The Winamp & Nullsoft Odyssey

Winamp was created by Nullsoft in 1997 as a community supported media play and was a pioneer as well as a disruptor in the digital media space. Lead by Justin Frankel and his merry band of developers, Winamp soon became one of the most revolutionary applications of its kind. Nullsoft, acquired by AOL in 1999, also created SHOUTcast, Gnutella (open source) and NSIS (open source installer used by Winamp, Dropbox, Firefox and others). Winamp was an early leader in community developed applications and helped to spawn the open source software movement for music. You can drop by our team & alumni pages to learn more about the people responsible for creating the player, turning out new revs, maintaining the website, and fostering relations with the developer community.

Today, Winamp is one of the world's most popular media players allowing users to manage and play audio and video files. Winamp supports playback of 60 audio and video formats, and is available in two versions: Winamp Standard and Winamp Pro. Although free, don't let the name fool you because Winamp Standard provides loads of features well beyond what you'd get from any plain vanilla media player. To name a few, it features robust tools for creating playlists, customizing your playback experience (aka "skinning"), managing podcasts, syncing portable devices, listening to internet radio stations, and accessing remote media (Winamp Remote).

The Pro version provides you with several additional features like mp3 ripping, high speed audio CD burning/ripping, extra-small file size encoding with AACPlus, and native support for H.264 encoded video. If you haven't tried Winamp lately, downloading the Winamp Media Player should be your first stop. From there you should visit Winamp.com which is home for all things Winamp, and will help you get the most out of your Winamp experience.




Not Your Plain Vanilla Player

At its core Winamp is all about individuality and customization, that's why we offer add-ons to extend functionality beyond the original design. Thanks to the efforts of our loyal development community, Winamp offers over 6,000 add-ons including skins, plug-ins, visualizations & online services.

Skins:
In addition to its breadth of features and support of high fidelity playback, one of Winamp's main differentiators is its skin-able interface. This level of customization gives you the control to reflect your own individual personality. To date the Winamp community has created over 2,700 skins. Browse our gallery to find one that fits your taste, or if you are the DIY type, make your own.


Plug-ins:
A Plug-in extends the functionality of Winamp and allows you to add just about anything to your Winamp player including equalizers, additional codecs, language packs, games and more. There are over 900 community developed plug-ins to choose from, so you can browse the plug-in gallery or make your own.
You can also bring your music to life with any one of Winamp's world renowned visualizations. Essentially they're dynamic add-ons that produce images, colors, and textures that change based on elements of the music being played. There are nearly 2,800 presets available for download in our visualization gallery. As a side note, the creator of Milkdrop (one of the two visualization platforms in Winamp) in Ryan Geiss. Ryan who now works for Microsoft, is a core developer of the human-tracking algorithms for Xbox 360's Kinect. Explore the Winamp visualization gallery or make your own.


Online Services:
The latest type of add-on is an online service, which is an integrated website or app customized specifically to interact with your Winamp player. With Winamp online services, you can broaden the functionality of your player with services like the 7digital store. This seamlessly integrated digital download store makes it easy and convenient to buy and download music without ever leaving your player. Winamp not only provides one of the most customizable players in the world but strives to extend your listening experience with valuable services that give access to artist info, tour schedules & tickets, lyrics, and an extensive podcast directory. Check out the Online Services Gallery or make your own.

Other Tasty Flavors in Winamp

Winamp is home to SHOUTcast Radio where you can choose from over 40,000 internet radio stations. If you don't find one you like, SHOUTcast provides the tools so you can create your own station.

The Now Playing experience presents contextual information around your music catalog. While listening to music, you will be offered artist biographies, photos, discographies, videos, news and recommendations.

The Orgler Module is an embeddable widget that reads your playback history and lets you share your listening habits with friends online. Or you can choose to download the Winamp Toolbar which allows you to control Winamp directly from your web browser.


Community

We love feedback, so tell us what you think, or you can stay in touch with the Winamp community on our product blog, Twitter, or in the Winamp Forums. Our community forum is a hub for technical questions, discussions and support. For those interested in building stuff and contributing to our Add-on catalog, the Winamp Developer Network is full of useful tools and documentation.

