After years of neglect, Winamp got a technical facelift in an attempt to regain the trust of its millions of users worldwide. Once the most popular media player, Winamp disappeared from view for years, only to reemerge thanks to a leaked copy of an updated version that was distributed online.
In this rebirth, Winamp is attempting to become a single app solution for all your media needs. It can play all types of audio and video files.
Winamp 5. The process is easy to follow. After years of being ignored, it was purchased by Radionomy, who updated the software — but only after it was already leaked.
There is a visualization option that opens a video screen with patterns, and colors that move to the beat of the song. One of the stranger features in Winamp 5. I played around with the browser and it was fairly buggy, with some scripts being unable to run, and opening secondary browsers when clicking on links. There are plenty of better options when it comes to media players to use.
Here are just a few of them. Is Winamp dead? But, for fans who were expecting good news, nothing came to fruition with regard to version 6. Winamp has had a pretty rough journey. AOL acquired the music player from Nullsoft in That's when it became popular.
A decade and a half later, Winamp's ownership changed hands when Belgian online radio aggregator, Radionomy, acquired it in French media conglomerate, Vivendi, infamous for its hostile takeovers, acquired a majority stake in Radionomy in There has been little to no development related to Winamp for quite a while.
The music player last received an update in the Winter of , i. A leaked version of the player, Winamp 5. Ever since then, there has been barely any word about its development. So it comes as no surprise that its cult following keeps pestering the devs about an update for their beloved music player.
That might change soon, strong emphasis on both might and soon. Bleeping Computer reports that Jeremy Scheppers, Winamp's Head of Product development, said they were excited for the re-launch of the music player.
That's pretty cryptic, actually, that tells nothing. The new Winamp portal, spotted by Vosveteit , says that the next-gen version of the music player will be a remastered one. It also goes on to mention that the program will connect your music wherever you are, including podcasts and radio stations. Fair warning, the website seems to chug, especially while scrolling.
The old version of Winamp is available for download near the bottom of the page. There is no new version available just yet, but you may opt in to the Winamp beta program to test it when it is released.
Did you notice the new Winamp logo in the top corner? The landing page mentions that artists and creators will be able to release their music, control their content, make money and connect with the fans through the service. The message is clear and obvious, Winamp will offer some sort of streaming service of its own. There are several job listings that outline the company's plans to monetize the service, through ads and sales.
And given the location requirements for the postings, the service should be available globally, or at least in the US, Canada, and Europe. He says that the new Winamp may offer a streaming service, potentially similar to Spotify.
The client software might just be web-api wrappers, like Electron. While the official page claims a remastered application is coming, Owen thinks the focus may be on a web-based client, and a mobile app, and not on the desktop program. If true, old Winamp skins may not be compatible with it. That's an interesting take on the music player from a former developer, or does that sound like a recipe for disaster? A Spotify rival from a radio aggregator does make sense, and so does ads in the stream for monetization, or at least to push users to subscribe to a premium service for the ad-free experience.
But none of this sounds like the Winamp we know and love. I don't think it is fair to judge it before it has been released, so let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it really whips the llama's ass. I tried other new music players on my Asus laptop, but none beats the sound quality of Winamp old version. Besides I use Media Player Classic for everything, both music and videos. Squiggy I share your enthusiasm for Media Player Classic as a great simple, features limited, media player.
Problem I have with it for a long time now is that it hard crashes randomly when streaming audio. The installer will download Winamp 5. The developers recommend to install WACUP into a separate directory and not over an existing Winamp installation at the time of writing.
A portable version is also available which will always be installed separately. The first public preview of WACUP introduced lots of crash and security fixes, improved the performance of the player, made improvements to the plugin system and media format support, and added support for new skins. The changelog is divided into three sections that list more than different changes introduced in the release.
As far as fixes are concerned, there are plenty in the new release. The latest WACUP preview improves stability by patching code that could lead to crashes or hangs, improves compatibility with certain plugins, and updates several DLL libraries to a new version.
Nothing stands out when it comes to new features introduced in the version, they all appear to be light changes or changes made in preparation of new features that will be added in future releases.
To give a few examples: Shuffle's session restoring can be turned off now in the preferences to restore classic Winamp functionality, a new Windows 10 preferences page has been added to disable on-screen media controls, and the Volume Logic output plug-in should now be usable with the new release. You can check out the entire changelog here for a full rundown on all the changes, improvements and fixes in the new release. WACUP is available as a preview only, and that means that it is beta software at this point.
My initial reaction to the release still stands: it is an interesting project, especially for die-hard Winamp users, until a final version gets released. Now You: what is your favorite music player, has it changed in the past two year period? AIMP is much better. I like foobar the best. It is small, minimalistic and looks like part of the Windows shell experience. Components are optional and can be downloaded and installed if the user needs them.
I used to use AIMP around when I had a certain amplifier and Windows and every other program would play sound from both speakers, but AIMP for some reason would only play from just one speaker and there was literally no way to fix this and then I installed foobar and it worked perfectly out of the box and I have been using it ever since. I have to change the colors and go on their website to find a non-ugly skin, which is a big downside for me and why I still stick with foobar I was a die-hard WinAmp user in the past.
As I work with Ubuntu Guess what? Thanks a lot for letting me know on the rebirth of WinAmp! Well, what else do you suggest they should use? The only two decent alternatives are foobar and AIMP, everything else is bloatware trash. Why should you care? Music players used to be fun.
They had configurable interfaces, visual feedback and visualizations. Winamp is fun. Go eat your favorite sandwich or something. Live your own life. Dinosaurs are cool. Nothing comes close to Winamp. Still the best music player on Windows. What would you rather? That garbage Groove app from Microsoft? Bloated electron Spotify player? No thanks.
Winamp for life! It works perfectly and they update it very often. So far, none of them quite come up to te mark.
0コメント