One of the most popular MP3 players of all time is back! Active development on Winamp ended in 2013, but rumors circulated that development resumed in 2018, after a long period of little news. After some time, the release candidate for Winamp 5.9 is now Downloadable (opens in new tab) (via beeping computer (opens in new tab)).
Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 comes with a comprehensive changelog starting with porting to Visual Studio 2019, updated libraries, Windows 11 compatibility, codec updates and more.
DJ Egg posted on the Winamp forums: Two development teams and a pandemic hiatus in between. To the end-user it may not look like a ton of changes, but in fact the biggest and hardest part is migrating the whole project from he VS2008 to he VS2019 and everything builds fine was to do The foundation is laid and we can now focus on functionality. ”
Judging from that, it seems that there is some work to be done. There are known issues, such as issues with the Milkdrop visualization feature and older plugins. Some of these should be relatively simple fixes to old .dll files. Other bugs will undoubtedly become apparent once users start testing.
Winamp has settled in the minds of many PC users. Before streaming services, MP3s were king. Ripping a CD and encoding it to MP3 is not that difficult. One thing I like is the support for lossless codecs like APE and FLAC, which weren’t widely supported in the 2000s.
Who can forget the infamous Napster and similar piracy tools like Kazaa, Limewire and eMule? It made getting MP3s ridiculously easy and Winamp was arguably the best player.
I liked the simple interface, playlist management and especially the visualization. For years I didn’t feel the need to upgrade my media player, but the excellent video capabilities of VLC and Media Player Classic eventually replaced my PC.
I’m very happy to see Winamp back in active development. Excuse me, I’ll go get this new version. I feel like flogging the ass of a nostalgic llama.
