp computer with all
the playlists with music available from the campus network.

We searched the net with Phoenix (now called Firefox) or Opera to find all the
album art work. We installed beautiful Winamp skins and was amazed at audio
3d-visualization plugins that Winamp offered.

Winamp was early on handling multiple audio cards. I had dual audio cards, one
just for Winamp connected to my HiFi equipment and the other for the rest of
the Windows sounds connected to the computer table speakers.

Early with global hotkey support. Plugins that showed GUI popups of the music
playing. Fraunhofer codec support. And it was super fast.

And I still remember the uproar when Winamp 3 was released. True fanboys
stayed with the Winamp 2 release for many years, the classic.

Sad this has to end, but Winamp never successfully adopted to a world with
full fledged media library players like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Back
in the day we used Windows Explorer (or Norton Commander) to cataloged all our
music and soon a community based naming standard convention of music was
"created" by mutual agreement.

And then came music streaming.

Bye Winamp!

// A pro license owner

------
redblacktree
I guess the Llama's ass now gets a break.

~~~
glennos
Rumour has it that PETA forced the shutdown.

------
ibudiallo
Why is this the title of the page?

<title><div id="ad_play_300"><script type="text/javascript"> <!--
adSetType("F"); htmlAdWH("93301178", "300", "250"); adSetType(""); //\-->
</script></div></title>

Is the title an Ad?

~~~
duncans
I'll hazard a guess that they have some dreadful ad platform that greps
keywords on the site and replaces them with a mouseover popup ad.

------
nashashmi
I hate AOL. They buy things and shut it down without much thought. I still
remember Goowy, a flash based desktop and OS with the early concept of having
Apps. Imagine if it were still there, you would have flash-based tablet.

But there is one victory from AOL, the spinoff off Mozilla. You would think
they could do the same with Winamp

------
ChrisNorstrom
"It really whips the lama's ass" What an era.

Winamp's goodbye might go in a similar fashion to Sonique's. Slowly and
quietly. Sonique was a music player that was bought for about $20 million by
Lycos (back in the dot com bubble days) and then shut down after it plateau'd
in development and execs realized "dude, it's just a media player". It had a
huge community (but no where near as big as Winamp's) and literally a TON
(hundreds and hundreds of pages) of really amazing skins and visualization
plugins. The site was shut down without much notice.

You can still download the lastest stable versions of Sonique on a fan site
and it'll still work. I have a feeling that's how Winamp will be. Unless the
developers release the source code.

------
evanmoran
The magic moment was when we all realized, pretty much simultaneously, that
CDs and radio were obsolete. And this wasn't from some iterative Moore's Law
like growth in hard drive size, it was sudden algorithmic brilliance that
allowed music to be compressed small enough to be easily downloaded and
shared. Suddenly digital distribution seemed inevitable and obvious. We could
listen to whole collections of songs very, very fast. Old bands became
popular, and we would sit around for hours playing song after amazing song for
our friends. Winamp was the app that made it possible. The skins let us change
its look to fit us better, and its music visualizations were an awesome
backdrop for parties. A great app and a great time.

We live in the future.

~~~
VLM
"And this wasn't from some iterative Moore's Law"

It was WRT CPU power. I remember having to use some specially compiled for 486
player to just barely be able to play mp3s. Before that on my 386-40 I was
below real time.

I'm pretty sure this is what I was using:

[http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/mpg123-oss-i486](http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/mpg123-oss-i486)

This was the days long before P2P, using binaries usenet groups. Or ripping
songs yourself, which took quite a long time indeed (like 10 or 15 minutes per
song?)

~~~
72deluxe
Haha ah yes, I remember being amazed by a friend who could convert WAVs to
MP3s _faster_ than ripping the CD to WAV. Good times. I remember a base
Pentium 90 laptop struggling to play MP3s in Winamp, not massively high
bitrate either. I could just about play MP3s on a 486 DX2 66Mhz (and
discovered MODs etc. at that time too - smaller to download, using floppy disk
and a school's internet access). I was amazed with Grip and its ability to rip
and convert straight to MP3s, but it took forever. Good times using RH 6.2.

------
tzury
Show me one product/service/platform that got acquired by AOL and got
better/bigger at there.

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL)

~~~
fhd2
I'd say Mozilla/Firefox somewhat counts. They acquired Netscape around 1998,
and although they eventually ran Netscape itself into the ground AOL-style,
they allowed the devs to work on Mozilla for quite some time. Long enough so
they could create what would become the foundation of Firefox (Gecko and XUL,
most notably).

------
SilkRoadie
Makes you wonder why they cannot open source the code instead of completely
killing it.

