Frankel founded Nullsoft in 1997 to continue the development of Winamp, only to sell the company to AOL on June 1, 1999. Winamp is the creation of University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev. It’s actually a series of ownership changes mixed with bad decisions and poor releases that turned Winamp into a legend which no longer had a place in a modern world. The popularity of Winamp skyrocketed on Windows 98 and Windows XP, especially thanks to its skin support and the growing community of devs creating them.Īs a quick timeline of Winamp, here’s when each major release was launched:īut the transition from local media players to streaming services isn’t the only one that killed off Winamp. It came with support for skins and plug-ins, playlists, visualization, and so much more, and this eventually turned it into a must-have app on Windows. But the most successful release was Winamp 2, which was released only a year later and which everybody just loved. While we won’t discuss the versions of Winamp and the updates that the app received, it’s worth emphasizing that the first version actually launched 23 years ago in April 1997. The Winamp usage peaked at 60 million users in 2001 at a time when it was pretty much the most popular media player on Windows.
Those were the days when Winamp was the number one media player out there, with millions of users on Windows and macOS turning to this app to handle their large music libraries. While the world is all about Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and other streaming services nowadays, there was a time when everybody just wanted (and had no option than) to play their own music libraries.
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