After over 15 years of existence, music player Winamp is shutting down it’s doors and will cease to exist after December 20th, 2013. Winamp has always been the choice of playing mp3 and FLAC music files for me from 1998 onwards and the only choice for playing music since 2006 when I gave away my stereo system and began using my computer as my main source of listening & playing music. In 2007 I even had a separate blog category for a few months as I re-ripped all my old cds (after my old hard disk had died) and did the same to my new ones.
From it’s launch in the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy of Winamp and downloading mp3 files from the internet or ripping and creating your own from your collection of cds were the craze. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge. When iTunes took over in many part of the world, countries like India which doesn’t have the iTunes monopoly continued to be Winamp territory. If you buy a new desktop, laptop and tab in India you can be sure than among the free little applications that they give you Winamp is sure to be there. When I bought this laptop that I am typing on back in 2010, they not installed Winamp but they also gave me a few folder worth of music – all of which I deleted since Tamil & Bollywood music isn’t what I listen to.
Winamp is very customizable and best of all they had tons & tons of skins, mostly created by users. I used to go crazy over them and download a few 100 (movies, tv series, sports teams, music bands etc) that I’d keep changing every few days. For the past 7 years I have only used 2 or 3 and this one pictured here – the Star Trek LCARS themed one – is the one that I usually use. If you can’t bear to leave the past behind, you have one more month to download the free Winamp media player, along with some skins and plugins, before it shuffles into the annals of history.
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