~~~
csmuk
Probably because the codebase stinks and releasing it would end up in multiple
vulnerability discoveries.

~~~
thinkpad20
... which would presumably be patched, if it were embraced by the open-source
community.

~~~
csmuk
That's fine and all that but it takes time for the new inevitable forks to
stabilise and some people will never switch.

------
Mikeb85
I prefer Clementine, Amarok, and Rhythmbox. No point using a proprietary app
when there's plenty of open-source apps which are just as good if not
better...

~~~
zanny
As someone who adores Clementine, using it all the time, and as someone who
has contributed patches (both bug and feature) to it, it _isn 't_ lean. My
instance right now (running for over a week straight, playing music most of
the time, I have around a dozen playlists open, and I have it auto download a
half dozen podcasts) has 122M of resident memory usage, and 85 minutes of
execution time on an i7 at 4.5ghz.

A really lean music player wouldn't use more than a dozen MB of resident
memory (after whatever libraries need loaded, but since i run KDE Clementine
isn't bearing the blunt of Qt loading) but Clementine intentionally caches a
lot of information to make the UI lag less and make transitions seamless.

------
jweir
Oh this takes me back... I redesigned WinAmp's website back in 2004 or 3 for
Odopod in San Francisco. The wonderful Andre Adreev assisted (he now running
[http://www.dresscodeny.com/](http://www.dresscodeny.com/) ).

Here are some comps for those interested...
[http://smokinggun.com/projects/winamp/index.php?id=0](http://smokinggun.com/projects/winamp/index.php?id=0)

~~~
dannyrosen
Great work, that takes me back.

------
jredwards
That's a shame. Winamp is still my music player of choice when I'm not using a
streaming service. I've always appreciated the design that allows me to
minimize it to a thin bar and leave it on top in a way that's unobtrusive. Has
anyone else copied that design?

iTunes and Windows Media Player are both monstrosities, and while I appreciate
VLC for playing video, I've never been inclined to use it as a music player.

------
yashg
Sad! It really whipped the Llama's ass! It is still my music player on PC. I
have saved the installer.

------
carabolic
Although I'm not using winamp any more, for at least 5 years now. This makes
me really sad.

------
pit
First Sonique, now this? At least we've still got foobar2000.

------
jdorfman
While I haven't used Winamp in years, this still makes me kind of sad. Justin
Frankel & Co. really changed the game.

~~~
bluedino
Relive the nostalgia through this Ars article that's not half bad:

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-
greatest-...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-
mp3-player-undid-itself/)

------
bane
If there was ever an example of how to acquire a technology you don't know
what to do with and then sit on it till it's dead, the Winamp story is it (and
I guess Sonique as well).

Made a couple people rich (well deserved) at least.

------
dpedu
Aaaaand here's a clone of the Skin / Plugin section from the winamp website:
[http://winamp.dpedu.io/](http://winamp.dpedu.io/)

Skins are coming soon, they're still scraping :)

------
AbraKdabra
I use Winamp since version 2 when it was released in 1998 (I was 8) I think,
my dad started using it and I still use it everyday, nothing can be compared
to it, the simplicity of use it's just insuperable, it's the best music player
out there and I'll continue using it. I tried AIMP, Foobar in Windows but the
just don't... and in Linux the only thing comparable is Audacious but of
course it lacks all the development that Winamp carries from all its years,
it's a sad day, AOL was the worst thing that could happen to this great piece
of software.

------
rob-alarcon
If anyone is looking for a replacement of Winamp, I highly recommend AIMP, I
have been using it for about two years now.

[http://www.aimp.ru/](http://www.aimp.ru/)

~~~
holms
sorry but AIMP UI design is worse than XMMP player 5 years ago!

------
beloch
I remember using Winamp back in the day. At one point in time, it was the only
mp3 player out there that didn't absolutely suck. It was pretty amazing how
usenet and winamp opened up a whole world of music you just couldn't buy
anywhere at the time. Truly a leap forwards in distribution! It's too bad the
music industry reacted with such paranoia that they arguably still haven't
adequately monetized it.

A couple of years ago I used OSX for about 6 months. One of the more minor
reasons I was relieved to uninstall it was that I never found a music player I
really liked. Let's face it, iTunes is crap even on the OS it was meant for!