If it isn't clear already, we'll say it again... we love our developer community! Be sure to support them by downloading and using their add-ons -- be it a new skin, a tweaked out visualization, an online service, a plug-in, or one of th3 16 different language packs. If you like the add-on, give them some feedback by reviewing, rating, or leaving a comment.

What is Winamp?

It's how you listen, watch and manage music, video, podcasts and internet radio on your desktop and devices. Winamp is for people who like to customize, tinker and tweak: offering the widest range of extensions, skins, and services to add to your experience.



Don't conform, make your media player do what YOU want!
Other media managers are often a "take it or leave it" experience, with few if any options to personalize. Winamp is the media player that you can make your own... if you don't see it and you have the moxie and are a little tech savvy, you can build it yourself (on dev.winamp.com).

Listen, Watch & Manage
You can listen to, manage and organize your media catalogs, including audio, video, streaming media, podcasts and internet radio stations. It supports playback for 60 audio and video formats (including Webm). And also ships with robust tools for creating playlists, customizing playback preferences and listening remotely.

Customize
Winamp allows you to significantly customize your experience with over 6,000 add-ons (skins, plug-ins, online services and visualizations) created by a loyal development community. The Winamp Media Player is used worldwide and comes available in 16 different languages.

Extend
You can extend the value of Winamp and your media collection with Online Services that enable you to browse & buy tickets, find lyrics, & download music directly from your media player with the seamlessly integrated 7digital store. Winamp also has robust tools for managing your podcast subscriptions with our dynamic and searchable podcast directory. Last but not least you'll be able to listen over 40,000 internet radio stations via our seamless integration with the SHOUTcast Radio directory.

Winamp Pro
You can further expand your media player's functionality with Winamp Pro, which offers:

- Navtive video support for the most popular H.264 file formats
- Unrestricted Audio CD Burning & Ripping (up to 48x)
- MP3 encoding - the industry leading format
- High quality bitrate AACPlus encoding (twice the quality of the free version)

As we've talked about in recent posts this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin is going to be unbelievable. For those going make sure you stop by the AOL/Winamp booth and say hello. Or if you want to learn how to create a customized media player for yourself or band, RSVP to our Developer Meet-up during the interactive portion of the festival. Hurry! The meet-up's next Monday, March 15th.

For anyone not going, or for anyone who doesn't know what the festival is all about... don't worry we'll have full coverage of the SXSW Music Festival.

Austin's South by Southwest Music Festival is the premier place to sample music from the hottest rising acts in music. AOL's coverage of the festival includes the most comprehensive collection of SXSW band interviews on the Web. Find out how this year's showcasing acts came up with their band names, what they've got stashed in their festival survival kits and much more!

Full Coverage of SXSW 2010 | SXSW Band Interviews | Free SXSW MP3s

Spinner.com will be hosting free pop-up shows at SXSW, featuring Broken Bells, Rogue Wave, VV Brown & Rival Schools. Read the Spinner article and follow @SpinnerSXSW on Twitter for information.

There's also s SXSW Radio station created by SXSW and powered by SHOUTcast. You can listen in Winamp or stream it directly from the below player.





Finally, be sure to check out The Interface which has a bunch of live performances of bands that will be at SXSW 2010:

Rogue Wave
Rogue Wave (2010)
Surfer Blood
Edwards Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
The Antlers
Miniature Tigers
Japandroids
Drive-By Truckers
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings
Adam Green
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Kimya Dawson
Nicole Atkins
Billy Bragg
The Temper Trap
Shearwater

The Winamp team's heading to Austin for SXSW 2010. In between catching shows and stuffing our faces with some Texas barbecue, we plan on having our own meet & greet. Stop by and learn how to use the Winamp platform to create a customized media player for artists, venues, festivals or pretty much anything you can think of.


Who: Developers, bands, fans, & business minded entrepreneurs
What: Winamp meet-up
When: Monday, March 15 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Where: Brazos Loft - 411 Brazos Street, Suite 108 Austin, TX
Why: Learn how to build a bitchin' band skin! Oh... and did I mention we're bringing the BBQ & drinks?

RSVP: winamp-event@corp.aol.com

For anyone not able to attend SXSW you can read the, How to Promote Your Band post to learn how you too can build a customized Winamp skin.

