Winamp

» see winamp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

winamp launched on 21 april 1997. it was made by justin frankel and dmitry boldyrev at a tiny company called nullsoft. it was the first mp3 player that was actually pleasant to use. before winamp, playing mp3 files on windows meant using clunky media players that were not designed for music. winamp was designed for music.

i installed winamp around 1999 right after my dial-up connection got fast enough to download mp3s. the version was 2.something. it stayed on my computer for the next decade. every windows computer i installed software on between 2000 and 2008 got winamp installed early. it was the canonical second-thing-after-the-browser install for that era.

AOL bought nullsoft in june 1999 for 80 million dollars. AOL was at the height of its dot-com era buying spree. they bought a lot of small interesting things and slowly ran them into the ground. winamp was one of them. they kept the team for a while, then made unpopular changes, then eventually announced the shutdown in november 2013 with an effective date of 20 december 2013.

~ the case file ~

~ skins ~

winamp's most loved feature was skins. you could change the entire visual appearance of the player by downloading a small file from the winamp skins website. there were thousands of skins. some looked like spaceships. some looked like cassette tape decks. some looked like rappers. some looked like anime characters.

the skin engine in winamp 2.x was relatively simple. you could not change the layout much, just the colors and icons. winamp 3 (which was a different codebase) and winamp 5 (which combined the best of 2 and 3) added "modern skins" that could rearrange the whole interface. people made elaborate modern skins that turned winamp into an entirely different-looking application.

the skin culture had its own community sites, its own competitions, and its own minor celebrities. some of the better skins were made by people who later became professional designers. winamp was one of the small early training grounds for ui design as a discipline.

~ visualizations ~

the other beloved feature was visualizations. these were full-screen animated graphics that pulsed in time with the music. the original visualizers were simple, just bars or oscilloscope lines. then milkdrop arrived in 2001, made by ryan geiss, and visualizations became their own art form.

milkdrop visualizations were generative, parametric, and could be programmed by users. people would spend hours staring at them while listening to electronic music. the milkdrop community produced thousands of preset visualizations. you could cycle through them. some of them were genuinely beautiful in a way that made you forget you were watching a music player.

nothing has replaced the milkdrop experience. apple music has visualizations but they are basic. spotify has none. modern music apps assume you do not want a visualization, which assumes you are not the kind of person who would put on a song and just stare at the screen for half an hour. the milkdrop era assumed you might be.

~ the end ~

itunes shipped in january 2001 and slowly took over the windows mp3 management space because it was integrated with the ipod. by 2005 itunes had a serious slice of the windows audio market. winamp was still better as a player but worse as a library manager and sync tool.

AOL during the same window was making winamp worse with each release. justin frankel had left nullsoft in 2004 in protest of various AOL decisions. the team that remained shipped winamp 5.6 in 2010, then 5.66 in 2013, then nothing. AOL announced the end on 20 november 2013. the winamp.com download page went offline a month later.

in january 2014 a belgian company called radionomy bought winamp from AOL. they brought the website back online and have kept shipping minor updates ever since, but winamp under radionomy has never had the cultural moment again. the cult version of winamp died with AOL.

~ what we lost ~

the small fast media player. winamp was tiny. the binary was about 2MB. it started instantly. it played everything. itunes was bloated. spotify is huge. apple music is huge. modern music players are big sluggish full-screen apps. winamp was a small panel that did exactly one thing well.

the customizability. modern apps do not let you change anything. you cannot skin spotify. you cannot replace the visualizer in apple music. winamp let you change the entire experience. that flexibility produced communities of people making weird and wonderful things, and it does not exist in modern music apps.

the llama line. "winamp 2.95, it really whips the llama's ass" was a voice clip that played when you launched winamp during a brief period in 2000. it was a stupid joke that was somehow exactly right for what winamp was. modern apps do not have the kind of confidence that lets them ship a voice clip about a llama. they are too professional. that is the loss.

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