1.2.3 Winamp

Space-efficient, high-quality, tagged audio was no good without a ready means of listening to it. The then-existing Windows Media Player and Real Networks’ Real Player never found widespread adoption. In April 1997 Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev released Winamp, a small, performant Windows MP3 player. Frankel formed Nullsoft in January 1998. With version 1.5, Winamp changed from freeware to shareware & charged a ten dollar registration fee; far from dampening uptake, this brought in $100,000 a month from $10 paper checks in the mail from paying users. Winamp 2.0 was released in September 1998 & became one of the most downloaded Windows programs ever.

One of the things that endeared Winamp to its users was its plugin architecture. Nullsoft provided several plugins as part of the standard distribution, one of which was the Music Library. Using this, one could manage, organize, search & play a personal library of thousands of MP3 files, all based on ID3 tags (See ID3.)

Nullsoft was (in)famoulsy acquired by AOL in 1999. By 2000 Winamp had been registered twenty-five million times, but Nullsoft began to struggle with the propblems of so many AOL acquisitions. 2002 saw the misbegotten release of Winamp 3, a complete re-write that broke with the prior ethos of tight, lightweight code. Widespread incidence of users (including the author) reverting to Winamp 2 in response to poor performance & high resource demands of Winamp 3 led to Nullsoft continuing 2.x development, and eventually the release of Winamp 5 (2+3) late in 2003. From version 5.2, Winamp provided the ability to sync the user’s library with iPods, which led to many iPod owners’ (again including the author) choosing to use Winamp instead of iTunes to manage their devices.

The original Winamp team quit AOL in 2004 & development moved to Dulles (VA). Work continued, albeit at a slower pace. With the release of Winamp 5.66 in late 2013, AOL announced that winamp.com would be shutdown later that year and that the software would no longer be availble for download. It was later announced that Nullsoft (along with Shoutcast, an MP3 streaming platform) had been sold to the Belgian company Radionomy. As of the time of this writing, winamp.com is up, and offering a download of Winamp 5.8 (beta) from Radionomy.