Winamp: A Short Story of The Legendary Music Player

A couple of days ago, December 20th 2013 to be exact, a legend was buried dead. Winamp, the legend's name, was put on an end by its owner, AOL. Winamp reached the summit when Windows XP boomed. This application's user has expanded throughout its lifetime. Me myself was a Winamp user until they decided to add browser usability inside the application. I dislike the idea and set my eyes to Foobar media player. However, a legend is a legend. Here's a little bit of Winamp's history I took from wikipedia.

Winamp is a media player originally created by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev of Nullsoft. They launched the product on April 21st 1997. It had always been one of the first applications I install on my every PC installations. They later added custom skins and plugins to the market's needs of a personalized GUI.

Nullsoft, the app's creator, made a leap (for me, at least) when they released Winamp version 5, a fusion of version 2 and 3. Nullsoft put on a brand new modern skin to its download package. I liked the old skin because of its simplicity. But this new skin was adorable.

I started to look at other music players in 2008, after Nullsoft added a web browser to Winamp. It was a later 2007 version, I cannot remember. But according to wikipedia, it's version 5.5. This version was launched to mark Winamp's 10th anniversary. It started to look unpleasantly heavy to me. I'm using winamp only to play music, not browsing nor streaming online music.

Winamp's most recent default skin

It is sad when I read an article that AOL planned to stop the development and production (and even the previous versions of winamp downloads!). Winamp was part of my computer history. And it will always be in the hearts of everyone. Sayonara, Winamp.