AOL shuts down Winamp for good on 2013-12-20

[Arthur]

I guess no one uses Winamp any more with all the cloud-based alternatives available?

 

Source: Winamp (via Ars Technica)

 

Winamp, the storied MP3 player bought by AOL in June 1999 for over $80 million, is set to shut down in exactly one month. According to a post that went live Wednesday at 12:00 pm Eastern Time on the Winamp website:

 

http://i.imgur.com/UcNEr8o.png

Edited November 20, 2013 by Arthur

[matt40k]

Didn't know AOL owned that, also didn't know people still used it. It's pretty horrible licensing wise and I thought iTunes killed it ages ago to be honest. Last time I saw it someone was installing it onto Win98!

[rich_tech]

AOL are the death knell of a lot of tech, itunes has beaten winamp as far as im concerned nowadays, wasnt always the case though thats for certain apple have made a lot of improvements, I only used winamp when I first started mp3ing.

[Boredguy]

I used to love Winamp. Still got a copy of version 2.8 on my home PC from 2002. Can't say I've actually launched it for the past 5 years though.

[MatthewL]

I didn't know that either.

 

Been a VLC user for a while but at one point was a heavy Winamp user. Shame good little package.

[mac_shinobi]

That sucks as I used to use winamp on the PC - as mentioned above VLC is great, lets hope AOL don't get taken over by AOL or another company and then ends VLC like winamp

[free780]

End of era. So many skins and plugins. The speakers plugin were the best.

[Dos_Box]

Shame. If you go back 13 years or so, Winamp was THE player to use.

TBH, I hadn't looked at it in years, but it's kind of sad to hear of its passing

[Gatt]

Guessing the Llamas finally got their revenge...

[CamelMan]

Damn - Installed Winamp a few weeks ago on my work PC to listen to some stuff. Hate iTunes, find Media player a bit annoying (and trying to be iTunes) and winamp was the first to mind.

 

Spend ages as a teenager messing with skins and plugins. Didnt know AOL bought them and cant see why - there cant have been much money in it!

[CAM]

I used to have a legit Pro key before I lost it, yes I'm one of the few who paid for it.

 

Was a good player, the compact mode was my favourite as it fit nicely in the title bar. Shame it is going. Any other alternatives to Windows Media Player which has gone backwards?

[Steve21]

Still use Winamp on every pc I own best player I've found!!! Remove all the rubbish with streaming stuff, and what are the options itunes or........

 

Steve

[3s-gtech]

Still swear by Winamp, on my work and home PCs. Use it extensively for my whole music collection - the iPod plugins mean that I can totally avoid iTunes, while the huge number of customisation features are ace. Still found it has the best gapless playback (with full configuration) which is good for mix albums.

 

Won't make any difference to me that they're killing it, I have the installers and they'll hang around on download sites for a while yet.

[Earthling]

Still use Winamp on every pc I own best player I've found!!! Remove all the rubbish with streaming stuff, and what are the options itunes or........

 

Steve

 

 

Same here, and on my phone And Nexus. I use it with the Shoutcast plug-in to broadcast sometimes. Have to start looking for an alternative, I guess.

[Arthur]

iTunes or........

Foobar2000! Infinitely customisable, it loads instantly and there are lots of good plug-ins for it. You can even make it look like iTunes if you wanted to.

 

These days however, I tend to listen to a lot of music in Spotify and Google Play Music All Access.

 

http://snag.gy/Hpee7.jpg

Edited November 21, 2013 by Arthur

[sonofsanta]

WinAmp has always been my player of choice, I love the Library feature and hate iTunes & WMP. VLC is my preferred video player but I just don't love it as much for music, it's functional but... it just feels wrong.

 

I used to love downloading and playing with skins, though I always ended up back at Classic because anything interesting murdered system performance. Random fact of the day: deviantArt started out as somewhere to share WinAmp skins (and a handful of other apps).

[dgsmith]

I still use winamp as my main home comp audio media player to this day, every day. Used it for god knows how many years.. disappointed about the announcement

[synaesthesia]

Foobar here. (Unskinned though!). Wouldn't want to infect my PC with iTunes so couldn't say it's replaced anything.

As per many, started with Winamp though. Plugins kept coming in for it so when new formats come up like ogg, VQF etc it wasn't long at all before someone added a plugin. Loved using Shoutcast too.

[localzuk]

Winamp went downhill with version 3. It became bloated and slow and was missing features that people did actually want. I went from Winamp 2 to Foobar2000 way back when, along with XMMS on Linux.

 

Foobar is ugly as sin, but its very good.

 

Its a shame that AOL ruin everything they touch.

Edited November 21, 2013 by localzuk

[Meldrew]

I use winamp as my main solution for playing music too. Years ago after much smashing my head against the wall to get iTunes to sync with an ipod nano just the music I wanted it to sync, I tried winamp and it worked a treat. I've not tried anything else since for sync'ing or playing music.

 

Meldrew

[Chuckster]

Couldn't believe it when I heard about Winamp.

 

I've been using it since 1999 and it is the only player you'll see that's defaulted to play all my collection on my machines.

 

It's a pretty sad day to see it shut down for good

[Arthur]

Microsoft In Talks To Buy Shoutcast And Winamp From AOL

[localzuk]

Interesting. That would actually be a good home for shoutcast.

[chazzy2501]

Winamp was the only way to get watchable video pre broadband. bit for bit I think it still beats flash video and doesn't hog system resources. AOL myspaced it.

[matt40k]

AOL myspaced it.

 

LOL!!! You myspaced my battleship! Sorry, really amuzed me. I hope Microsoft don't buy it, I couldn't stand another version of Zune\XBOX Music\windows media player. I've just gone from Windows Phone 7 which need Zune that, alright wasn't perfect but the missus had a Xbox Music and it worked. Now she needs Zune, I need Xbox music and it's an arse. I liked it when I had everything ripped in either iTunes or Windows Media player and not having to scan\sync my library, convert it, re-buy it. Still, might be alright, maybe they'll do 1 player, maybe it'll also be able to play blurays as well!

 

In case you haven't notice I'm still narked Blockbuster is closing. It's like my childhood is closing down and DRM is taking over with all it's silly rules - like I have to dig out a DVI cable to play a bl00dy movie. Rar!!!