Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013

Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95, which is allegedly the best version out there.<p>Although it&#x27;s 10 years old (!!), it&#x27;s still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept <i>simple</i>.<p>I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.<p><pre><code> Me: Can&#x27;t I pause that song by hitting space? WMP: No, there are no keyboard shortcuts! Me: I wanna play all the songs of this folder! WMP: Ok, but I&#x27;ll mess up the order! By the way, are you interested in purchasing more songs from this artist? Cause I got a VirginMega link just right here! Me: No thanks... WMP: Why not? I mean, iTunes gets away with it, why can&#x27;t I? Me: I just want to play some music. WMP: Really?? JUST that?? Me: I wish.</code></pre>

I just switched back to Winamp after getting fed up with the latest release of iTunes.<p>At least it&#x27;s a real application that I can download and own for myself, and doesn&#x27;t stop working just because it&#x27;s no longer being supported.<p>This is a great example of why I don&#x27;t move all my data to the cloud, or use browser-based apps for things that matter to me.<p>Hopefully they&#x27;ll release the codebase to the world.

Wow, the end of an era.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just that it&#x27;s what I learned to use first, but for a scattered library of downloaded music across multiple languages, etc., I still haven&#x27;t found a clearly better solution. It was trivial and <i>fast</i> to find the songs I was looking for, either by filename or by ID3 data, and get them playing.<p>I suppose that it turns out the world has changed and this isn&#x27;t how most people consume music anymore, and the writing&#x27;s been on the wall for a while. But it&#x27;s incredibly sad to see that model of media consumption finally dying with a whimper. I&#x27;m not sure if there are even any modern alternatives for Windows that still optimize for a large library of local music with poor ID3 data quality.

There are ultimately two types of people in the comments right now: those that will miss Winamp and those laughing it was still around.<p>Winamp worked. It played all your MP3s without any of the other fluff. It played your music in a very lightweight program. What was also nice was this was before every program auto-updated; so you&#x27;d manually have to go update it; except, the newer versions were adding features, not fixing bugs. If you thought Winamp was fine, there was never a need to upgrade. I remember never upgrading Winamp until way into my college years.<p>People have mentioned it, but I didn&#x27;t change to foobar because I always used Winamp. Even when they made the modern UI, you could (and can) still go Classic. Computer space and performance weren&#x27;t issues because the extra bells and whistles are easy to never use.<p>Only a few weeks ago did I make the move from Winamp to foobar; and it was only to see the difference. Initial thoughts are I don&#x27;t like how it displays my music; but I do like the shuffle since its playing songs I never hear.

Thank you Justin Frankel for this wonderfully whimsical piece of software and all the code you have shared over the years. I wouldn&#x27;t have been a programmer if it weren&#x27;t for you being providing such a stellar role model.

People laugh at me for still using winamp but I love it. It&#x27;s fast, low memory, never crashes and the ui hasn&#x27;t significantly changed for well over a decade.<p>More than that, it&#x27;s one of the few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens when I was first getting seriously involved with computers.<p>Its death sort of marks an end of an era for me :&#x27;(

Well this really sucks the llama&#x27;s ....<p>Thanks for all the skins and memories!

I remember as a teen talking to the developers on IRC, in one of the Windows development channels. I remember thinking they were crazy because they didn&#x27;t want to use the standard Windows components to do the UI. I also remember wondering why anyone bother spending a half hour downloading 1 song over a 56k modem when you could just set your Sony Discman on top of your computer!<p>Then they started branching out and worked with skinnable UIs, then went totally crazy and built things like ShoutCast, streaming music over the internet was a crazy idea at the time. Amazing group of guys that built that and were willing to learn anything and put incredible amounts of time and effort into a project.

I always used Winamp on Windows, so when I switched to Linux I tried basically every single open-source alternative that worked with my workflow: Per-song ratings, a nested Genre&#x2F;Artist&#x2F;Album&#x2F;Song library browser, global hotkeys, able to handle a collection of &gt;100 GB and a useful playlist&#x2F;queue system.<p>For anyone else looking for the same thing: the one that I ended up choosing was <a href="http://gmusicbrowser.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gmusicbrowser.org&#x2F;</a>. See <a href="http://gmusicbrowser.org/screenshots/ListsLibraryContext.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gmusicbrowser.org&#x2F;screenshots&#x2F;ListsLibraryContext.png</a>.

