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Winamp Shutting Down On December 20
New submitter Cid Highwind writes "If you want to download the latest version of Winamp, you'd better do it soon. According to a new banner on the download page, AOL will be pulling the plug on the iconic llama-whipping music player in a month. 'Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.' Ars Technica ran an article last year detailing how the music player lost its dominance."
Foobar2000 is great!
QMMP on the other hand seems quite alive.
Get your Winamp here:
http://www.oldapps.com/winamp.php
When Winamp first appeared it was one of the first mass market players to handle MP3 playback at a time shortly after the FHG encoder began to be distributed and competitors like XING, LAME, etc. were just starting to appear. Hard drive storage capacities were still tight - you wouldn't want to fill your disk with CD quality WAV files, but people could store many albums with MP3s without resorting to burning CDs. Napster/gnutella/Frostwire/etc. would come along soon after and transform the way teenagers of the period acquired music. Later, subscription services etc. would be born.
Winamp may not have been around throughout the _entire_ decade, but towards the end of the decade your average joe was getting online, and Winamp was there leading the way for digital music formats that are still popular well over a decade later. Times move fast in computing, but there are probably not many Windows users here who haven't popped open Winamp at some point, cranked up their speakers, and popped open the visualizer.
http://www.aimp2.us/
Been using it for a while. It is like WinAmp without the crud.
In case folks were wondering. Frankel and some of the original crew moved on to creating a DAW called Reaper flying under the company name Cockos.
www.reaper.fm
If Winamp is only worth $6m today, I'm pretty sure he could buy it back. There's so many things in reaper that have been missing in Winamp for years (namely good ASIO support, the ASIO output plugin for winamp stinks)
AOL is still in business!?!?!?!!?!?!?!!!
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
They did released Milkdrop under the BSD license a few years ago, there's a clone for OpenGL. XBMC uses it, and it can even load Milkdrop 1.x presets (totally just grabbed a huge set of those and am living like it's 2001 right now). I'm unaware of anything that can emulate AVS presets unfortunately.
Audacious can load Winamp 2.x and XMMS skins too. I'm still using it after a few years of flirting with other media players (ok, I may have given up and used xbmc on the teevee machine, but that's because it has a nice party mode and milkdrop!).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!