UPDATE: Apparently it may be sold off, not sure how I feel about that…

So Dec. 20th is the day AOL is shutting off WinAmp.com and discontinuing official downloads.

I remember when MP3s were brand new on the scene.
No good players for miles, the ones that popped up would quickly bloat or disappear.

But then WinAmp hit the scene…

I had an old Pentium 166 with MMX extensions.
For those who experienced or knows about CPU usage back then, an MP3 took up a huge chunk. So I could either “multitask” or listen to music.
However after a while WinAmp supported MMX and enabling that made a HUGE difference.
By the way, I started before version 1.0.

Years later WinAmp had thousands of amazing skins and dozens of stunning visualizations.

Like many of us who used WinAmp since version 2, version 3 was horrible.
Terribly slow and consumed so many resources.

They redeemed themselves with version 5, nice and fast.
They also put in more amazing and useful features than I can list here.
At this point they had gotten me excited about internet radio via Shoutcast and I discovered dozens of great online radio stations and tons of new music.

Sadly during all this AOL had somehow managed to purchase WinAmp.

Like most things AOL touches, it began to die.
It became less a music player, lightweight and useful, and more a “media” player with tons of bloat.

Reminds me of what AOL did to ICQ, another mournful story…

Anyway, while I still use and love it, it’s been reduced down to small bugfixes and minor changes, than the radical improvements of its yesteryear.

I’m going to miss it greatly, and will probably use it for a while longer before moving on to a continually evolving product, maybe MediaMonkey…