One thing that's unique about the Winamp music player is its integrated Shoutcast Radio, which lets you listen to Internet radio stations streaming live. Compared with dedicated streaming radio apps like iHeartRadio and TuneInRadio, Winamp offers few stations to choose from. However, the feature is still a nice addition that presents alternative listening options.
One of Winamp's biggest features is its Wi-Fi sync, which makes it possible to push content from your PC (with Winamp installed) to your Android device, using a common Wi-Fi connection. I found the process of syncing music between PC and mobile device to be simple to figure out, but not always reliable. On more than one occasion, the process froze due to an interrupted connection. This wouldn't have been so bad, if the sync had resumed automatically upon reconnecting, but unfortunately, Winamp did no such thing. This made syncing a tedious process. Also, when transferring individual albums, I saw that several incomplete tracks had made their way onto my mobile device. When I tried to resend the albums, bunches of duplicate files were created.
While it did have trouble syncing files with my PC, Winamp did well with songs that were already locally stored on my Android device. It offered a simple navigation scheme, and I liked that it incorporated thumbnails of album art into menus.
It's worth noting that there are a few different ways to add premium features to Winamp via in-app purchases. For $2.99, you can add lyrics. Similar to SoundHound's feature, this Winamp add-on scrolls through lyrics in real time, as the song is playing. The album washer feature costs $3.99 and is meant to keep your collection whole by updating tags and adding missing album artwork. Finally, the Winamp Pro bundle costs $4.99 and gives you a handful of new features including a 10-band graphic equalizer and crossfading and gapless playback capabilities.
In sum, Winamp is a solid, albeit unattractive app that is just fine for basic music playback. It has Shoutcast radio built in, which is nice, and a Wi-Fi sync feature that would be a huge selling point if it were better designed and more reliable. Other than these, it doesn't really have any bells or whistles to speak of.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev[7][8][9] by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Version 1 of Winamp was released in 1997, and quickly grew popular with over 3 million downloads,[10] paralleling the developing trend of MP3 (music) file sharing. Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions were widely used and made Winamp one of the most downloaded Windows applications.[11] By 2000, Winamp had over 25 million registered users[12] and by 2001 it had 60 million users.[13] A poor reception to the 2002 rewrite, Winamp3, was followed by the release of Winamp 5 in 2003, and a later release of version 5.5 in 2007. A now-discontinued version for Android was also released, along with early counterparts for MS-DOS and Macintosh.
Winamp was first released in 1997, when Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev,[7][8][9] formerly students at the University of Utah, integrated their Windows user interface with the Advanced Multimedia Products ("AMP") MP3 file playback engine.[56] The name Winamp (originally spelled WinAMP) was a portmanteau of "Windows" and "AMP".[57] The minimalist WinAMP 0.20a was released as freeware on April 21, 1997.[58][59]Its windowless, menu bar-only interface showed only play (open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played. MP3 decoding was performed by the AMP decoding engine developed by Advanced Multimedia Products co-founder Tomislav Uzelac, which was free for non-commercial use.[60] It was compatible with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Winamp was the second real-time MP3 player for Windows, the first being WinPlay3.[61]
WinAMP 0.92 was released as a freeware in May 1997. Within the standard Windows frame and menu bar, it had the beginnings of the "classic" Winamp GUI: dark gray rectangle with silver 3D-effect transport buttons, a red/green volume slider, time displayed in a green LED font, with track name, MP3 bitrate, and "mixrate" in green. Overlength titles appear as slowly scrolling text (or "marquee"). The skeuomorphic design somewhat resembles shelf stereos. There was no position bar, and a blank space where the spectrum analyzer and waveform analyzer would later appear. Multiple files on the command line or dropped onto its icon were enqueued in the playlist.
Version 1.006 was released June 7, 1997,[10][62] renamed "Winamp", i.e., with "amp" now in lowercase. It showed a spectrum analyzer and color-changing volume slider, but no waveform display. The AMP non-commercial license was included in its help menu.