This seems like a good time to plug my latest open source project: libgroove [1]<p>It&#x27;s a cross-platform music player backend C library. It&#x27;s meant to be generic enough to be the backend of any music player.<p>I use it as the backend for Groove Basin [2] which just might hit milestone 1.0.0 around December 20.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;superjoe30&#x2F;libgroove</a> [2]: <a href="https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;superjoe30&#x2F;groovebasin</a>

Ars had a really nice article about the history of Winamp and of what went wrong: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;winamp-how-greatest-...</a>

Please open source it. It is still best player around with classic skin.

I&#x27;m another long-time winamp user. I got stuck on 2.91, never needed to update since it worked perfectly. The biggest reason why I never switched to another player (aside from all of them having zero features that interested me) is that the plugin system was extremely easy to use and had a community of devoted developers. I can reproduce like 20 or so different formats that the &quot;naked&quot; winamp cannot (mostly console chiptunes, like .vgm, .spc or .psf). I know that other players support those plugins, but for me, there&#x27;s simply no need to switch. There&#x27;s nothing I miss.<p>I strongly associate winamp with the early days of P2P, when I was just a teen and got fascinated by the possibility of, at last, getting (at 5k&#x2F;s; way better than nothing) all those songs from a foreign music TV channel that never played in the local radios... and using Winamp to play them. But it&#x27;s not just nostalgia: what makes Winamp such a great piece of software is that I still use it every day and it doesn&#x27;t show its age.

Is it only me, or there is some JS &lt;script&gt; tag in winamp&#x27;s &lt;title&gt;?<p>&lt;title&gt;&lt;div id=&quot;ad_play_300&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text&#x2F;javascript&quot;&gt; &lt;!-- adSetType(&quot;F&quot;); htmlAdWH(&quot;93301178&quot;, &quot;300&quot;, &quot;250&quot;); adSetType(&quot;&quot;); &#x2F;&#x2F;--&gt; &lt;&#x2F;script&gt;&lt;&#x2F;div&gt;&lt;&#x2F;title&gt;

Nostalgia. I remember the good old days just a decade ago when we would download any song we want (courtesy napster&#x2F;kazaa) and the default music player would be: yep Winamp hands down. Keyboard shortcuts were so convenient. It just seems like we have headed in the wrong direction with how music is managed on our computers&#x2F;devices etc. Not to mention the beautiful skins that we could apply for funkiness. RIP winamp and you will be missed.

Too bad, I liked their Android player as well. One of the few pieces of software I have used continuously for... oi... longer than I care to admit. Makes me sad.

I still use Winamp as my main musicplayer - it&#x27;s customizable, import&#x2F;exports to iPod easily, doesn&#x27;t spam me with updates, doesn&#x27;t force me to buy things through it, reads basically every format and above all it is really light.<p>It&#x27;s a shame - seems like it died because it doesn&#x27;t have a content purchasing mechanism forced on the user.

This is a sad day in computer history. Winamp was my first default music player and first true love of a computer program. It was in the end of the 1990s and ICQ ruled internet chatting and mp3s was new thing.<p>I used Winamp everyday. We shared music from dorm to dorm on the campus network. Everyone had Winamp. Parties had a dedicated Winamp computer with all the playlists with music available from the campus network.<p>We searched the net with Phoenix (now called Firefox) or Opera to find all the album art work. We installed beautiful Winamp skins and was amazed at audio 3d-visualization plugins that Winamp offered.<p>Winamp was early on handling multiple audio cards. I had dual audio cards, one just for Winamp connected to my HiFi equipment and the other for the rest of the Windows sounds connected to the computer table speakers.<p>Early with global hotkey support. Plugins that showed GUI popups of the music playing. Fraunhofer codec support. And it was super fast.<p>And I still remember the uproar when Winamp 3 was released. True fanboys stayed with the Winamp 2 release for many years, the classic.<p>Sad this has to end, but Winamp never successfully adopted to a world with full fledged media library players like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Back in the day we used Windows Explorer (or Norton Commander) to cataloged all our music and soon a community based naming standard convention of music was &quot;created&quot; by mutual agreement.<p>And then came music streaming.<p>Bye Winamp!<p>&#x2F;&#x2F; A pro license owner

I guess the Llama&#x27;s ass now gets a break.

