Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Winamp Group. Since version 2, it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Version 1 of Winamp was released in 1997, along with basic counterparts for MS-DOS and Macintosh, and quickly grew popular with over 3 million downloads, paralleling the developing trend of MP3 file sharing. Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions were widely used and made Winamp one of the most downloaded Windows applications. By 2000, Winamp had over 25 million registered users and by 2001 it had 60 million users. A poor reception to the 2002 rewrite, Winamp3, was followed by the release of Winamp 5 in 2003, and a later release of version 5.5 in 2007. Winamp for Android was released in 2010. The last AOL-developed version, Winamp 5.666, was released in 2013.
After a five-year hiatus, Winamp 5.8 (written as Winamp 5.) was leaked to the public in 2018 before its eventual release by Radionomy; development has since resumed with the latest version 5.9.2 released on April 26, 2023. Its developer Radionomy has since rebranded as Llama Group (later Winamp Group) and launched a streaming service that allows users to support artists by buying perks or NFTs. The service launched on the web in April 2023, followed by beta apps for Android and iOS in July 2023. In September 2024, Llama Group partially released the Winamp source code for Windows under a custom source-available license; the source repository was deleted soon afterwards following criticism for its license terms and inclusion of proprietary code.
Features Playback formats Winamp supports music playback using MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV, and WMA. Winamp was one of the first widely used music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC and ReplayGain for volume leveling across tracks. CD support includes playing and importing music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and burning music to CDs. The standard version limits maximum burn speed and datarate; the "Pro" version removes these limitations. Winamp supports playback of Windows Media Video and Nullsoft Streaming Video. For MPEG Video, AVI, and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Microsoft's DirectShow API for playback, allowing playback of most of the video formats supported by Windows Media Player. 5.1 Surround sound is supported where formats and decoders allow. Media Library At installation, Winamp scans the user's system for media files to add to the Media Library database. It supports full Unicode filenames and Unicode metadata for media files. In the Media Library user interface pane, under Local Media, several selectors (Audio, Video, date, and frequency) permit display of subsets of media files with greater detail. Adding album art and track tags Get Album Art permits retrieval of cover art, and confirmation before adding the image to the database. Autotagging analyzes a track's audio using the Gracenote service and retrieves the song's ID2 and ID3 metadata. Podcatcher Winamp can also be used as RSS media feeds aggregator capable of displaying articles, downloading, or playing such content as streaming media. SHOUTcast Wire provides a directory and RSS subscription system for podcasts. Media player device support Winamp has extendable support for portable media players and Mass Storage Compliant devices, Microsoft PlaysForSure, and ActiveSync, and syncs unprotected music to the iPod. Media Monitor Winamp Media Monitor allows web-based browsing and bookmarking music blog websites and automatically offering for streaming or downloading all MP3 files there. The Media Monitor is preloaded with music blog URLs. Winamp Remote Winamp Remote allows remote playback (streaming) of unprotected media files on the user's PC via the Internet. Remote adjusts bitrate based on available bandwidth, and can be controlled by web interface, Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and mobile phones. Plug-ins In February 1998, Winamp was rewritten as a "general-purpose audio player" with a plug-in architecture. This feature was received well by reviewers. Development was early, diverse, and rapid: 66 plugins were published by November 1998. The Winamp software development kit (SDK) allows software developers to create seven different types of plug-ins. Input: decodes specific file formats. Output: sends data to specific devices or files. Visualization: provides sound activated graphics. DSP/Effect: manipulates audio for special effects. General Purpose plug-ins add convenience or UI features (Media Library, alarm clock, or pause when logged out). Media Library plug-ins add functions to the Media Library plug-in. Portables plug-ins support portable media players.
Plug-in development support increased Winamp's flexibility – for example, the creation of specialized plug-ins for game console music files such as NSF, USF, GBS, GSF, SID, VGM, SPC, PSF, and PSF2.
Skins Skins are bitmap files that alter the aesthetic design of the Winamp graphical user interface (GUI) and can add functionality with scripting. Winamp published documentation on skin creation in 1998 with the release of Winamp 2 and invited Winamp users to publish skins on Winamp.com. As of 2000, there were nearly 3,000 Winamp skins available. The ability to use skins contributed to Winamp's popularity early in MP3 development. With the increasing number of available skins, genres or categories of skins developed, such as "Stereo", "Anime", and "Ugly". Online communities of skin designers such as 1001Skins.com and Skinz.org have contributed thousands of designs; also at GnomeArt. Designers see skins as an opportunity to be creative: nontraditional examples have included Klingon, iPod, and Etch-a-sketch designs. The Winamp skin format is the most popular, the most commonly adopted by other media player software, and is usable across platforms. One example is the XMMS player for Linux and Unix systems, which can use unmodified Winamp 2 skin files. Winamp 5 supports two types of skins – "classic" skins designed to Winamp 2 specifications (static collections of bitmap images), and more flexible, freeform "modern" skins per the Winamp3 specification. Modern skins support true alpha channel transparency, scripting control, a docked toolbar, and other innovations to the user interface.
