Winamp 5.9: First update in four years to facilitate further development

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winamp 59 first update in four years to facilitate further.jpg
winamp 59 first update in four years to facilitate further.jpg

There is a new version for the once popular media player Winamp. The big changes are under the hood.

Almost four years after the previous update, there is now a new version of the once very popular media player Winamp. Version 5.9 may not look much different for users, the Winamp team admits in a forum entry. But a lot has happened under the cover and the update is the result of four years of work, including an interruption caused by Covodi-19.

The biggest and most difficult part was the switch from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. This now provides a basis for working on the functions. Now you can add new ones or repair or replace existing ones. The released version is a release candidate, many tests are still necessary.

Winamp is a veteran among media players. The program has been playing users’ music collections on desktop computers since 1997. Due to the rise of streaming services such as Spotify and smartphones as playback devices, Winamp has fallen behind more and more in recent years. The update to Winamp 5.8 was released in 2018 – out of necessity because the files were leaked. The update itself was probably already two years old. Before that, there had been no update for five years. Version 5.8 removed, among other things, paid features and made Winamp freeware again.

The history of Winamp could have ended as early as 2013, when the owner AOL wanted to shut down the website. But that didn’t happen, instead the Belgian web radio aggregator Radionomy took over the software on January 14, 2014. Not much happened in the years that followed, but Radionomy announced that it wanted to resume development of Winamp. In autumn 2021, the company then announced “something big”, Winamp should be adapted for “a new generation”.

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The beta test announced at the time has apparently still started. Meanwhile, Radionomy has announced an NFT initiative, as part of which, among other things, the first Winamp skin is to be auctioned off. How things will continue after the update to version 5.9 remains to be seen.


(mho)