Winamp is not going to be a thing of the past anytime soon: On July 29, a new version of the iconic 90s audio player was launched. The software itself dates back to 1997, and was the popular choice of a generation of music lovers for playing their MP3 tracks, either downloaded from the Internet, in a more or less legal way, or sourced from a CD. Users could customize the appearance of the player with 'skins,' decorating their interface in an array of attractive ways. They could also watch the music groove to the rhythm of graphic visualizations, which helped to make Winamp a known name.
For all these reasons, Winamp evokes a love affair-like nostalgia for those in their thirties or forties, even if its outdated interface has made some of its fans switch to other audio players and online temples of music, such as Deezer or Spotify.
Unaffected, the Winamp development team brainstormed to create a new version of the software, nine years after the last stable version, which remains downloadable today, and four years after an unfinished version was released after it had been leaked.
An invisible upgrade
The developers of the new Winamp explained on a forum that they have mainly modernized the software's code, an invisible change that took them four years of work and will allow them to follow with other projects in the coming years, such as introducing audio formats like OGV or H265 to the player,
The project's webpage does, however, point out some small malfunctions and incompatibilities that plague the new Winamp, notably the detection of several malicious softwares by two antivirus programs. Even though Winamp's developers deem the analysis to be erroneous, they advise users to be patient before giving this mythical player another shot.