From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Winamp
Winamp 5.x
Maintainer:	Nullsoft
Stable release:	5.33  (February 13, 2007) [+/-]
Preview release:	5.34 Beta (build 1239)  (April 5, 2007) [+/-]
OS:	Microsoft Windows
Use:	Media player
License:	Proprietary freeware, shareware
Website:	http://www.winamp.com/

Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is skinnable, multi-format freeware / shareware.

Winamp was first released by Justin Frankel in 1996. Current Winamp development is credited to Ben Allison (benski), Will Fisher, Taber Buhl, Maksim Tyrtyshny, Chris Edwards and Stephen (Tag) Loomis.

In 2005 Winamp grew from 33 million monthly users to over 57 million monthly users^[1], making it by some counts the third most actively used media player globally, behind only Windows Media Player and iTunes.

Contents 1 History 1.1 WinAMP 1.2 Winamp 1 1.3 Winamp 2 1.4 Winamp3 1.5 Winamp 5 2 Concepts 2.1 Skins 2.2 Plug-ins 3 Features 4 Derivative work 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

The minimalist WinAMP 0.20a was released as freeware on April 21, 1997^[2]. It had a windowless menubar-only interface, with only play(open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A single file on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played. MP3 decoding was performed by the "free for non-commercial use"^[3] AMP® decoding engine, ©1996-97 by Tomislav Uzelac, at the time a student at FER, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The acronym "AMP" stood for "Advanced Multimedia Products". Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev integrated this engine with their user interface.

WinAMP 0.92 was released as freeware in May 1997. Within the standard Windows frame and menubar, it had the beginnings of the "classic" Winamp GUI: dark gray rectangle with silver 3d-effect transport buttons, a red/green volumen slider, time displayed in a green LED font, with trackname, MP3 bitrate and "mixrate" in green. There was no position bar, and only a blank space where the spectrum analyzer and waveform analyzer would later appear. Multiple files on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be enqueued in the playlist.

Version 1.006 was released June 7, 1997, renamed "Winamp"(lower case). It showed a spectrum analyzer, and color changing volume slider, but no waveform display. The AMP non-commercial license was included in its help menu.

According to Tomislav Uzelac, Frankel licensed the AMP 0.7 engine June 1, 1997. Frankel formally founded Nullsoft, Inc. in January 1998, and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to shareware. In March, Uzelac's newly founded company, PlayMedia Systems^[4] sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nullsoft, claiming unlawful use of AMP. Nullsoft responded that they had replaced AMP with Nitrane, Nullsoft's proprietary decoder, but Playmedia disputed this.

Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8, 1998. The 2.x versions became widely used, and Winamp was one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Microsoft Windows^[5]. The new version improved the usability of the playlist, made the equalizer more accurate, introduced more plug-ins, and allowed 'skins' for the playlist and equalizer windows.

PlayMedia Systems filed a federal lawsuit against Nullsoft in March 1999. In June 1999, Nullsoft was bought by AOL for $80 million. PlayMedia was granted an injunction on Nullsoft distributing Nitrane, and the same month the lawsuit was settled with out-of-court licensing and confidentiality agreement. Soon after, Nullsoft switched to an ISO decoder from the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the developers of the MP3 format.

Nullsoft relaunched the Winamp-specific winamp.com in December 1999 to provide easier access to skins, plug-ins, streaming audio, song downloads, forums, and developer resources.

The next major Winamp version, Winamp3 (so spelled to include mp3 in the name and to mark its separation from the Winamp 2 codebase), was released on August 9, 2002. It was a complete rewrite of version 2, newly based on the Wasabi application framework, which offered additional functionality and flexibility. Winamp3 was developed parallel to Winamp 2, but many users found it consumed too many system resources and was unstable (or even lacked some valued functionality, such as the ability to count or find the total duration of tracks in a playlist). Winamp3 had no backward compatibility with Winamp 2 skins and plugins, the SHOUTcast sourcing plugin was not supported, and no Winamp3 version of SHOUTcast was ever released.

Many Winamp3 users reverted to Winamp 2. Nullsoft responded by continuing development of Winamp 2 to versions 2.9 and 2.91. The beta versions 2.92 and 2.95 were released with the inclusion of some upcoming Winamp 5 functionality. During this period the Wasabi (software) cross-platform application framework and skinnable GUI toolkit was derived from parts of the Winamp3 source code. Nullsoft also built a Linux version of Winamp3 but has not updated it despite continued user interest.

The Winamp 2 and Winamp3 branches were later fused into Winamp 5 — Nullsoft justified their non-sequential christening by quipping that 2 + 3 = 5 — taking the best parts from both applications. Developers also joked that "nobody wants to see a Winamp 4 skin" ('4 skin' being a pun on foreskin). Winamp 5 was based on the Winamp 2 codebase, with several Winamp3 features (e.g. modern skins) incorporated. Winamp 5.0 was released in December 2003. Most of the Wasabi framework built for creating Winamp3 and its components was released as open source, and as of 2005 an active development effort has succeeded in making a standalone version of Wasabi, minus the skinning and scripting modules which were never released.