On Windows, look no further than Foobar2000. It's not a super-sexy looking
player (although it can be if you put some work into it), but it is eminently
functional. It does practically anything you can want (with extensions), has
an easy to figure out but powerful interface, and is audiophile-grade. This
lives on my HTPC, which interfaces with my stereo, so it's what I'm primarily
used to. Love it! There's one extension (foo_httpcontrol) you can add that
allows you to control your stereo from any networked device (there are a few
android apps designed to work through this interface), which is handy for
flipping through music while reading in your comfy chair or sitting on the
porcelain throne!

On Linux, Amarok. Sexier apps come and are abandoned to become bug-infested
swamps of suck, but Amarok has been going strong for a very long time. I often
try newer music apps, but Amarok is the default on KDE for a reason.

~~~
Segmentation
I'm surprised you recommend Amarok as a foobar2k user. Amarok is closer to
iTunes than it is foobar2k.

Linux users: look for Audacious or DeaDBeeF. They are the best Linux
alternatives to foobar2k.

------
piyush_soni
Even though I moved to another player on my desktop long ago, I still use it
on my Android device. Sad that it's going away :(. They should definitely open
source it.

------
wozniacki
How come Winamp is shutting down and Real Player still around !?!?

Notwithstanding that Real Player was quite popular in Asia, a few years ago,
during the portable media player years.

------
tikumo
I still use Winamp on every PC I own.. Even bought a license but i never
bother to add it.

------
trumbitta2
Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass! :-(

~~~
kosei
One of my favorite slogans ever.

------
bhaile
Memories of napster/kazaa coming back from reading this. Best MP3 player.
Fast, skinnable with ease, supported ID3 tags, one of the first with
visualizations (cool feature but didn't use it much)

VLC is the same for me for video. Fast and plays almost all formats plus its
open source. Winamp should have been open source to further its usage and
development.

------
FedRegister
Thank you for the music, WinAmp.

Edit: Will this affect Shoutcast?

~~~
1wheel
Doesn't look like it, but maybe?

[http://www.shoutcast.com/](http://www.shoutcast.com/)

~~~
Karunamon
I hope not.. there's a _ton_ of services out there relying on the Shoutcast
directory.

------
holms
I don't know about you guys, but I've this news just ended my teenage years =(
I've used winamp to store my 2TB music collection for like 10 years. yeah back
then to get 2TB from 120gb hdd's was something big, but anyway, even after
dragging and dropping the whole 2TB directory into winamp, it processed track
by track, without destroying my ram, and my CPU. I've had a zillions (Around
10gb, it's 1-2kb per song) of modular music from: atari, c64, nds, n64, sega,
ps1,2,3 and etc and etc. All of these was supported by winamp plugins. This
was working perfectly, sorted in my winamp by categories/genres and various
other methods. I've been really enjoying this player for all my geeky life.
And now it's going way =( They could at least release and opensource. That
classical design is masterpiece, I don't know any player you can beat winamp's
design, unless it's xmms player in linux, which is probably also dead for a
long long time. Although I'm currently residing on OSX, and I'm using iTunes
to sort all my stuff, it's still not so great as Winamp. All I need is proper
music indexer, and all possible music format support. What could be better is
having transcoding software together with this cute player, and I'd be happy
till the end of my life lol. Now I have to use only ALAC instead of FLAC, and
ofcourse mp3. For converter I'm using XLD, for video VLC or mplayerx, for
converting videos Handbrake. C'mon Winamp was universal tool! I belive some
plugins could provide transcoding.

LET'S CRAWL WINAMP SIDE AND SAVE A HISTORY OF GREAT SOFTWARE.

Lol i think this should be in computer museum or something =/

Winamp, I'll miss you so much, I know that "justin can't code it" sometimes,
but I still love all your team, your product, your efforts, Thanks for being
with us with our teenhood!!!

P.s and what about winamp shoutcast? this was only ultimate radio solution in
the whole web!!

------
muppetman
I wonder if this is a hoax/website hack? There's no mention of it anywhere
else apart from this particular URL. No mention on Twitter, no talk of it in
the forums etc. They only just updated the Winamp Android Client.

