Winamp

Winamp is a media player for Windows that was first released in 1997 by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev of the US company Nullsoft. It became one of the most downloaded Windows programs of its time, with 25 million registered users by 2000. After AOL shut the project down in 2013, the Belgian digital audio group Radionomy, now Llama Group, acquired Winamp in 2014. Llama Group is headquartered in Brussels and listed on Euronext Paris and Brussels.

Features

• Lightweight player for local music files with playlists and a media library.
• Plug-ins and skins that change the look and add functions such as visualisations.
• Support for common audio formats and streaming radio.
• Versions for Windows, with mobile apps and a web service from the same company.

Model and limits

Winamp is distributed as a freemium program. The last stable release listed is version 5.9.2 from April 2023, and a preview of the next major version appeared in 2026. In 2024 the company released parts of the source code under a custom license, but withdrew the repository after criticism, so Winamp is not open source.