WinAMP Returns To Whip The Llama's A** Once Again - TRC Nostalgia

Listening to music these days is so natural on the internet or a computing device that it is hard to imagine a time before that. If you had a computer in the 90s, you must have struggled with organizing, ripping and playing back one’s collection.

A program called ‘Winamp’(Windows Advanced Multimedia Products) - the quirky, cutting-edge media player that changed the whole experience of dealing with MP3s - quickly became ubiquitous at the time. 

The first version of Winamp was launched in 1997 by a company called Nullsoft, instantly becoming popular with over 3 million downloads. It made dragging and dropping MP3s into a playlist a very smooth experience. This combined with the early file-sharing phenomenon made it a go-to media player and Winamp rode that wave, growing until it had 90 million users, only to become irrelevant.

The lightweight architecture made it stand out, furthermore, part of the appeal came from a large tech-savvy online community that offered extensibility in the form of plug-ins, innumerable funky skins, and music visualization. 

What hurt its prospects was the introduction of the iPod along with the iTunes program which was a compulsory requirement for putting stuff into the Apple device. Slowly the user base shifted as Apple took the music player market and ran with it, leaving the geeky Winamp behind.

Further, a few layers of mismanagement by AOL(the company that later acquired the software) didn’t help either, resulting in a total decline in terms of the user base.

However, if one is overwhelmed with nostalgia they are in luck as the developers have recently released an updated version, Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999(Windows only). For those who don’t use Windows, there also exists a clone version which can be visited at webamp.org on any web browser.

Read more: Games That Defined The Childhood Of 90s Kids