Tech
Winamp is officially back because '90s nostalgia knows no bounds
The iconic '90s media player made its official return after a four-year beta.
If you had any doubts that ‘90s nostalgia is alive and thriving, we have an important update: Winamp (yes that Winamp) is back. The iconic media player’s reboot is now official with its latest version, which is the culmination of a four-year beta.
The latest version is updated for the modern era, but it’s a fairly new release so it still has some kinks to work out. Still, the developers preserved that classic skin and intro audio clip that instantly transports you back to the days of unfettered music piracy.
Good ol’ days — Luckily, the reboot stays fairly true to the original Winamp vibe from the late ‘90s. The original skins, like Winamp Classic, Winamp Modern, Bento, and Big Bento are still around and you can just as easily import your favorite skin.
To get Winamp updated, developers say most of the work was dedicated to upgrading the back-end coding of the audio player.
"To the end-user, it might not seem like there's a whole heap of changes, but the largest and hardest part was actually migrating the entire project from VS2008 to VS2019 and getting it all to build successfully,” the post reads. There are no complaints here since I don’t think people were looking for too many changes. Unfortunately, this update does mean that you will need at least Windows 7 to run the new Winamp.
There’s still a bunch of bugs and issues to work out, as you can see in the Known Issues section of the post and the four pages of comments. The devs also mentioned that this build and its features still need testing.
Figuring out features — With the majority of the foundational work completed, the devs said they are going to concentrate on implementing features. That could amount to fixing and replacing old features or adding new ones, according to the dev team.
You can download the new Winamp on the site’s forum to try it out for yourself, so long as you have a compatible Windows OS. Outside the MP3 player, Winamp is also going through somewhat of a rebranding or expansion and has even started NFT initiatives and a foundation meant to help musicians. This has the early signs of an overzealous reboot, but at the very least, the audio player is solid.