History
Initial releases
Winamp was first released in 1997, when Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, formerly students at the University of Utah, integrated their Windows user interface with the Advanced Multimedia Products ("AMP") MP3 file playback engine. The name Winamp (originally spelled WinAMP) was a portmanteau of "Windows" and "AMP". The minimalist WinAMP 0.20a was released as freeware on April 21, 1997.
Its windowless, menu bar-only interface showed only play (open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played. MP3 decoding was performed by the AMP decoding engine developed by Advanced Multimedia Products co-founder Tomislav Uzelac, which was free for non-commercial use. It was compatible with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Winamp was the second real-time MP3 player for Windows, the first being WinPlay3.
Within the standard Windows frame and menu bar, it had the beginnings of the "classic" Winamp GUI: dark gray rectangle with silver 3D-effect transport buttons, a red/green volume slider, time displayed in a green LED font, with track name, MP3 bitrate, and "mixrate" in green. Overlength titles appear as slowly scrolling text (or "marquee"). The skeuomorphic design somewhat resembles shelf stereos. There was no position bar, and a blank space where the spectrum analyzer and waveform analyzer would later appear. Multiple files on the command line or dropped onto its icon were enqueued in the playlist.
Winamp 1
Version 1.006 was released June 7, 1997, renamed "Winamp", with "amp" now in lowercase. It showed a spectrum analyzer and color-changing volume slider, but no waveform display. The AMP non-commercial license was included in its help menu.
According to Tomislav Uzelac, Frankel licensed the AMP 0.7 engine June 1, 1997. Frankel formally founded Nullsoft Inc. in January 1998 and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to $10 shareware. Despite the fact that there would be no extra features by paying $10, Winamp's popularity and warm reception brought Nullsoft $100,000 a month that year from $10 paper checks in the mail from paying users.
In March, Brian Litman, managing co-founder with Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products, which by then had been merged into PlayMedia Systems, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nullsoft, claiming unlawful use of AMP. Nullsoft responded that they had replaced AMP with Nitrane, Nullsoft's proprietary decoder, but Playmedia disputed this. Third-party reviews found that Nitrane had bugs that resulted in playing back MP3s incorrectly, and that this resulted in unstable tones being added to the playback, and undoubtedly therefore violated the ISO standard. This also means that Nitrane was unlikely to have been based on the AMP software, and was more likely evidence of a hastily written MP3 decoder that didn't concern itself with standards compliance.
Version 1.90, released March 31, 1998, was the first release as a general-purpose audio player, and documented on the Winamp website as supporting plugins, of which it included two input plugins (MOD and MP3) and a visualization plugin.
The installer for Version 1.91, released 18 days later, included wave, cdda, and Windows tray handling plugins, as well as the famous Wesley Willis-inspired DEMO.MP3 file "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass". Mike the Llama is the company mascot.
By July 1998, Winamp's various versions had been downloaded over three million times.
Winamp 2
Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The new version improved the usability of the playlist, made the equalizer more accurate, and introduced more plug-ins. The modular windows for playlist and equalizer now matched the player's skin and could be moved around and be separated or "docked" to each other anywhere in any order.
The 2.x versions were widely used and made Winamp one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Windows. By the end of 1998, there were already over 60 plugins and hundreds of skins made for the software.
PlayMedia filed a federal lawsuit against Nullsoft in March 1999. In May 1999, PlayMedia was granted an injunction by Federal Judge A. Howard Matz against distribution of Nitrane by Nullsoft, and the same month the lawsuit was settled out-of-court with licensing and confidentiality agreements. Soon after, Nullsoft switched to an ISO decoder from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the developers of the MP3 format.
Winamp 2.10, released March 24, 1999, included a new version of the "Llama" demo.mp3 featuring a musical sting and bleating.
Nullsoft was purchased by AOL in June 1999 for $80 million in stock, with Nullsoft becoming a subsidiary. AOL itself merged with Time Warner in 2000.
Nullsoft relaunched the Winamp-specific winamp.com in December 1999 to provide easier access to skins, plug-ins, streaming audio, song downloads, forums, and developer resources.
As of June 22, 2000, Winamp surpassed 25 million registrants.
Winamp3