A couple of weeks ago, I shared news to our social channels of the Internet Archive’s effort to pay homage to the legendary music player Winamp. With “Webamp”, the Archive created a verbatim recreation of the classic Winamp 2.x, and even allows you to set one of 5,000+ equally classic skins that are also available on the website. With this player, you can either listen to your own music, or listen to the massive amounts of audio found in the Internet Archive itself.
There’s no such thing as “forgetting” about a legend like Winamp, but when I shared that post, I didn’t really expect to hear any significant news about the real Winamp anytime soon. Or maybe ever. But here we are, with newfound knowledge that Winamp isn’t dead. In fact, a 5.8 beta recently leaked to the web somewhere, and it’ll hit the rest of us this week.
On one hand, this upcoming update is going to appease devout Winamp users who’ve had bad luck with the application on modern operating systems (read: Windows 10), but on the other, it’s simply awesome to see that someone has picked up the torch and will continue development on Winamp as if it never stopped. Most fans are probably concerned that someone else’s hands will make it feel less like Winamp as time goes on, but so far, there’s nothing to suggest that will happen. That’s good, since Winamp 6 is due in 2019.
The company behind this development is Radionomy, which bought what remained of Winamp back in 2014, and soon, the fruits of the company’s labor should help remind us that the project still has lots of life in it. For some, Winamp may still serve their needs today, but for the modern digital society, better cloud and podcast support is going to be appreciated at the very least. Updated and added format support would be great to see, as well.
Winamp might be long in the tooth by many opinions nowadays, but the classic player still has over 100 million faithful monthly users, which is a testament to how well it works. It’s no wonder those 100 million wouldn’t want to move on from something that works so well. But soon, those same users will finally have a worthwhile update, and with Winamp 6 coming, the rest of us might become suddenly intrigued. Especially so since it will offer mobile support. Linux and OS X support seems to be currently unrevealed.