Why winamp

At first, Winamp kept riding high. That was in and of itself a lucrative business—not a sexy business, but a lucrative business nonetheless. You must login or create an account to comment. Skip to main content Tens of millions of Winamp users are still out there.

Flickr user uzi As many of us are busy crafting the perfect playlist for grilling outdoors, most likely such labor is happening on a modern streaming service or within iTunes. But during the last 15 years or so, that wasn't always the case. Today, we resurface our look at the greatest MP3 player that was—Winamp. This piece originally ran on June 24, and Winamp finally called it quits in November His latest book, Habeas Data , about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House.

He is based in Oakland, California. We can definitely recommend getting the Winamp Windows 10 latest download back on your desktop. Though the market is not overwhelmed with very functional, but mobile media players, still there are a lot of really good programs in Winamp is definitely among those quality ones. First of all, it is easy for downloading and installation. You can easily get Winamp free download files on the Internet. Winamp associates with the whole era of quality music listening and music library creation.

The GUI, resembling an aftermarket stereo head unit, felt period correct, but the real fun came in customizing the look and feel of the player through skins and plugins. Skins enabled to alter the visual look of the Winamp GUI. With scripting, they also added functionality to the player. There was an entire community behind Winamp modifications and many quality Winamp skins to choose from, although personally I always preferred the simple look of Winamp Classic.

To this day, the only plugin I ever messed with was the visualization variety. Winamp was an immediate hit with early adopters. By mid, the program, which debuted as freeware but shifted to a shareware model after launch, had been downloaded over 3 million times. Mainstream success soon followed. By June , Winamp had 25 million registered users and only a year later it was seen surpassing the 60 million user mark.

It was pretty clear that MP3s were going to be the next big thing in music. And they were AOL, meanwhile, was still making ridiculous sums of money with its infamously sandboxed dial-up service.

That massive revenue stream made it hard to prioritize other projects—even those for which AOL paid millions. This was a major turnoff for Winamp users. Then something new came along. In Apple launched the iPod, and it caught on in a big way. By iTunes came out for the PC and that was the beginning of the end for Winamp.

Everyone who bought an iPod switched to iTunes for listening to music, because iTunes was more-or-less required for loading up an iPod with music—and a lot of people bought iPods.

It could identify and rip your CDs in just a couple of clicks. The search was basically instant. Winamp was made up of several windows; iTunes only had one. A lot of geeks preferred Winamp, but iTunes appealed to a much bigger audience who just wanted to rip a bunch of CDs and listen to them.

Apple took the music player market and ran with it and then spent 15 years turning iTunes into the cluttered mess we all hate today. That plan changed at the last second when Nullsoft was sold to Radionomy. There are occasional developer rumblings about new builds, but nothing substantial so far. So you might be wondering: can you install and use Winamp right now? The answer: sort of. The WinAMP website , unchanged for five years, points to a forum thread when you request a download.

This software dates back to , but it works. I installed Winamp on a modern Windows 10 machine and quickly noticed a problem: nothing here is scaled properly on high-resolution displays. You can solve this in any modern skin by adjusting the Scaling settings, like this:. Winamp once offered a vast directory of skins and plugins, but that died in Happily, Winamp heritage offers a large collection, so check that out if you want to try out anything you remember from back in the day.

But it does work, and if nothing else is worth firing up for the nostalgia factor. Give it a spin and remember the early s.