I doubt it, but the odd HTML in the title and lack of any other information
makes me doubt it's authenticity.

~~~
muppetman
No, it's official. DJ Egg has posted as much in the forums. Wow. RIP Winamp.

------
rolfk2
Winamp proved that offer sensible playlist management and multi-format support
and you can't go wrong. I only wonder two things: why Winamp wasn't bagged by
the big players earlier, and why the other players (i've only tried the
free/freemium warez) still don't get it.

------
kepano
Before I knew the word “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and
various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse[1], still shows up on their
site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and
in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish.
It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of
people around the world would use.

Saddest to me, is that I can’t think of today’s equivalent, a widespread and
useful app that encourages its users to tinker and easily modify the
interface.

[1]
[http://www.winamp.com/skin/impulse/142212](http://www.winamp.com/skin/impulse/142212)

~~~
mikejsiegel
Perhaps Tumblr to a certain degree? I've met some young front-end guys that
cut their teeth making Tumblr themes. I suppose what you can modify with
Tumblr Themes is more limited than winamp skins.

------
josefresco
Anyone here old enough to remember Sonique? Back in the late 90's skinning
your MP3 player was the bees knees. I remember having debates about Winamp
plugins, flame wars about the direction of the software ... the good ol' days.
iTune sucks.

~~~
mathiasben
My favorite winamp plugin was Punkie. it was a visualization that had
seemingly endless randomness to it. and file was only 72K and it managed to
look incredible on even the lowliest video cards and resolutions.

------
lsc
Huh. Has anyone offered AOL some cash for Winamp? it isn't like it'd be
expensive to maintain, if AOL was willing to part with it for reasonable
money.

Is there a reason why they'd want to shut down the company rather than selling
it for cheap?

------
tomrod
Ah, the good old days of winamp are coming to an end.

I'll miss the old days of 1999, using winamp to play my latest Napster
"acquisitions".

For myself, I generally just use mplayer or music-on-console (moc) nowadays.
It gets the job done with no fuss and no mess.

------
washedup
Brings up a great question: What are the alternatives to Winamp? (No iTunes
please)

~~~
cookiecaper
Clementine is a great multi-platform open-source clone of Amarok 1.4.x. A
little different from the old Winamp/XMMS "tape deck" feel, but very
responsive and light with many modern features.

~~~
jlgreco
I use to love Amarok back in the 1.4.x days, but after Amarok messed
everything up with 2.0, I swore it off and wrote my own XMMS2 client.
Clementine wasn't out yet and I decided that the only way to get something
that I wouldn't hate would be to write it myself.

These days I just use zsh and mplayer though. Apparently all of my use-cases
sum up to _" play one or more albums, perhaps shuffling them first"_. I've
given Clementine a shot, and it is quite like Amarok use to be, but now it all
seems like clutter.

------
MrBra
Thanks for the memories, I will never stop using Winamp in my mind. I have so
many memories tied to it. It was crazy you had to download it to play those
surreal .mp3 files. Then it was my patient assistant when I had to make my
first (teen) love compilation! I also used to show people how many beatiful
skins it had. And what about when lyrics plugins came out and no no other
players could do it. And what about breath taking, stunning visualizations
plugins when WMP would just show you those low resolution ugly bricks? (has
this last point got any better?) Thanks Justin for all you did!

------
rietta
Why do they not open source the entire package? I have to think that AOL has
clean intellectual property ownership on the code base. It would be better
than letting this important historical codebase slip into oblivion.

------
mehmehshoe
I stopped using Windamp for a long time until I purchased my first Android
phone. After looking through the dozens of Mp3 players on the market, I saw my
old fave, downloaded it and have been using it ever since on my phone.

RIP Llama

------
everyone
I have not seen a better music player.

Lightweight

Unobtrusive, customisable, highly functional UI

Fades out tracks when u stop (to not have a harsh cut off waveform)

Its what I currently use. Current build will probably run on windows for a
loong loong time to come tho.

~~~
vomitcuddle
foobar2000 has all of those features

~~~
recursive
Doesn't require customization to be usable.

------
panzi
Winamp is a great music player. It is still the best for some file formats.
Via it's plugins it can play more exotic audio file formats than any other
player. Some players support s3m and it, but play only half of some files:
Winamp plays it all. There are great plugins for nsf, spc, psf and usf sound
files (sound files form NES, SNES, PS1 and N64 games). I wish there would be a
real alternative (for Linux). Does anyone know a good player for these file
formats? Audacious is good for s3m, it and nsf, but spc, psf and usf?