Why is this the title of the page?<p>&lt;title&gt;&lt;div id=&quot;ad_play_300&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text&#x2F;javascript&quot;&gt; &lt;!-- adSetType(&quot;F&quot;); htmlAdWH(&quot;93301178&quot;, &quot;300&quot;, &quot;250&quot;); adSetType(&quot;&quot;); &#x2F;&#x2F;--&gt; &lt;&#x2F;script&gt;&lt;&#x2F;div&gt;&lt;&#x2F;title&gt;<p>Is the title an Ad?

I hate AOL. They buy things and shut it down without much thought. I still remember Goowy, a flash based desktop and OS with the early concept of having Apps. Imagine if it were still there, you would have flash-based tablet.<p>But there is one victory from AOL, the spinoff off Mozilla. You would think they could do the same with Winamp

&quot;It really whips the lama&#x27;s ass&quot; What an era.<p>Winamp&#x27;s goodbye might go in a similar fashion to Sonique&#x27;s. Slowly and quietly. Sonique was a music player that was bought for about $20 million by Lycos (back in the dot com bubble days) and then shut down after it plateau&#x27;d in development and execs realized &quot;dude, it&#x27;s just a media player&quot;. It had a huge community (but no where near as big as Winamp&#x27;s) and literally a TON (hundreds and hundreds of pages) of really amazing skins and visualization plugins. The site was shut down without much notice.<p>You can still download the lastest stable versions of Sonique on a fan site and it&#x27;ll still work. I have a feeling that&#x27;s how Winamp will be. Unless the developers release the source code.

The magic moment was when we all realized, pretty much simultaneously, that CDs and radio were obsolete. And this wasn&#x27;t from some iterative Moore&#x27;s Law like growth in hard drive size, it was sudden algorithmic brilliance that allowed music to be compressed small enough to be easily downloaded and shared. Suddenly digital distribution seemed inevitable and obvious. We could listen to whole collections of songs very, very fast. Old bands became popular, and we would sit around for hours playing song after amazing song for our friends. Winamp was the app that made it possible. The skins let us change its look to fit us better, and its music visualizations were an awesome backdrop for parties. A great app and a great time.<p>We live in the future.

Show me one product&#x2F;service&#x2F;platform that got acquired by AOL and got better&#x2F;bigger at there.<p>* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL</a>

Makes you wonder why they cannot open source the code instead of completely killing it.

I prefer Clementine, Amarok, and Rhythmbox. No point using a proprietary app when there&#x27;s plenty of open-source apps which are just as good if not better...

Oh this takes me back... I redesigned WinAmp&#x27;s website back in 2004 or 3 for Odopod in San Francisco. The wonderful Andre Adreev assisted (he now running <a href="http://www.dresscodeny.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dresscodeny.com&#x2F;</a> ).<p>Here are some comps for those interested... <a href="http://smokinggun.com/projects/winamp/index.php?id=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smokinggun.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;winamp&#x2F;index.php?id=0</a>

That&#x27;s a shame. Winamp is still my music player of choice when I&#x27;m not using a streaming service. I&#x27;ve always appreciated the design that allows me to minimize it to a thin bar and leave it on top in a way that&#x27;s unobtrusive. Has anyone else copied that design?<p>iTunes and Windows Media Player are both monstrosities, and while I appreciate VLC for playing video, I&#x27;ve never been inclined to use it as a music player.

Sad! It really whipped the Llama&#x27;s ass! It is still my music player on PC. I have saved the installer.

Although I&#x27;m not using winamp any more, for at least 5 years now. This makes me really sad.

First Sonique, now this? At least we&#x27;ve still got foobar2000.

While I haven&#x27;t used Winamp in years, this still makes me kind of sad. Justin Frankel &amp; Co. really changed the game.

If there was ever an example of how to acquire a technology you don&#x27;t know what to do with and then sit on it till it&#x27;s dead, the Winamp story is it (and I guess Sonique as well).<p>Made a couple people rich (well deserved) at least.

