Tyler Hunt

Winamp has been my MP3 player of choice since the first time I used it at the dawn of the Internet music age, while Napster was still fresh and relatively underground. Since that time, the basic Winamp player hasn’t changed a whole lot. Winamp 3 was released, but, in my opinion, this was a pathetic attempt at an update that would attract more users based on funky skins alone. It was beta (or alpha?) software distributed as a final release, and would never see a single bug fix during it’s one year lifetime. It was so bad, in fact, that the Nullsoft crew went back and updated the older Winamp 2 code to add some of the better features from 3, including video support and a rudimentary media library.

It appears that Nullsoft has come through with another new Christmas-time delivery this year, with the advent of Winamp 5. Ars Technica was quick out of the gates with a post on the release. Hyped as “Winamp 2 plus Winamp 3 equals Winamp 5,” they have apparently “decided to set things straight by merging the best of both code sets.” I haven’t given it a thorough trial yet, but if I find this is a worthy upgrade to my faithful 2.91 version, I’ll be sure to write about it here.