~~~
tokenrove
I like deadbeef, which uses libgme to play SPC, at least; haven't tried PSF or
USF.

~~~
panzi
Wait, I just realized Audacious CAN play psf and spc (forgot about that). The
only thing I'm missing is (mini)usf (Nintendo 64 music). Although the Winamp
plugins are much more feature rich: more metadata, (live!) disabling and
enabling of channels (instruments), custom song length configuration etc.
That's why I still used Winamp for that.

------
founder4fun
I use to use winamp to fill my house with audio. I had a few PCs throughout
the house and had set up my own radio station. I would hit play on one of the
PCs and all the computers would start playing throughout my home. I could even
access and control my broadcast outside my home.

Back then I had a ton of curiosity but development skills. Tinkering as did
with Winamp and other programs like edonkey and Bit torrent compelled me to
create and then learn how to turn my web ideas into reality.

Thanks Winamp for helping me get going!

------
piyush_soni
Just for those who are looking for a replacement player on Windows Desktop. I
have been using JetAudio player, and have been very happy with it. It supports
global keyboard shortcuts (VERY important for me), CD ripping, playlists with
live monitoring and what not. And one of the biggest reasons I moved to it
from Winamp was that it could handle the 4500 something songs I had on my
machine in _one playlist_ , without getting laggy. Winamp would just crawl
with those many songs.

------
msturm
XMPlay has to be mentioned here! Great player in not even 400 kB, but
unfortunately Windows only.

[http://support.xmplay.com/](http://support.xmplay.com/)

~~~
orng
I second this. So tiny, yet with such great sound quality.

------
tadruj
Sad. Years ago I found WinAmp and its programmable visualizer an indispensable
tool when teaching Mathematics. Graphing sine waves is so much fun when
combined with a good beat.

------
conradfr
I still use it everyday, never changed player since its first release. I guess
it's the piece of software I have used for the longest time now (for free!) ?

It just works for me. Controls in the systray (deal breaker for me with other
players), brillant mix of media library and playlists, the Bento skin is very
decent etc.

Once in a while a shoutcast radio or a trippy Milkdrop session.

I get that people use Spotify now. I'm not in the cloud yet but I see the
appeal.

------
Jagat
I still use winamp. I have been a faithful user of winamp for the last 12
years. Everything else seems very bloated and try to do too many things at
once.

------
znowi
Oh, memories. I've been using Winamp for at least 10 years. I still have a
Netscape skin for the legacy version (came out with Netscape Navigator, I
believe). Yes, Winamp was _the_ audio player back then.

I switched to Winamp lite when they started adding "bloat" features like media
library, video playback, etc. It plays music and it does it awesomely. It's
likely I'll be using it for 10 more years.

------
Demiurge
Still use it and prefer it to VLC or Foobar. I hope they opensource it, but I
suspect it's unlikely? Would be cool to see all old versions too.

------
mkhalil
This is sad. I discovered so much music throughout my teenage life using
WinAMP. I used to do shoutCast broadcast for friends and feel like a DJ. I
used to be excited when a friend would allow me to replace their MusicMatch
Jukebox with Winamp. It was solid, and worked. Why shutdown? :(

I supposed I've only been installing the <3.00 version anyway, so I can stick
with it, but still...mixed emotions.

------
slig
It's been a couple of years since I tried to find a good alternative to iTunes
on OS X. Does it exist yet? Is there a Winamp for mac yet?

~~~
pax
Possibly Vox: [http://coppertino.com/vox/](http://coppertino.com/vox/)

~~~
glomph
There is also [http://cogx.org/](http://cogx.org/) (but it is a lot more
minimal)

------
pritambaral
I feel like I already know the answer but I really hope they release the
source code. At least the community can take Winamp forward then.

------
mattbee
In their dog days they are now giving away the pro version of Winamp, which
does CD ripping, removes ads and has a few other features. i.e. the link to
the Free version is now the Pro version.

I was another pretty recent convert to Winamp after using it in the 90s then
switching to Linux, but it still does the job _fast_ if you still keep a big
hard drive of MP3s.

------
satluj
Does this affect SHOUTcast?

------
nblavoie
Audacious + Winamp Classic Skin = Winamp.

For the skin: [http://gnome-
look.org/content/show.php/Winamp+Classic+Skin?c...](http://gnome-
look.org/content/show.php/Winamp+Classic+Skin?content=64790)

For the player: [http://audacious-media-player.org/](http://audacious-media-
player.org/)

------
taopao
I have a lot of hardware that's SOL if Shoutcast goes down. I hope they have a
transition plan if that's the case.

~~~
bane
I'm surprised some other personal broadcast approach hasn't replaced it by
now.

Lots of great online radio (and formerly video) was Shoutcast.

~~~
taopao
I think it was like Reader, where the service was so good and ubiquitous that
nobody felt compelled to make a replacement.