Aaaaand here&#x27;s a clone of the Skin &#x2F; Plugin section from the winamp website: <a href="http://winamp.dpedu.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;winamp.dpedu.io&#x2F;</a><p>Skins are coming soon, they&#x27;re still scraping :)

I use Winamp since version 2 when it was released in 1998 (I was 8) I think, my dad started using it and I still use it everyday, nothing can be compared to it, the simplicity of use it&#x27;s just insuperable, it&#x27;s the best music player out there and I&#x27;ll continue using it. I tried AIMP, Foobar in Windows but the just don&#x27;t... and in Linux the only thing comparable is Audacious but of course it lacks all the development that Winamp carries from all its years, it&#x27;s a sad day, AOL was the worst thing that could happen to this great piece of software.

If anyone is looking for a replacement of Winamp, I highly recommend AIMP, I have been using it for about two years now.<p><a href="http://www.aimp.ru/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aimp.ru&#x2F;</a>

I remember using Winamp back in the day. At one point in time, it was the only mp3 player out there that didn&#x27;t absolutely suck. It was pretty amazing how usenet and winamp opened up a whole world of music you just couldn&#x27;t buy anywhere at the time. Truly a leap forwards in distribution! It&#x27;s too bad the music industry reacted with such paranoia that they arguably still haven&#x27;t adequately monetized it.<p>A couple of years ago I used OSX for about 6 months. One of the more minor reasons I was relieved to uninstall it was that I never found a music player I really liked. Let&#x27;s face it, iTunes is crap even on the OS it was meant for!<p>On Windows, look no further than Foobar2000. It&#x27;s not a super-sexy looking player (although it can be if you put some work into it), but it is eminently functional. It does practically anything you can want (with extensions), has an easy to figure out but powerful interface, and is audiophile-grade. This lives on my HTPC, which interfaces with my stereo, so it&#x27;s what I&#x27;m primarily used to. Love it! There&#x27;s one extension (foo_httpcontrol) you can add that allows you to control your stereo from any networked device (there are a few android apps designed to work through this interface), which is handy for flipping through music while reading in your comfy chair or sitting on the porcelain throne!<p>On Linux, Amarok. Sexier apps come and are abandoned to become bug-infested swamps of suck, but Amarok has been going strong for a very long time. I often try newer music apps, but Amarok is the default on KDE for a reason.

Even though I moved to another player on my desktop long ago, I still use it on my Android device. Sad that it&#x27;s going away :(. They should definitely open source it.

How come Winamp is shutting down and Real Player still around !?!?<p>Notwithstanding that Real Player was quite popular in Asia, a few years ago, during the portable media player years.

I still use Winamp on every PC I own.. Even bought a license but i never bother to add it.

Winamp! It really whips the llama&#x27;s ass! :-(

Memories of napster&#x2F;kazaa coming back from reading this. Best MP3 player. Fast, skinnable with ease, supported ID3 tags, one of the first with visualizations (cool feature but didn&#x27;t use it much)<p>VLC is the same for me for video. Fast and plays almost all formats plus its open source. Winamp should have been open source to further its usage and development.

Thank you for the music, WinAmp.<p>Edit: Will this affect Shoutcast?

I don&#x27;t know about you guys, but I&#x27;ve this news just ended my teenage years =( I&#x27;ve used winamp to store my 2TB music collection for like 10 years. yeah back then to get 2TB from 120gb hdd&#x27;s was something big, but anyway, even after dragging and dropping the whole 2TB directory into winamp, it processed track by track, without destroying my ram, and my CPU. I&#x27;ve had a zillions (Around 10gb, it&#x27;s 1-2kb per song) of modular music from: atari, c64, nds, n64, sega, ps1,2,3 and etc and etc. All of these was supported by winamp plugins. This was working perfectly, sorted in my winamp by categories&#x2F;genres and various other methods. I&#x27;ve been really enjoying this player for all my geeky life. And now it&#x27;s going way =( They could at least release and opensource. That classical design is masterpiece, I don&#x27;t know any player you can beat winamp&#x27;s design, unless it&#x27;s xmms player in linux, which is probably also dead for a long long time. Although I&#x27;m currently residing on OSX, and I&#x27;m using iTunes to sort all my stuff, it&#x27;s still not so great as Winamp. All I need is proper music indexer, and all possible music format support. What could be better is having transcoding software together with this cute player, and I&#x27;d be happy till the end of my life lol. Now I have to use only ALAC instead of FLAC, and ofcourse mp3. For converter I&#x27;m using XLD, for video VLC or mplayerx, for converting videos Handbrake. C&#x27;mon Winamp was universal tool! I belive some plugins could provide transcoding.<p>LET&#x27;S CRAWL WINAMP SIDE AND SAVE A HISTORY OF GREAT SOFTWARE.<p>Lol i think this should be in computer museum or something =&#x2F;<p>Winamp, I&#x27;ll miss you so much, I know that &quot;justin can&#x27;t code it&quot; sometimes, but I still love all your team, your product, your efforts, Thanks for being with us with our teenhood!!!<p>P.s and what about winamp shoutcast? this was only ultimate radio solution in the whole web!!