Winamp 5 comes in three versions. Lite and Full are freeware, and Pro requires registration and (as of early 2007) sells for US$19.95. The Lite version has far less functionality (largely supplementable with plugins) while still replicating most of Winamp 2's feature set in a far smaller installer. The Full version offers a richer feature set, excluding only music ripping and CD burning (available in the Pro version).

Skins are revisions of the graphical user interface of Winamp. Winamp has published documentation on skin creation, and invites contributors to publish skins on Winamp.com. Winamp 5.0 supports "classic" skins designed to Winamp 2 specifications, and "modern" skins per the Winamp3 specification. Modern skins support alpha channels, a docked toolbar, and other innovations to the GUI, but many skin designers remain committed to the "classic" skin specification. Skin templates, such as those created by Mischa Klement and Jellby, have aided the production of increasingly sophisticated skins. Online communities of skin designers, such as 1001 Winamp Skins and deviantart, and the active forums on Winamp.com attest to the popularity of the feature and its flexibility as a medium for creative expression. As with all artistic mediums, as the number of independently produced works have increased, genre styles or categories of skins have emerged. Promoting celebrities, fashion models, films, cars, bands, brands, and other forms of entertainment remains a common staple of the medium. Artists have also created designs for their own sake: parodies of other interfaces, nostalgic emulations of old hardware and operating systems, hand drawn art, 3-dimension renderings employing transparencies, minimalist and high contrast designs, and clever implementations of vector graphics. The size of the development community has led to the inclusion of Winamp skin support in other digital media software such as Windows Media Player and XMMS.

The Winamp software development kit allows software developers to extend Winamp's functionality through the use of plug-ins, which are categorized into the following seven types:

• Input plug-ins decode media data contained in specific file formats.
• Output plug-ins control the destination of decoded audio (such as the DirectSound device or direct-to-file writing).
• Visualization plug-ins provide sound activated graphics.
• DSP/Effect plug-ins manipulate audio (reverb, spacialization, equalization, compression, etc).
• General Purpose plug-ins add functionality or extensions to Winamp (alarm clock, or pause when logged out).
• Media Library plug-ins add functionality or extensions to the built in Media Library.
• Device plug-ins add interfaces to Portable media players.

Easy development of specialized Input plug-ins contributed to Winamp's versatility compared to monolithic media players. For example, popular video game music has driven development of plugins to playback game console music files, such as NSF, USF, GBS, GSF, SID, GYM, SPC, PSF and PSF2.

A wide variety of plug-ins are available on the Winamp web site^[6].

The following are features of Winamp 5:

• MIDI, MOD, MP1, MP2, MP3, AAC, M4A, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WAV, WMA, Chiptunes and many other audio formats supported.
• AVI support, which is played through the appropriate DirectShow filters installed on the user's system; MPEG; and NSV (Nullsoft Streaming Video).
• Plug-in support for additional input and output formats, sound effects (via DSP plugins), and visual effects (notably Advanced Visualization Studio, or AVS, and MilkDrop).
• Support for both Winamp 2's "classic" skins and Winamp3's more flexible "modern" skins(via official plugin provided in "Full" install).
• Freely available access to many types of streaming media, including:
  • Internet radio and Internet television (via the SHOUTcast technology).
  • XM Satellite Radio.
  • Music Tracks.
  • Music Videos (not available in all territories).
  • AOL Video Content.
  • In2TV classic television programs.
  • SHOUTcast Wire (podcast directory and subscription functionality).
  • Singingfish audio/video search engine.
• Support for ripping data from audio CDs, optionally with CD-TEXT, into MP3 or AAC formats, a feature enhanced in Winamp Pro.
• Support for burning music to CDs, a feature enhanced in Winamp Pro.
• True alpha channel (per-pixel transparency).
• Support for winshade mode as well as docking, which allows Winamp to operate as an always-on-top media bar.
• Support 5.1 Surround where formats and decoders allow.
• Support Gapless playback for MP3 and AAC.
• Replay Gain support.
• Support Unicode metadata for media files.
• Extendable Portable media player support, currently offering device plugins for:
  • Apple iPod.
  • Creative NOMAD Jukebox.
  • Microsoft PlaysForSure.
  • Mass Storage Compliant devices.
  • ActiveSync devices, such as those running Windows Mobile.
• Support Global hotkeys.
• Customized install options packaged with NSIS.
• 24-bit playback.
• Format conversion (transcoding).

Winamp also integrates Predixis MusicMagic, which scans the songs in the user's library, and can generate playlists of songs with similar aesthetic to the one the user has selected.

• Unagi, codename for the media playback engine derived from Winamp core technologies as distributed with the AOL software or as an ActiveX download. Powers many AOL media projects (i.e video@netscape, video@aol etc).

• Advanced Visualization Studio
• Music visualization
• MilkDrop
• Dosamp
• XMMS
• Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
• Nullsoft Streaming Video
• SHOUTcast
• Winamp Alternative
• Comparison of media players

• Official Winamp website
• Winamp 5 version history
• Older versions of Winamp at OldVersion.com