This will affect a lot more people than the Reader shutdown, and in a way that
hits the pocketbook for those that have devices that depend on Shoutcast like
my Yamaha receiver. I wonder if the outcry will be as strong?

------
christogreeff
Started using Winamp 1.90 in 1998. Don't think I've ever played MP3s in any
other application since. :(

------
PavlovsCat
I know it's lame to hijack topics with "yeah, but [something else but
similar]" posts, but I am _still_ sad that DeliPlayer isn't being developed
anymore :(

[http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/DeliPlayer](http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/DeliPlayer)

------
tracker1
This sucks... winamp has been my go to media player, along with shoutcast
services forever and a day... Their android player is imho one of the best
ones available at that.

I honestly haven't been into any of the skin options since version 5.. but the
player has been awesome. This is really a shame.

------
smurph
I actually really like the Zune music player that you could (still can?)
download from Microsoft. I never even owned a Zune, but the player software is
a lightweight WMP with better design. Sure the Zune Marketplace/pass links
were all there, but they are easy enough to ignore.

------
Fuxy
I'm so bummed about this.

It's my favorite media player.

It was the first media player in its day that payed every file you threw at
it.

It has never disappointed me since.

I really wish the owner would opensource it though if he doesn't have the time
to maintain it I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands of people who will.

------
Segmentation
Thank you Winamp for the good times.

I wouldn't call it an end of an era though, I feel like Winamp's era ended
several years ago.

Now the only program Windows users still use in this day of age that I can't
understand is shareware WinRAR. Seriously. (Who hasn't been using 7-Zip for
years?)

------
Springtime
This will likely be buried beneath the upvoted comments, but does anyone know
if there's a backup of the entire skins and plugins database?

Would be a tragedy to lose all the brilliant work that's been created over the
years, even if I don't use Winamp anymore.

------
jbk
If you want a nice, cross-platform, sane, fast alternative, including
streaming between users, you should have a look at the open source Tomahawk.
[http://www.tomahawk-player.org/](http://www.tomahawk-player.org/)

~~~
eropple
Tomahawk is the only cross-platform media player I've seen that looks really
good on OS X, too. I don't have much need for a desktop media player anymore
with a phone always in my pocket, but I really enjoyed using it when I did.

------
tzury
Show me 1 product/service/platform that got acquired by AOL and got
better/bigger at there.

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL)

~~~
nandhp
Well, MapQuest probably isn't worse (although obviously it has been overtaken
by Google Maps in popularity). MapQuest Open (
[http://open.mapquest.com/](http://open.mapquest.com/) ) is actually a pretty
good interface to OpenStreetMap; it does search, directions, and a good job of
tile rendering.

------
holms
Please sign a petition to opensource a winamp! [https://www.change.org/en-
AU/petitions/attention-aol-let-win...](https://www.change.org/en-
AU/petitions/attention-aol-let-winamp-go-open-source#share)

------
taylorbuley
With HTML like this, I can see perhaps why folks aren't tuning in as much
[https://gist.github.com/editor/ed6339a732d6c7c06dd3](https://gist.github.com/editor/ed6339a732d6c7c06dd3)

------
rahuldracula
Best music player with all the customizations I need and manages all the
external devices very well. Quite a shame that it has to shut down. Another
disappointment but not as large as Google reader, I will still be using my
winamp.

------
WD-42
"It really whips the llama's ass" was a reference to the late, great Wesely
Willis:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM)

------
mratzloff
Winamp was being shopped around recently.

Either they didn't end up finding a buyer or they did and the buyer is taking
the tech private (cheaper than staffing a product and paying for bandwidth
costs). I'm guessing it is the latter.

------
wil421
Winamp has a special place in my heart it was the first music app that I
really like when I was in my teens.

I remember downloading a song in 15 minutes off Napster when my family first
got an ISDN line. Oh man 10-15kbs was screaming.

------
themodelplumber
Just got it running with the D-Reliction skin using Wine in Ubuntu. Then the
first song it picks on shuffle is all, "numa numa yey"...haha, man, I'll bet
they've had so many downloads today. lol

~~~
nekopa
Which version? I installed v2.95, but the library doesn't seem to work.

~~~
themodelplumber
I ended up seeing a lot of glitches too, to the point where the player buttons
stopped responding. I might still run it in a Windows VM. The lite version
seems OK though.

------
mzs
I had a 6500 and used SoundApp, it was scriptable, thanks Norman!

