Winamp news

For millions of people, the name 'Winamp' was synonymous with music a couple of decades ago. This program for Windows was capable of playing our MP3 files like no other, with a simple but very powerful interface and above all, customizable with 'skins' to our liking.
Like so many other programs, Winamp suffered greatly in the migration of users to smartphones; Although there was an official Winamp app for Android, it was not very successful as it was focused on playing music stored locally in the mobile memory, while streaming platforms such as Spotify were triumphing.

Today, not much remains of the original Winamp. Its creators, Nullsoft, were sold to Internet giant AOL and disappeared; and the Winamp brand ended up being sold to the Belgian company Radionomy, which announced ambitious plans to revive it.

Now, those plans have materialized with a new Winamp app, which was first launched for computers but did not take long to reach mobile phones. The Llama Group, the developer created by Radionomy for this project, has announced the limited release of the Winamp app for Android and iOS. At the moment, it is a closed 'beta' to which few users are allowed, but over time it will be opened to more people.

The new Winamp stands out for including music streaming functions, as well as for its new interface, more modern and adapted to current times; However, it is not a simple copy of Spotify, since its creators claim that they have managed to balance the needs of both users and creators. The result is called "Fanzone", a section from which we can follow our favorite artists, with exclusive access to their songs and original content such as publications and a merchandise store. Creators will be able to charge each user $1 each month to access this exclusive area. Therefore, instead of paying a fee that is divided among all the artists on the platform, at Winamp we will pay directly to the artists we like the most.

Winamp will continue to be a local music player, with access to sound files stored in the mobile memory; but with Fanzone, it aims to expand and monetize the service in a different way than the rest. It is clear that the company's plan is to attract users who may recognize the Winamp name to sign up for the Fanzone; although at the moment, the list of artists who have signed up seems somewhat short.

In reality, Winamp already had an app for Android, but the latest version dates back to 2014, after the fall of Nullsoft and the sale of the rights. The APK can still be found on the usual pages, although it is obviously an obsolete app at this point. In that sense, the new Winamp can fill a gap.

The new Winamp app is on Google Play, although we may not be able to install it yet as it is in closed beta.

The New Winamp Is Here, but It’s Not What You’d Expect

Winamp was a popular music player program in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and recently it’s back under active development. A completely new version of Winamp is now available, but it’s pretty different than the original version.

The parent company for Winamp has been split between two projects for the past few years: updates for the classic Windows player, and a completely new service with the same name. The initial version of the service is now live at player.winamp.com, which works on both desktop and mobile browsers. Full mobile apps for iPhone and Android are expected to arrive in the third quarter of 2023, “based on the legacy desktop version,” according to a press release.

You can’t actually play your own music files with the new web app yet, nor can you connect it to third-party streaming services. Winamp says that functionality is “coming soon,” and it’s not clear which streaming services would allow playback through the service. For now, the only source of music is “Fanzone” — a service where you can support individual artists with direct subscriptions (most seem to be $1 per month) for access to their music in the player. That feature seems to be competing with platforms like Patreon.

The press release explains that the new Winamp “features the Fanzone, which creators can access to become better merchants and to sell their products, creating tiered subscription plans. Winamp fuels the love dedicated fans have for their favourite artists through exclusive content, experiences and memberships, while empowering artists to bypass industry gatekeepers and create on their own terms.”

The concept of a music player that aggregates your own music library, streaming services, and direct access to a given artist’s library could be useful, but right now only the latter component is functional. The existing classic player is also still available and under active development.

Winamp releases new version after four years in development

Winamp has released its first release candidate after four years in development, officially bringing the popular media player out of beta.

Before music streaming platforms rose to prominence, we needed to rip our music from CDs and play the resulting MP3 files on a media player.

One of the most beloved media players to play MP3s was Winamp, which included retro skins and animated visualizations that synced with your music.

Winamp ceased development after version 5.666 was released in 2013. That was until October 2018, when Winamp 5.8 was leaked online, and the developers decided to publish it themselves on the Winamp.com website.

Since then, the developers have promised an updated version with cloud streaming support and more modern features. Finally, in November 2021, the Winamp.com website received a facelift with a new logo and a beta signup form to be notified when new versions were released.

Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 was released, marking it as the first version released in 4 years and as the first release candidate of the revitalized media player.

While the Winamp release candidate does not contain too many changes, the main goal of this release was to upgrade the code base from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. Now that this has been completed, the team can add new features and capabilities to the media player.

A byproduct of these changes is that Winamp requires Windows 7 SP1 or later, dropping support for Windows XP and Vista, which have long been out of support.

