We live in the era of online music, dominated by familiar names like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music or Tidal. The advantage of online music listening platforms is their abundance, convenience, and limitlessness, which can well meet the entertainment needs of all audiences, in all circumstances, at all times. But if you ask me which music player left the deepest impression, the answer is probably Winamp.
Back in time many years ago, when you had to go to the net shop, download music to usb, then “copy” to your home computer and listen to it gradually, Winamp was a “legend”. Winamp is a familiar music player for the 8X generation, first launched in 1997. The application reached its peak in 2001 with a record number of users, reaching 60 million, and at the same time holding the reputation. The most popular multimedia application on Windows.
As of 2004, Winamp continues to be named one of the most popular music players worldwide, with an estimated 250,000,000 installs. This success is attributed to a simple yet extremely intuitive interface, customizable, easy to get used to, easy to use, supports many file formats, is free and was one of the first to support MP3 player support. Winamp’s popularity skyrocketed on Windows 98 and Windows XP, along with a large support community.
Famous Winamp versions that have been released include:
The development of online music services is only an objective factor when talking about the “death” of Winamp. The demise of this “empire” firstly stems from the mistakes made in the developer’s decisions, as well as many times of changing hands, causing it to gradually lose the identity that made its name. As time passed, Winamp did not have time to change and adapt to the flow of the technology world, and becoming a forgotten “legend” is also inevitable.
Winamp is the initiative of two young university students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev. Frankel founded the software company Nullsoft in 1997 to further develop Winamp. However, the company was later acquired by AOL on June 1, 1999. Since then, Winamp has continued to grow under the umbrella of AOL, while the Nullsoft team remained the department responsible for updates. update application. The first big break occurred in 2004 when the Nullsoft team decided to leave the company.
After the departure of the Nullsoft team, Winamp barely progressed, but even “reverted” in some versions, and gradually lost users. Along with that is the rapid rise of emerging music streaming platforms. In 2013, Winamp was officially retired.
Just a year later, Belgian technology company, Radionomy, acquired Winamp and vowed to bring the app back to its heyday. However, it was not until nearly 4 years later (October 2016), that Radionomy released Winamp version 5.8, and the biggest change in this update is just the ability to support Windows 10.
Since then, users have continued to wait for new updates, but in return are just empty promises from the publisher. The last time, Radionomy announced that it would release Winamp 6 version in 2019, with the addition of many new features such as playing playlists, podcasts, radio stations… However, so far, this version is still “no sound” trust”. The official website has also been abandoned, as no updates have been announced in the past two years.
A legend has died like that, in a way that could not be more disappointing and sad!