[http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~franke/SoundApp/](http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~franke/SoundApp/)

------
iscrewyou
[http://www.sheepfriends.com/index-
page=billy.html](http://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html)

This was my go to music player before I moved over to Play Music and then
Spotify.

------
jotm
Well, shit. It's still the best music player for Windows, even after a decade.
I haven't updated it for over a year, though, so I guess the latest version
will have to do for the next decade :-)

------
rocky1138
Just in case you're looking for winamp after the close date, you can find old
versions of it on [http://oldversion.com](http://oldversion.com). My fave is
2.95.

------
meerita
Trough WinAmp I discovered MP2. Then MP3. I even created an amazing skin for
Winamp back in 2000, before they went with the scalable one. It was hellish
popular back in the days, it was a Puma skin :)

------
zerohm
My progression over the last 15 years has gone Winamp, Foobar, MediaMonkey,
itunes, Spotify. I keep itunes around just for CD ripping and ipod syncing,
but I'd like to abandon it altogether.

------
wnevets
Why does it have to shut down, cant they just not release new versions?

~~~
mhurron
Because no one wants to pay to keep it up?

~~~
kristopolous
I'd pitch in towards the $20 a year for the domain + vps.

~~~
biot
Will you also indemnify AOL against all third party claims should someone use
the software, it messes up their Windows 9.3 filesystem, and they end up
suing... however meritless the case may be? Will you accept responsibility for
acting as the DMCA contact and updating the site within the time limits
provided in the Safe Harbor provisions should a skin, plugin, or visualization
infringe someone else's copyright? Will you also update the apps for free to
keep current with mobile and desktop OS changes?

I'm guessing AOL has looked at all this and sees $$$ for both the business
risk as well as maintaining software which they have deemed does nothing for
their company goals. As a result, they are better off focusing their limited
resources towards efforts which do further their goals.

~~~
saalweachter
This is why I really, really hate the modern, diversified corporation.

The decision of whether to continue a product line within a large corporation
is very, very different from whether or not a product line could keep a small
business afloat. If you're a small business, the only question is "are we
making payroll?". Within a large, diversified corporation, you have to ask if
a project is _as valuable as your alternatives_. Mom-and-pop's with a
sustainable business can't and don't say, "Yeah, this is profitable, but it'd
be _more_ profitable if we dropped everything we're doing and put our
resources towards a different sector entirely." But it's entirely feasible and
rational for a large corporation to look at it's hundred sub-businesses, axe
the ten least profitable, and put the people to work on the ten most
profitable.

I'd be a lot happier if modern corporations were small, narrowly focused
beasts, and not the monstrous conglomerations we have instead.

------
bad_user
The end of an era. I still have it installed, as on Windows there's still
nothing better.

I remember switching to Linux and being frustrated by XMMS because it wasn't
Winamp, although it tried to be.

------
mikefromit
I remember having to rip cds to wav files on my x4 CD burner (the fastest at
the time) and then using winamp to convert them to mp3 before winamp had the
add-in that did it all in one step.

------
Tiktaalik
First thing I do when setting up a fresh PC is installing Winamp 2.95. It's
the perfect mp3 player for the simple use case of just dragging some files
onto a window and hitting play.

------
xzombiedev
Fifteen years ago, i was downloaded winamp. Now i'm use other SO, it's sad,
but it's the end of many first music player, other example is sonique, downed
in 2002.

------
sgarlatm
I believe AOL owns Winamp now. I hope they open source the code!

~~~
ConceptJunkie
AOL used to do some cool open-source stuff back in the 2000s. At the time, a
lot of their tech was based on AOLServer which was an web server they acquired
in the 90s and open-sourced. AOLServer is also tightly coupled with Tcl and
AOL used to contribute to Tcl development as well.

Alas, I doubt anyone involved in open-sourcing anything is still there.

------
willfiveash
I loved the visualization plugins for Winamp. I remember throwing parties
using Winamp to play the tunes and projecting the visualizations on a huge
screen. So good!

------
travelorg
Isn't XMMS still around? That looks a hell of a lot like winamp.
[http://www.xmms.org/](http://www.xmms.org/)

~~~
nandhp
XMMS is obsolete; in particular, it uses GTK+1.2 which is no longer available
in most Linux distributions. It was removed from Debian in 2008:
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2007/07/msg00026.html](http://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2007/07/msg00026.html)

I don't know what the status of XMMS2 is, but it's a client-server model like
MPD.

The GTK2 fork of XMMS, Beep Media Player, is reported by Wikipedia to be
discontinued; the BMPx fork of BMP has also been removed Debian. Audacious is
another Linux music player with Winamp skin support, it is actively
maintained.

