Winamp to return in 2019 and resume whipping llama ass
The world's greatest desktop music player may be experiencing a rebirth soon.
If you used a computer between the years of 1998 and 2010 for listening to your pirated music collection, odds are that you may be intimately familiar with Winamp. The once ubiquitous media player began experiencing a slow death following its acquisition by AOL more than ten years ago and has not seen an update since 2013. Fans of Winamp now have reason to rejoice as Radionomy, the current owners of Winamp, have announced that the media player is making a comeback in 2019.
To keep up with the streaming future, the new version of Winamp will see some upgrades to accommodate the changing landscape of digital music and audio. “There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience,” said Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Radionomy. “You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built.”
While Winamp has languished on version 5.666 for years, a new version 5.8 leaked online this month, bringing along improvements for Windows 10 compatibility. The update is supposed to be officially launched in the coming weeks and is a sort of olive branch to vigilant Winamp users who have stuck with the app after it went on life support.
“What I see today is you have to jump from one player to another player or aggregator if you want to listen to a radio station, to a podcast player if you want to listen to a podcast — this, to me, is not the final experience,” Saboundjian explained. The revamped Winamp will also be making its debut on iOS and Android, should users need to pound llama ass on the go. 2019 can’t get here soon enough.
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replyChris Jarrard posted a new article, Winamp to return in 2019 and resume whipping llama ass
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Things that would make me purchase and use this:
Ability to play songs from Google Play Music
Ability to take a Spotify link and play the same song in Google Play instead
A bunch of visualizers that react to the audio like I had back in the 90s
Ability to create playlists larger than 1000 songs (the Google Play Music limit)-
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I'm not asking for exclusivity. Given what they said, it sounds like they want to integrate multiple services. I just want to be able to tell Windows to use Winamp to handle Spotify links for me so they open using the service I'm actually subscribed to rather than trying the "free" Spotify service.
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Awesome. I still haven't found a music app on my phone I lake as much as Winamp on my PC
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This is the best news ever!
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When's the last time you bought music?
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The downside of that is you're missing out on lots of independent artists who can't or won't distribute their music through apple.
So for people like me that buy music from a variety of places Bandcamp, Beatport, Amazon, and my local record store, we need something like a dedicated music player.-
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I would use it. I actually attempted to make a modern XAML based take on Winamp a few moths back. Only stopped because UWP apps can't control window size by definition, and I needed that for what I wanted to do.
And incorporating Webamp was one of the first things I did in my web component desktop:
https://youtu.be/pS-wSdgv9Qo?t=10
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I'll have to read up on what they're going to do. Not sure they can find a real use with so much stream service in effect these days. I assume you wouldn't be able to stream any/every service through winamp. HOWEVER, if they could be a front end to bring Google Play Music's category/genre feature back, I'd insta-buy it.
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I have been using foobar 2000 for years and now they have a phone app that isnt that bad.
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I haven’t listened to anything but Spotify and occasionally YouTube for years. Playing music off your hard drive is dead. They could find a niche by offering features the official streaming clients don’t, but I’m not expecting anything exciting. They’re banking on nostalgia and stick-in-the-muds here.
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