Winamp

Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is skinnable, multi-format freeware shareware.

Winamp was first released by Justin Frankel in 1997.Current Winamp development is credited to Ben Allison (benski), Will Fisher, Taber Buhl, Maksim Tyrtyshny, Chris Edwards and Stephen (Tag) Loomis.

Winamp 5.5

10th Anniversary Edition, released on October 10, 2007, marked the tenth year since the first release of Winamp. A beta preview was released on September 10, 2007. New features to the player included album art support, a much improved localization support (with several official, localized Winamp releases, such as German, Polish, Russian and French), and a unified player and media library interface skin.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/14/Winamp.png

Features

Besides MP3, Winamp supports a very wide variety of contemporary and specialized music file formats, including MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and Windows Media Audio. Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC, and Replay Gain for volume levelling across tracks. In addition, Winamp can play and import music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and can also burn music to CDs.

Initial releases
The minimalist WinAMP 0.20a was released as freeware on 21 April 1997. Its windowless menubar-only interface showed only play (open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played.

Winamp 1

Version 1.006 was released June 7, 1 997 renamed "Winamp" (lower case). It showed a spectrum analyzer, and color changing volume slider, but no waveform display. The AMP non-commercial license was included in its help menu.According to Tomislav Uzelac, Frankel licensed the AMP 0.7 engine June 1, 1997 Frankel formally founded Nullsoft, Inc. in January 1998, and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to $10 shareware.

Winamp 2

Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions became widely used, and Winamp was one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Microsoft Windows.The new version improved the usability of the playlist, made the equalizer more accurate, introduced more plug-ins and allowed 'skins' for the playlist and equalizer windows.

Winamp3

The next major Winamp version, Winamp3 (so spelled to include mp3 in the name and to mark its separation from the Winamp 2 codebase), was released on August 9, 2002. It was a complete rewrite of version 2, newly based on the Wasabi application framework, which offered additional functionality and flexibility. Winamp3 was developed parallel to Winamp 2, but many users found it consumed too many system resources and was unstable (or even lacked some valued functionality.

Winamp 5

The Winamp 2 and Winamp3 branches were later fused into Winamp Nullsoft justified their non-sequential christening by quipping that taking the best parts from both applications. They also joked that "nobody wants to see a Winamp 4 skin" ('4 skin' being a pun on foreskin). It was also joked that "Winamp 5 is so good they skipped a number." Winamp 5 was based on the Winamp 2 codebase, with several Winamp3 features (e.g. modern skins) incorporated.

Custom Search