I wonder if this is a hoax&#x2F;website hack? There&#x27;s no mention of it anywhere else apart from this particular URL. No mention on Twitter, no talk of it in the forums etc. They only just updated the Winamp Android Client.<p>I doubt it, but the odd HTML in the title and lack of any other information makes me doubt it&#x27;s authenticity.

Winamp proved that offer sensible playlist management and multi-format support and you can&#x27;t go wrong. I only wonder two things: why Winamp wasn&#x27;t bagged by the big players earlier, and why the other players (i&#x27;ve only tried the free&#x2F;freemium warez) still don&#x27;t get it.

Before I knew the word “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse[1], still shows up on their site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish. It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would use.<p>Saddest to me, is that I can’t think of today’s equivalent, a widespread and useful app that encourages its users to tinker and easily modify the interface.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.winamp.com/skin/impulse/142212" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.winamp.com&#x2F;skin&#x2F;impulse&#x2F;142212</a>

Anyone here old enough to remember Sonique? Back in the late 90&#x27;s skinning your MP3 player was the bees knees. I remember having debates about Winamp plugins, flame wars about the direction of the software ... the good ol&#x27; days. iTune sucks.

Huh. Has anyone offered AOL some cash for Winamp? it isn&#x27;t like it&#x27;d be expensive to maintain, if AOL was willing to part with it for reasonable money.<p>Is there a reason why they&#x27;d want to shut down the company rather than selling it for cheap?

Ah, the good old days of winamp are coming to an end.<p>I&#x27;ll miss the old days of 1999, using winamp to play my latest Napster &quot;acquisitions&quot;.<p>For myself, I generally just use mplayer or music-on-console (moc) nowadays. It gets the job done with no fuss and no mess.

Brings up a great question: What are the alternatives to Winamp? (No iTunes please)

Thanks for the memories, I will never stop using Winamp in my mind. I have so many memories tied to it. It was crazy you had to download it to play those surreal .mp3 files. Then it was my patient assistant when I had to make my first (teen) love compilation! I also used to show people how many beatiful skins it had. And what about when lyrics plugins came out and no no other players could do it. And what about breath taking, stunning visualizations plugins when WMP would just show you those low resolution ugly bricks? (has this last point got any better?) Thanks Justin for all you did!

Why do they not open source the entire package? I have to think that AOL has clean intellectual property ownership on the code base. It would be better than letting this important historical codebase slip into oblivion.

I stopped using Windamp for a long time until I purchased my first Android phone. After looking through the dozens of Mp3 players on the market, I saw my old fave, downloaded it and have been using it ever since on my phone.<p>RIP Llama

I have not seen a better music player.<p>Lightweight<p>Unobtrusive, customisable, highly functional UI<p>Fades out tracks when u stop (to not have a harsh cut off waveform)<p>Its what I currently use. Current build will probably run on windows for a loong loong time to come tho.

Winamp is a great music player. It is still the best for some file formats. Via it&#x27;s plugins it can play more exotic audio file formats than any other player. Some players support s3m and it, but play only half of some files: Winamp plays it all. There are great plugins for nsf, spc, psf and usf sound files (sound files form NES, SNES, PS1 and N64 games). I wish there would be a real alternative (for Linux). Does anyone know a good player for these file formats? Audacious is good for s3m, it and nsf, but spc, psf and usf?

