It’s been a good 15 years, but Winamp, our go-to desktop media player, is shutting down on December 20th but the reasons are yet to be disclosed.
AOL announced the decision in a brief statement on the official Winamp.com website, saying that the webpage and the downloadable media player will be removed on December 20.
“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. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years,” the notification reads.
Winamp, which was developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev for Nullsoft, was purchased by AOL in June 1999 for no less than $80 million (€59.4 million) in stock.
In June 2000, Winamp reached a record 25 million registered users, but started a dramatic decline soon after that.
In the last few years, Winamp launched several new versions, including a Mac port and an Android version that’s experiencing quite a terrific success among smartphone owners.
Even though development of new versions continued, and both Winamp 3 and Windows 5 reached the market in the next years, some users decided to stick to the original WInamp 2.95 version thanks to the impressive audio quality and its reduced footprint on system resources.