Perhaps somebody should do a Winamp2-compatible MPD client for nostalgia
purposes.

------
Link-
Nooo... This is a bad, bad day! It would really interesting to learn more
about this company and how it survived for 15 years in a very competitive
market.

------
stevewillows
Peter Pawlowski's work on Foobar2000 is / was great. Winamp did the trick, but
after 2.95 it lost me.

That said, it's sad to see the name go.

------
garthdog
Winamp.com _and associated web services_

Associated web services sounds a lot like Shoutcast.

AOL wants to double down on stupid journalism. Winamp is a distraction.

------
mindotus
Sad to see Winamp go and hopefully AOL won't do the same with Shoutcast. Would
be nice to see AOL update the Shoutcast app more.

------
antr

        "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!"
    

My favourite mp3 player during internet 1.0. Good times.

------
SchizoDuckie
[http://i.imgur.com/Y9Y4yZI.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Y9Y4yZI.jpg) You will be
missed!

------
yeukhon
Winamp was very popular back in the days. When I was in 6, 7th grade I would
use it every day! Sad to see this going down.

------
orthecreedence
God I hate Aol.

------
yankoff
Why shutting down and not open-source?

------
dcustodio
I really liked the windamp android player, specially because it had lastfm
integration. sad news.

------
taude
Winamp + Napster reminds me of 1999.

------
potomushto
Writing simple Winamp Plugin was my first C++ experience about 10 years ago
and it was amazing.

------
bkeating
WinAmp was dead to me a few months into AOL owning it. Long live Nullsoft &
Justin!

------
jksmith
Sad news. Always loved using winamp. Really did "kick the llama's ass."

------
jes5199
What does it even mean to "shut down" a piece of download-and-run software?

------
chjohnst
Wow I feel like I am leaving a piece of my childhood behind. Long live winamp
haha

------
soheilpro
This makes me really sad. I learned to code while listening to music using
Winamp.

------
desireco42
It was great while it lasted. I am sorry to see them shut down, but I
understand.

------
shmerl
Winamp? I used it years ago. I use VLC and mplayer for quite a while already.

------
croisillon
> Why Go Pro? Help fund continued product development & innovation

Well... no more...

~~~
rschmitty
Charging a 1 time fee probably wasn't the best idea for life-time support.

Perhaps AOL hoped they would have their own itunes and it would self support
the player development

------
MrBra
And this is not gonna top up on 4chan. This is why I like it better here.

------
mankypro
noooooooooooooooooo.....

------
schappim
It turns out that the lama came back and whooped it's arse.

------
dragonfax
I guess the Llama got sick of its ass being whipped.:/

------
ismail
Ah, fond memories of downloading MP3's via irc DCC :)

------
lepunk
great example of how unimaginative AOL is. winamp has (had) a massive user
base. it would have been a great base to start a spotify competitor with.

------
iamleppert
Just in time for me to download and get my latest skin.

------
ZeWaren
Someone should create a Winamp 2 theme for FooBar now.

------
luisehk
I would love to contribute if there was a public repo.

------
paddyoloughlin
Geiss is my favourite music visualisation program

------
smegel
For those looking for a lightweight alternative, I recently switched to GOM
Music Player on Windows. No library (yet), but a nice modern GUI and good
Context Menu integration.

------
ParadisoShlee
Give Mediamonkey a try.. syncs with iPods too

------
snambi
Its a great app. Sad they are shutting down.

------
archQuestions
And the llama may finally rest in peace.

------
Nux
Dear Winamp, thank you for XMMS. Adios!

------
wpnx
It really kicked the llama's ass.

------
g8oz
They brought MP3s to the masses. RIP.

------
crimzonrayne
You win this time llama's ass!!

------
rossover
Holy shit, Winamp is still around!?

------
smtbsrn
Winamp was my first mp3 player.

------
Datsundere
RIP the era of windows ricing.

------
nvr219
Shift+V for fadeout for life.

------
gorbachev
Internet history dieing.

------
brosco45
AOL money down the drain

------
talles
Noooooooo.....

(tears)

Anyway, why are they shutting down?

------
caruana
this sucks, let's start a form to keep WinAmp alive :)

------
q_no
this is a sad day! I've been using it since 1999. :(

------
x0n
I blame the llamas.

------
threeio
This makes me sad.

------
s7an4o
say hi to foobar

------
thrillgore
Imagine if they opened the sources on this...

------
kostyk
end of an era