I use to use winamp to fill my house with audio. I had a few PCs throughout the house and had set up my own radio station. I would hit play on one of the PCs and all the computers would start playing throughout my home. I could even access and control my broadcast outside my home.<p>Back then I had a ton of curiosity but development skills. Tinkering as did with Winamp and other programs like edonkey and Bit torrent compelled me to create and then learn how to turn my web ideas into reality.<p>Thanks Winamp for helping me get going!

Just for those who are looking for a replacement player on Windows Desktop. I have been using JetAudio player, and have been very happy with it. It supports global keyboard shortcuts (VERY important for me), CD ripping, playlists with live monitoring and what not. And one of the biggest reasons I moved to it from Winamp was that it could handle the 4500 something songs I had on my machine in <i>one playlist</i>, without getting laggy. Winamp would just crawl with those many songs.

XMPlay has to be mentioned here! Great player in not even 400 kB, but unfortunately Windows only.<p><a href="http://support.xmplay.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.xmplay.com&#x2F;</a>

Sad. Years ago I found WinAmp and its programmable visualizer an indispensable tool when teaching Mathematics. Graphing sine waves is so much fun when combined with a good beat.

I still use it everyday, never changed player since its first release. I guess it&#x27;s the piece of software I have used for the longest time now (for free!) ?<p>It just works for me. Controls in the systray (deal breaker for me with other players), brillant mix of media library and playlists, the Bento skin is very decent etc.<p>Once in a while a shoutcast radio or a trippy Milkdrop session.<p>I get that people use Spotify now. I&#x27;m not in the cloud yet but I see the appeal.

I still use winamp. I have been a faithful user of winamp for the last 12 years. Everything else seems very bloated and try to do too many things at once.

Oh, memories. I&#x27;ve been using Winamp for at least 10 years. I still have a Netscape skin for the legacy version (came out with Netscape Navigator, I believe). Yes, Winamp was <i>the</i> audio player back then.<p>I switched to Winamp lite when they started adding &quot;bloat&quot; features like media library, video playback, etc. It plays music and it does it awesomely. It&#x27;s likely I&#x27;ll be using it for 10 more years.

Still use it and prefer it to VLC or Foobar. I hope they opensource it, but I suspect it&#x27;s unlikely? Would be cool to see all old versions too.

This is sad. I discovered so much music throughout my teenage life using WinAMP. I used to do shoutCast broadcast for friends and feel like a DJ. I used to be excited when a friend would allow me to replace their MusicMatch Jukebox with Winamp. It was solid, and worked. Why shutdown? :(<p>I supposed I&#x27;ve only been installing the &lt;3.00 version anyway, so I can stick with it, but still...mixed emotions.

It&#x27;s been a couple of years since I tried to find a good alternative to iTunes on OS X. Does it exist yet? Is there a Winamp for mac yet?

I feel like I already know the answer but I really hope they release the source code. At least the community can take Winamp forward then.

In their dog days they are now giving away the pro version of Winamp, which does CD ripping, removes ads and has a few other features. i.e. the link to the Free version is now the Pro version.<p>I was another pretty recent convert to Winamp after using it in the 90s then switching to Linux, but it still does the job _fast_ if you still keep a big hard drive of MP3s.

Does this affect SHOUTcast?

Audacious + Winamp Classic Skin = Winamp.<p>For the skin: <a href="http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Winamp+Classic+Skin?content=64790" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gnome-look.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;show.php&#x2F;Winamp+Classic+Skin?c...</a><p>For the player: <a href="http://audacious-media-player.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;audacious-media-player.org&#x2F;</a>

I have a lot of hardware that&#x27;s SOL if Shoutcast goes down. I hope they have a transition plan if that&#x27;s the case.

Started using Winamp 1.90 in 1998. Don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever played MP3s in any other application since. :(

I know it&#x27;s lame to hijack topics with &quot;yeah, but [something else but similar]&quot; posts, but I am <i>still</i> sad that DeliPlayer isn&#x27;t being developed anymore :(<p><a href="http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/DeliPlayer" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exotica.org.uk&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DeliPlayer</a>

This sucks... winamp has been my go to media player, along with shoutcast services forever and a day... Their android player is imho one of the best ones available at that.<p>I honestly haven&#x27;t been into any of the skin options since version 5.. but the player has been awesome. This is really a shame.