According to Tomislav Uzelac, Frankel licensed the AMP 0.7 engine June 1, 1997.[63] Frankel formally founded Nullsoft Inc. in January 1998 and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to $10 shareware.[10] Despite the fact that there would be no extra features by paying $10, Winamp's popularity and warm reception brought Nullsoft $100,000 a month that year from $10 paper checks in the mail from paying users.[13]
In March, Brian Litman, managing co-founder with Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products, which by then had been merged into PlayMedia Systems, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nullsoft, claiming unlawful use of AMP.[64] Nullsoft responded that they had replaced AMP with Nitrane, Nullsoft's proprietary decoder, but Playmedia disputed this.[citation needed] Third-party reviews found that Nitrane had bugs that resulted in playing back MP3s incorrectly, and that this resulted in unstable tones being added to the playback, and undoubtedly therefore violated the ISO standard. This also means that Nitrane was unlikely to have been based on the AMP software, and was more likely evidence of a hastily written MP3 decoder that didn't concern itself with standards compliance.[65]
Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The new version improved the usability of the playlist, made the equalizer more accurate, and introduced more plug-ins. The modular windows for playlist and equalizer now matched the player's skin and could be moved around and be separated or "docked" to each other anywhere in any order.
The 2.x versions were widely used and made Winamp one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Windows.[11] By the end of 1998, there were already over 60 plugins and hundreds of skins made for the software.[68]
PlayMedia filed a federal lawsuit against Nullsoft in March 1999. In May 1999, PlayMedia was granted an injunction by Federal Judge A. Howard Matz against distribution of Nitrane by Nullsoft, and the same month the lawsuit was settled out-of-court with licensing and confidentiality agreements.[59] Soon after, Nullsoft switched to an ISO decoder from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the developers of the MP3 format.
The next major Winamp version, Winamp3 (so spelled to include mp3 in the name and to mark its separation from the Winamp 2 codebase), was released on August 9, 2002. It was a complete rewrite of version 2, newly based on the Wasabi application framework, which offered additional functionality and flexibility. Winamp3 was developed parallel to Winamp 2, but "many users found it consumed too many system resources and was unstable (or even lacked some valued functionality, such as the ability to count or find the total duration of tracks in a playlist)".[70][71] Winamp3 had no backward compatibility with Winamp 2 plugins, and the SHOUTcast sourcing plugin was not supported. No Winamp3 version of SHOUTcast was ever released.
In response to users reverting to Winamp 2, Nullsoft continued the development of Winamp 2 to versions 2.9 and 2.91 in 2003,[72] even alluding to it humorously.[73] The beta versions 2.92 and 2.95 were released with the inclusion of some of the functionality of the upcoming Winamp 5. During this period the Wasabi cross-platform application framework and skinnable GUI toolkit was derived from parts of the Winamp3 source code. For Linux, Nullsoft released an alpha version of Winamp3 on October 9, 2001, but has not updated it despite continued user interest.[74]
Winamp 5 was based on the Winamp 2 codebase, but with Winamp3 features such as modern skins incorporated via a plugin,[75] thus incorporating the main advantages of both products. Regarding the omission of a version 4, Nullsoft joked that "nobody wants to see a Winamp 4 skin" ("4 skin" being a pun on foreskin).[76] It was also joked that "Winamp 5 is so good they skipped a number" and "Winamp 2+3=5,".[77] Winamp 5.0 was released in December 2003. A blue themed "Modern" skin became the default interface. The media library was improved, CD burning and ripping was introduced, and other additions.
Winamp 5.5: The 10th Anniversary Edition was released on October 10, 2007,[80] ten years after the first release of Winamp (a preview version had been released on September 10, 2007). New features to the player included album art support, improved localization support (with several officially localized Winamp releases, including German, Polish, Russian, and French), and a new default interface skin called "Bento" which unlike the previous skins is a unified player and media library in one window as opposed to a multi-window interface.[81] This version dropped support for Windows 9x.[28][82]
Winamp 5.6 was released in November 2010[83] and features Android Wi-Fi support and direct mouse wheel support. Fraunhofer AAC codec with VBR encoding support was implemented. Moreover, the option to write ratings to tags (for MP3, WMA/WMV, Ogg, and FLAC) was added. Hungarian and Indonesian installer translations and language packs were added.
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