"This is the culmination of 4 years' work since the 5.8 release.  Two dev teams, and a pandemic-induced hiatus period inbetween," reads the changelog for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999.

"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 groundwork has now been laid, and now we can concentrate more on features. Whether fixing/replacing old ones or adding new."

Winamp outlines its plans for aggregation, artists and NFTs

 

 

 Media player Winamp‘s original heyday may be some time in the past, but it remains a going concern – 80 million people are using the software around the world still.

It also made headlines in March this year when it announced plans to sell NFTs based on the 1997 Winamp skin – its first graphical interface – albeit while rousing the ire of Winamp’s co-creator Justin Frankel in the process.

So what is the Winamp of 2022 really up to? The player’s corporate history is a saga in itself: its original developer was bought by AOL in 1999 for $80m, then sold on to Belgian music/tech startup Radionomy for a rumoured $5m-$10m in 2014.

Vivendi then bought a 64.4% stake in Radionomy in 2015, before selling that back to a new parent group called AudioValley in 2017.

Fast forward to 2022, and Winamp is still owned by AudioValley, alongside sister subsidiaries including Targetspot (the rebranded Radionomy service, focusing on digital audio advertising tech); music licensing firm Jamendo; and recently-launched rights-management entity Bridger.

It’s complicated! But CEO Alexandre Saboundjian shed some more light on his company’s plans for Winamp in an appearance last week at the Wallifornia Music & Innovation Summit in Belgium, interviewed by Music Ally CEO Paul Brindley.

Some of those plans are focused on Winamp’s consumer player, which will soon be relaunching as software that aggregates various kinds of listening: different music streaming services, podcasts and radio stations for example.

“All your listening experiences. I think this is really the future of our player, and I was really surprised that in the last 10 years, nobody tried to build a player like this,” said Saboundjian.

Open source project Tomahawk is the closest thing we can remember to this vision: it was getting lots of buzz in 2012, exactly 10 years ago.

While companies ranging from Spotify to TuneIn have offered different combinations of radio, podcasts and/or on-demand music, nobody has quite wrapped it all up with multiple streaming services in one app.

Saboundjian said that Winamp will pursue these DSP integrations on a “step by step” basis, with one partnership already in place for this year, and more to follow.

Keep reading on  https://musically.com/2022/07/11/winamp-aggregation-artists-nfts/

The mythical original 'skin' of the WinAmp player was auctioned as NFT in Open Sea for solidarity purposes

 

Winamp sold a non-fungible token (NFT) linked to its media player’s original 1997 graphical skin, becoming the latest company to blend nostalgia and crypto. Winamp did put the NFT up for auction through OpenSea between May 16th and May 22nd, followed by a separate sale of 1997 total NFTs based on 20 artworks derived from the original skin. The proceeds will go to the Winamp Foundation, which promises to donate them to charity projects, starting with the Belgian nonprofit Music Fund.

The NFT sale appears to be a combination of a publicity move and a fundraising effort. Winamp is sourcing the derivative art NFTs by asking artists to submit Winamp-based works between now and April 15th, then giving selected artists 20 percent of the proceeds from each sale of their image as an NFT. Nineteen of the pieces will sell in editions of 100 copies, and the remaining one will have 97; they’ll all sell for 0.08 Ethereum — around $210 at current exchange rates. The artists will get 10 percent of any royalties on later sales, where the seller will set their own price.

 Winamp’s head of business development Thierry Ascarez tells The Verge that buyers will get a blockchain token linked to an image of either the original skin seen above or one of its derivatives, which is a common setup for NFTs. Buyers will have the right to “copy, reproduce, and display” the image, but they won’t own the copyright. Likewise, selected artists will agree to transfer all intellectual property for their work to Winamp, according to a page of terms and conditions.

Winamp isn’t precisely the service you might remember from the ’90s. The MP3-playing software was acquired by AOL in 1999, then sold to online radio company Radionomy in 2014 after a long decline and shutdown. Radionomy (and later its majority stakeholder AudioValley) revamped it as a mobile audio app, then announced a broader relaunch for this year. There’s also a long-running community update project for the original app.

 However, there’s a stronger connection between Winamp’s current form and its original one than some crypto projects. Venerable peer-to-peer file-sharing service LimeWire recently “relaunched” as an NFT marketplace, but it shares effectively no connection to its previous iteration; a new company apparently just bought the domain name and revived an expired trademark. It’s a little closer to a resurrected RadioShack’s plans to launch a cryptocurrency marketplace, except that this NFT sale is a small part of its relaunch as a music service, not a broader move into crypto — at least so far.