I actually really like the Zune music player that you could (still can?) download from Microsoft. I never even owned a Zune, but the player software is a lightweight WMP with better design. Sure the Zune Marketplace&#x2F;pass links were all there, but they are easy enough to ignore.

I&#x27;m so bummed about this.<p>It&#x27;s my favorite media player.<p>It was the first media player in its day that payed every file you threw at it.<p>It has never disappointed me since.<p>I really wish the owner would opensource it though if he doesn&#x27;t have the time to maintain it I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s hundreds of thousands of people who will.

Thank you Winamp for the good times.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t call it an end of an era though, I feel like Winamp&#x27;s era ended several years ago.<p>Now the only program Windows users still use in this day of age that I can&#x27;t understand is shareware WinRAR. Seriously. (Who hasn&#x27;t been using 7-Zip for years?)

This will likely be buried beneath the upvoted comments, but does anyone know if there&#x27;s a backup of the entire skins and plugins database?<p>Would be a tragedy to lose all the brilliant work that&#x27;s been created over the years, even if I don&#x27;t use Winamp anymore.

If you want a nice, cross-platform, sane, fast alternative, including streaming between users, you should have a look at the open source Tomahawk. <a href="http://www.tomahawk-player.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomahawk-player.org&#x2F;</a>

Show me 1 product&#x2F;service&#x2F;platform that got acquired by AOL and got better&#x2F;bigger at there.<p>* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL</a>

Please sign a petition to opensource a winamp! <a href="https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/attention-aol-let-winamp-go-open-source#share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.change.org&#x2F;en-AU&#x2F;petitions&#x2F;attention-aol-let-win...</a>

With HTML like this, I can see perhaps why folks aren&#x27;t tuning in as much <a href="https://gist.github.com/editor/ed6339a732d6c7c06dd3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;editor&#x2F;ed6339a732d6c7c06dd3</a>

Best music player with all the customizations I need and manages all the external devices very well. Quite a shame that it has to shut down. Another disappointment but not as large as Google reader, I will still be using my winamp.

&quot;It really whips the llama&#x27;s ass&quot; was a reference to the late, great Wesely Willis: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM</a>

Winamp was being shopped around recently.<p>Either they didn&#x27;t end up finding a buyer or they did and the buyer is taking the tech private (cheaper than staffing a product and paying for bandwidth costs). I&#x27;m guessing it is the latter.

Winamp has a special place in my heart it was the first music app that I really like when I was in my teens.<p>I remember downloading a song in 15 minutes off Napster when my family first got an ISDN line. Oh man 10-15kbs was screaming.

Just got it running with the D-Reliction skin using Wine in Ubuntu. Then the first song it picks on shuffle is all, &quot;numa numa yey&quot;...haha, man, I&#x27;ll bet they&#x27;ve had so many downloads today. lol

I had a 6500 and used SoundApp, it was scriptable, thanks Norman!<p><a href="http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~franke/SoundApp/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-cs-students.stanford.edu&#x2F;~franke&#x2F;SoundApp&#x2F;</a>

<a href="http://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sheepfriends.com&#x2F;index-page=billy.html</a><p>This was my go to music player before I moved over to Play Music and then Spotify.

Well, shit. It&#x27;s still the best music player for Windows, even after a decade. I haven&#x27;t updated it for over a year, though, so I guess the latest version will have to do for the next decade :-)

Just in case you&#x27;re looking for winamp after the close date, you can find old versions of it on <a href="http://oldversion.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldversion.com</a>. My fave is 2.95.

Trough WinAmp I discovered MP2. Then MP3. I even created an amazing skin for Winamp back in 2000, before they went with the scalable one. It was hellish popular back in the days, it was a Puma skin :)

My progression over the last 15 years has gone Winamp, Foobar, MediaMonkey, itunes, Spotify. I keep itunes around just for CD ripping and ipod syncing, but I&#x27;d like to abandon it altogether.

Why does it have to shut down, cant they just not release new versions?

The end of an era. I still have it installed, as on Windows there&#x27;s still nothing better.<p>I remember switching to Linux and being frustrated by XMMS because it wasn&#x27;t Winamp, although it tried to be.

I remember having to rip cds to wav files on my x4 CD burner (the fastest at the time) and then using winamp to convert them to mp3 before winamp had the add-in that did it all in one step.

