Facebook developer Jordan Eldredge has created a virtual Winamp museum in memory of his beloved player. On the site, you can endlessly scroll through topics and feel nostalgic for the bygone MP3 era. We spent several hours here, and this time was far from being wasted.
Probably everyone knows about Winamp on Habré. This media player is called the predecessor to the era of Spotify and iTunes. Once upon a time, we downloaded our favorite musical compositions in MP3 format (or borrowed hard drives with gigabytes of music from friends) and loaded them into the player. The legendary player has become one of the most popular, used by tens of millions of music lovers around the world.
Winamp is a player from Nullsoft, sold by AOL in 1999 and liquidated in 2013. The main feature of the player is the ability to stylize it according to the user's preferences. Thousands of design options “walked” on the network.
And those times are back! American programmer Jordan Eldrage, together with the non-profit organization "Archives of the Internet" decided to leave an online trail about the key era for many of the formation and development of the digital music industry. They created a virtual Winamp Skin Museum . The museum page looks like an endless ribbon of player skins. There are 65 thousand themes in the collection (!).
Each of the skins in the museum can be used as a player with pre-installed music pieces. You can also upload your own compositions there if you wish. In this case, the player does not need to be installed, just click on the skin you like. Favorite themes can be downloaded and installed on your own Winamp.
Jordan says the museum is a tribute to artists who have used skins to "create iconic moments in the history of internet art."
A story without a point
The Winamp player was invented in 1997 by eighteen-year-old hacker Justin Frankel and student Dmitry Boldyrev. The first version of the application, 0.20a, worked with only one file and had no playlists.
The popularity of the player has grown since the release of version 1.00 a few months after its launch. This version had a spectrogram, which was unconventional for the late 90s. In the first 18 months of its existence, the media player was downloaded by 15 million people. Player version 2.90 made it possible to watch video files.
Official support for the latest Winamp 5.666 (Build 3516) ended on December 20, 2013. Then Yandex.Music made an attempt to perpetuate the memory of the fateful era for electronic music. A page called Remembering Winamp was launched. The fully clickable page is designed as a Windows desktop interface. On the right - the player window is open. On the left, in the "Explorer" branch, you could select folders with music. The page is currently unavailable.
But the story did not stop there. First, the player's support is not over yet . Secondly, in 2014, the Belgian company Radionomy Group boughtplayer. The price was not disclosed, but presumably ranged from $ 5 to 10 million. The media call the Radionomy Group an aggregator of Internet radio stations. She was going to use the player to introduce the audience of the player to their own service and provide new content.
not updated from 2013 until the fall of 2018. Then the completely free version 5.8 was released with minor changes - all paid functions that appeared in 2002 were removed from it.
At the same time, Radionomy Group announced in the media about the promise to release a new version of the popular player in a year. Winamp 6 was intended to be mobile and desktop, convenient for listening to podcasts, playlists from the cloud, and streaming radio stations. The developers promised to "preserve the legacy" but enrich the user experience. According to the Radionomy Group, the monthly audience of the player at that time was already 100 million users.
However, the release did not happen. For fans, the browser version of the media player is still available .
While we are preparing new materials, write in the comments what Winamp themes were your favorite?
