Winamp is Shutting Down

AOL, a big company who have acquired Nullsoft, parent company of a music service Winamp in 1999 has made a big decision by shutting down Winamp on December 20, 2013. This means that after that date, there will be no more Winamp releases and it will be history.

Just before the final date, Winamp has managed to release Winamp 5.66 and i guess this will be their final release before shutting down.

Winamp was one of my favorite multimedia player since i used computer back in junior high school. I followed it's development from winamp 2, 3, and lastly 5. It was a great software, easy to use, and it just worked. I guess it's time to say good bye to all of those and switch to other application that does the same thing.

Winamp 5.52

It's been some time since Winamp release their Winamp player application. In my opinion, Winamp is one of the most stable application that exists on Windows platform. I never had problems with Winamp so far (unless a bloated version causing slow response when Winamp 3 comes up that rapidly replaced by Winamp 5). Since the availability of Winamp 5.5, they have introduced a new skin called Bento and in the latest version, they made some improvements on it. Here's the latest Changelog for Winamp 5.52

• Improved: Better Unicode filename support for enc_*.dll audio encoders
• Improved: [ml_transcode] Unicode filename support
• Improved: [in_mp3] APEv2 tag support
• Improved: [in_flac] Support for reading/writing BPM metadata
• Improved: [nde] Optimized for faster mldb query results
• Improved: [vis_milk2] Pixel shaders now work on onboard Intel graphics chips
• Fixed: Comment field character limitation in Basic Info tab of File Editor
• Fixed: Playback Thread Priority middle setting resets to Lowest
• Fixed: [in_mp3] Ultravox streaming metadata stack overflow
• Fixed: [in_mp4] Crash when attempting to play non-existent files
• Fixed: [in_vorbis] Crash when clearing existing metadata fields in File Info
• Fixed: [in_wave] Transcoding of floating point WAV files
• Fixed: [ml_transcode] Memory leaks
• Misc: More miscellaneous general tweaks and improvements
• Updated: Bento skin #118

New Default Skin For Winamp

Winamp has just released their final 5.5 version (this version takes some time to finish, but at last it's out and it's worthed if you look at the changes). This version also marks Winamp's 10 year of anniversary. Here are some of the new features that are new in Winamp 5.5:

* New "Bento" Skin as Default
* A Completely Redesigned Interface, including Album Art
* Multiple device support, including iPods
* Access and Share Your Music and Videos with Winamp Remote
* Play and Playlist the Best Music on the Web with Media Monitor
* Get Artist & Concert News, Videos & more with Smart Search
* Enjoy Dynamic Song Recommendations
* Experience MP3 Surround Sound Support
* Access to Thousands of Online Radio Stations, Videos and More!
* 50 FREE MP3 Music Downloads compliments of eMusic's 2-week Trial
* Auto-Tagger provides automatic updates to file information
* Control Winamp From Your Browser with the Winamp Toolbar
* New installer

The filesize has increased as well. It's 9,81 MB now, compared to the version 2 which only less than 3 MB. Here's the screenshot of the latest Winamp.