Winamp, the best MP3 player of the 1990s, just got a major update

Winamp was an app that existed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People over the age of 30 will remember Winamp as the premiere music player for people using the internet to illegally download music. You needed to collect every single song you wanted to listen to manually and add it to the app for it to work.

Like a lot of influential Windows 95-era PC apps, it was eventually outpaced by newer software and business models, but it has never been dead. Winamp was shut down by AOL after years of mismanagement. An update to the app was leaked in 2016 and a major version 6.0 update was planned for next year.

The plan didn't go as planned. A new version of Winamp was released last week, four years after it was last updated.

It still looks and acts like a Windows app because most of the work in this build focuses on behind-the-scenes work. A wide range of audio codecs have been updated to newer versions, and support for Windows 11 and https streams has been improved.

The final release will be version 5.9 with some features targeted for release in version 5.9.1 "and beyond" It needs Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or newer to work.

In our limited testing of the "new" Winamp, it's still an old app that isn't made for high-resolution, high-density displays. Depending on what you're trying to run it on, this could cause problems. It's nice to see something on Winamp.com that isn't a weird NFT project and a promise of updates.

There is a listing image by Winamp.