We are excited to be just around the corner of the launch of the next version of the Winamp Media Player, version 5.57. Currently we are scheduled to release on Wednesday, Dec. 16, late in the evening on Wednesday so really Thursday.

How do you see the new media player? Well, we have just released a Preview Beta in the forums . It is still being tweaked and there are some known issues that we are actively addressing, but we would like you to try it and give us some feedback. Please leave comments directly in the forums, you can also review the detailed list of features, bug fixes and enhancements there.

Here are some highlights...

Winamp PRO 5.57 will ship with native video support for the most popular H.264 formats, MP4, MKV and AVI. So if you have been using Winamp for your audio library and something else for video, you can now do it all with one application, Winamp.

We have also been spending a lot of time working on our Online Services offerings.
You're probably already familiar with some our flagship services like SHOUTcast Radio and Winamp Charts. Our developers and partners have created some great new services that extend the usefulness of the Winamp Media Player:

• * First, the new Tour Tracker online service, allows you to see current tour dates & purchase tickets for artists in real time, as their tracks are playing through your Winamp.
• * Next for all of you wannabe rock stars, lip syncers and karaoke fans, our partner Metro Lyrics has built a service, so as you're beltin' out your favorite tune, you'll never miss a single lyric.
• * Last but not least, be sure to check out the new 7digital Store, were you can browse and download new music from right inside your Winamp player. At launch the 7digital service will be limited to the U.S. and U.K but we plan to roll this out for more countries in Europe quickly.

The new Winamp 5.57 is fully Windows 7 compatible and takes advantage of some of the new preview features in the new WinOS.

The last big feature in the media player that we want to highlight in this post is the new "Add-ons" Gallery. We have made this a top-level node in the Media Library navigation and you can search and add any skin, plug-in, visualizations and online service directly from the media player. No need to go out to winamp.com anymore.

There are a lot of developer improvements coming on Dec. 16 as well. We have redesigned the Developer Profiles on winamp.com, improved the submission flow for Add-ons and we will be releasing an updated SDK.

Lastly, we participated in a local tech meet-up in Washington D.C. last week called TECH Cocktail, were we demo'd the new Winamp 5.57 client. You can check out some pix over at the TECH Cocktail site.

Apologies for the long-winded post, but there are so many features in Winamp 5.57 and there is so much more to talk about. Therefore, we are planning a series of posts after the launch to deep dive into all of the new features for the media player and winamp.com too. Stay tuned...

Xin Nian Kuai Le (Chinese)
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar (Dutch)
Happy New Year (English)
Bonne Année (French)
Ein Gutes Meues Jahr (German)
Nav Varsh Ki Subhkamna (Hindi)
Felice Anno Nuovo (Italian)
Akemashite Omedetô (Japanese)
Seh Heh Bok Mani Bat Uh Seyo (Korean)
Szcz??liwego Nowego Roku (Polish)
Feliz Ano Novo (Portugese)
Un An Nou Fericit (Romanian)
? ????? ????? (Russian)
Feliz Año Nuevo! (Spanish)
Gott Nytt år (Swedish)
Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun (Turkish)

Happy New Year from the Winamp Team! We are so excited about the coming year and the plans we have. 2009 for us is a year of change and opportunity. We plan to add new features to both the Winamp Client and website in the coming year that will significantly improve the experience for users and will expand the tools available to developers to create custom versions and extensions of Winamp. We feel that this will be one of the most significant years of growth for the product and hope that you will follow our progress and upgrade to the newest versions with as much excitement as we will have in releasing them.

I personally have learned so much about Winamp in the last couple of months. You see... I am new to the team and my role as Executive Director is to manage the product and technical teams to bring new features and services to the Winamp community. I have worked with the team to design an aggressive roadmap that will serve our users and developers in new and better ways. I will be posting on the blog from time to time to bring you updates on the state of the roadmap and other Winamp initiatives.

One of the greatest assets of Winamp is you and the other members of the Winamp community, both users and developers alike, and we want your voice to be heard. In addition to watching the Winamp forums and comments on this blog, we have added direct feedback links to this Blog, Winamp.com, the Winamp client and dev.winamp.com. Please use them. While we may not be able to respond directly to all feedback, we DO read it all. We have already collected a lot of great ideas, keep 'em coming.

More to come soon...
Best, Geno