First thing I do when setting up a fresh PC is installing Winamp 2.95. It&#x27;s the perfect mp3 player for the simple use case of just dragging some files onto a window and hitting play.

Fifteen years ago, i was downloaded winamp. Now i&#x27;m use other SO, it&#x27;s sad, but it&#x27;s the end of many first music player, other example is sonique, downed in 2002.

I believe AOL owns Winamp now. I hope they open source the code!

I loved the visualization plugins for Winamp. I remember throwing parties using Winamp to play the tunes and projecting the visualizations on a huge screen. So good!

Isn&#x27;t XMMS still around? That looks a hell of a lot like winamp. <a href="http://www.xmms.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xmms.org&#x2F;</a>

Nooo... This is a bad, bad day! It would really interesting to learn more about this company and how it survived for 15 years in a very competitive market.

Peter Pawlowski&#x27;s work on Foobar2000 is &#x2F; was great. Winamp did the trick, but after 2.95 it lost me.<p>That said, it&#x27;s sad to see the name go.

Winamp.com <i>and associated web services</i><p>Associated web services sounds a lot like Shoutcast.<p>AOL wants to double down on stupid journalism. Winamp is a distraction.

Sad to see Winamp go and hopefully AOL won&#x27;t do the same with Shoutcast. Would be nice to see AOL update the Shoutcast app more.

<p><pre><code> &quot;Winamp, it really whips the llama&#x27;s ass!&quot; </code></pre> My favourite mp3 player during internet 1.0. Good times.

<a href="http://i.imgur.com/Y9Y4yZI.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Y9Y4yZI.jpg</a> You will be missed!

Winamp was very popular back in the days. When I was in 6, 7th grade I would use it every day! Sad to see this going down.

God I hate Aol.

Why shutting down and not open-source?

I really liked the windamp android player, specially because it had lastfm integration. sad news.

Winamp + Napster reminds me of 1999.

Writing simple Winamp Plugin was my first C++ experience about 10 years ago and it was amazing.

WinAmp was dead to me a few months into AOL owning it. Long live Nullsoft &amp; Justin!

Sad news. Always loved using winamp. Really did &quot;kick the llama&#x27;s ass.&quot;

What does it even mean to &quot;shut down&quot; a piece of download-and-run software?

Wow I feel like I am leaving a piece of my childhood behind. Long live winamp haha

This makes me really sad. I learned to code while listening to music using Winamp.

It was great while it lasted. I am sorry to see them shut down, but I understand.

Winamp? I used it years ago. I use VLC and mplayer for quite a while already.

&gt; Why Go Pro? Help fund continued product development &amp; innovation<p>Well... no more...

And this is not gonna top up on 4chan. This is why I like it better here.

noooooooooooooooooo.....

It turns out that the lama came back and whooped it&#x27;s arse.

I guess the Llama got sick of its ass being whipped.:&#x2F;

Ah, fond memories of downloading MP3&#x27;s via irc DCC :)

great example of how unimaginative AOL is. winamp has (had) a massive user base. it would have been a great base to start a spotify competitor with.

Just in time for me to download and get my latest skin.

Someone should create a Winamp 2 theme for FooBar now.

I would love to contribute if there was a public repo.

Geiss is my favourite music visualisation program

For those looking for a lightweight alternative, I recently switched to GOM Music Player on Windows. No library (yet), but a nice modern GUI and good Context Menu integration.

Give Mediamonkey a try.. syncs with iPods too

Its a great app. Sad they are shutting down.

And the llama may finally rest in peace.

Dear Winamp, thank you for XMMS. Adios!

It really kicked the llama&#x27;s ass.

They brought MP3s to the masses. RIP.

You win this time llama&#x27;s ass!!

Holy shit, Winamp is still around!?

Winamp was my first mp3 player.

RIP the era of windows ricing.

Shift+V for fadeout for life.

Internet history dieing.

AOL money down the drain

Noooooooo.....<p>(tears)<p>Anyway, why are they shutting down?

this sucks, let&#x27;s start a form to keep WinAmp alive :)

this is a sad day! I&#x27;ve been using it since 1999. :(

I blame the llamas.

This makes me sad.

say hi to foobar

Imagine if they opened the sources on this...

end of an era