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.
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