Winamp will cease to exist from next month

Winamp, an iconic media player from the nineties, will cease to exist from December 20, with its owner AOL deciding to shut down the service.

 

AOL, which runs the popular media player, has announced that it will shut down Winamp.Com and its associated web services.

 

"Winamp.Com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download," a note on the Winamp.Com website said.

 

Its last version (Winamp 5.66) was released yesterday.

 

"Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years," the note added.

 

Once synonymous for playing music for PC users in the 90s, Winamp was developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev in 1997 as a freeware.

 

The music streaming services once boasted of a user base of over 50 million.

 

Frankel named his software company, Nullsoft, and continued development on the player. It was later turned into shareware with new features and functionality added to the player. Nullsoft was acquired by AOL in 1999.

 

Winamp's popularity grew with the growing trend of MP3 file sharing. It supports music playback using MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and WMA. Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows.

 

Initially developed for Windows, Winamp now offers betas for Android and Mac OS X and an alpha version for Linux as well.