Goodbye, winamp!. Goodbye, Youth!

"Guide" Today, AOL announced that its music service Winamp will be closed on December 20, 2013. This will affect its website winamp.com, associated network services, and its Winamp media player. Winamp, which has been a popular music player for more than 15 years, has been declining since it was acquired by AOL in 1999. You are old by the means of this.

For as long as I know which wherever I go

Are there to follow

Right into our world

Release Me

--right into my World,kathrin Scheer

Winamp version number is forever fixed on the 5.66, just today, Winamp officially announced on December 20 will shut down including the website, related network services and music player support updates.

After 15 years of history, the former music player now finally gave up the final effort and struggle, exhausted and bleak announced the withdrawal of the stage of history. But who could forget the years of listening to music with a 56K cat on a CRT monitor?

With the popularity of the internet, especially the mobile internet, this once recorded countless people's youth and music memories of the player gradually died down in the internet history of the crowd eventually disappeared in the turbulent tide, at this time, the only thing we can do is to record its life track, and lament the memory of the glorious years.

As early as 1994, the Germans have introduced the MP3 format encoder, but for a full three years, for the vast majority of ordinary users, MP3 files are extremely difficult to use, extremely inconvenient to share.

The revolution in digital music was finally done by young Americans.

Justin Frankel, a student at the University of Utah, introduced Winamp in the year, and they put together the most popular and easy-to-use Windows use interface and the AMP MP3 format playback engine, when the Winamp interface was extremely crude and only played, stopped, paused, etc. Note that this player is based on the amp, and that the AMP's decoding engine was developed by Tomislav Uzelac, not surprisingly, that the engine is completely free for non-commercial use.

In May of the same year, they introduced the classic gui--dark grey interface, green play time display effect, green or Red volume adjustment slide button.

Then in June, Winamp's version was finally over 1.0, and the player was officially renamed Winamp (note the difference in capitalization), and the AMP's non-commercial license also appeared in its help.

However, by the year 1998, things have changed subtly.

Frankel founded the company Nullsoft, and Winamp also became a 10-dollar shareware from free software, allowing Winamp to earn more than 100,000 dollars a month.

At this point, Frankel was only 18 years old and lived with his parents, and Rob Lord, Winamp's first manager from California, who travelled all the time to Arizona, State, was just a more than 20-year-old head boy.

We ' ll ethically do X and let the universe decide

This is the idea of Frankel, the man who disposes in heaven.

Two months later, Uzelac issued a restraining order, arguing that Nullsoft's behavior violated the AMP's protocol of use, but the latter turned a deaf ear, saying that it would replace the amp with its own Nitrane decoder, but the dispute ended.

In less than 20 days from the end of March, Winamp has made two updates in a row, starting to support plug-ins and more audio formats, and it was in the 1.91 edition that added the famous----12 seconds short audio with sheep bleating and whip-whipped sound:

Winamp, it really whips the llama ' s ass!

By July, the player downloaded more than 3 million times. September, 2.0 release officially, since then, Winamp became the most popular, the most influential audio player.

Along with Winamp's reputation is the lawsuit between it and the amp company PlayMedia.

In March 1999, PlayMedia filed a lawsuit, two months later, the judge issued a ruling, the Winamp decoder Nitrane issued a ban, but in court, two companies finally reached a secret settlement agreement. Later, Nullsoft from the MP3 format developer Fraunhofer Gesellschaft where to get the new ISO decoder.

In June, after the lawsuit was not long, Winamp was at that time rich and deep AOL to buy 80 million dollars, and it also acquired streaming media Services spinner, two acquisitions amounted to 400 million U.S. dollars, AOL hopes to use the resources of the two companies in the Internet music market to seize the opportunity. Frankel's AOL stock was worth 60 million dollars at the time.

A year later, Winamp announced that he had more than 25 million registered users. Almost everyone thinks that with the collaboration of Winamp and spinner, AOL will definitely become a giant in the digital music world, but no one will talk about what will happen next.

The first problem comes from spinner and Nullsoft, who were acquired when the entire team was four and more late than the spinner, and there was an inevitable rift between the two teams, adding to the fuel that the AOL executives at this time thought that while Winamp had a larger user base, But spinner is relatively mature, so they give the latter more decision-making power and budget.

This is really deep ice. (It was perverse)

That's still in Nullsoft, Rob Lord. So recalled that the rift between the team as AOL's decision becomes bigger, more irreparable. Although the number of users in Winamp has increased by 1500 to 60 million from 1999 to 2001, the underlying crisis is emerging.

In the 2000, AOL had learned that only Winamp could drive its music service--compared to the 25 million users of Winamp, AOL's own music service had less than 24 million users and was always at a loss.

In order to promote their own music services, AOL requires Winamp users must carry out account migration, but, Winamp most of the users are music enthusiasts, geek, they are so bossy big companies like AOL have no goodwill, of course, do not want to migrate accounts.

The end result is that AOL has not been able to push its music service (up to today, only 3 million users), while also making Winamp lose the user's support and best development time.

2001, the ipod turned out, and by 2003, the ipod sold more than 1 million units and launched itunes.

Apple opened a door to opportunity, and we missed it. (tightly created that door; "We ethically weren ' t positioned to walk through it in the way of that Apple is)

AOL insiders lament.

AOL makes every decision as if it were politics, and whenever there is any good idea, it is blind to meet them (these bureaucrats viewed every decision as a political decision. Really ideas would die on the vine)

Winamp to today still melancholy to AOL complain unceasingly.

In August 2002, based on the Wasabi framework, Nullsoft almost rewrote Winamp 2 and released Winamp3 (note that this is not the next generation of Winamp 2), but there is a big problem with this version of the product, and a large number of users are unwilling to update or reuse previous versions , Nullsoft had to start Winamp 2.9X version of the development.

Meanwhile, the contradictions between Frankel and AOL are getting bigger.

As an AOL shareholder and Winamp founder, he wanted to make a bigger sound in the decision-making process has been ignored by the senior AOL, and the 2003 waste of the release of AOL and the subsequent intent of the ban completely angered the only 25-year-old young man, he in public high-profile scold AOL:

Our users don't use AOL, they also think AOL is a piece of crap. (I'm like, look, we users don ' t want to use aol! Tightly to AOL sucks!)

Between the two sides has evolved into a situation, Frankel finally agreed to Winamp 5 before the launch to stay.

Why not Winamp 4? Nullsoft joked that this was because Winamp 4 skin gave people a bad feeling (4 skin read like foreskin).

Winamp 5.0 was released in December 2003, and Frankel subsequently left AOL to re-register the new company.

AOL retained the Winamp development team in 2004, but shut down nullsoft, which means that for many people, AOL has done a stupid thing again:

AOL kills off the last maverick tech company

Since then, Winamp actually has only six people in charge of maintenance and updating, so imagine why it was not until 3 years later that a 5.5 version of the 10 anniversary as a gimmick without a substantial update was launched-Winamp still as Shimo as usual The Users still have 90 million users in this difficult situation.

With the release of the 5.5 version, Winamp began to use the freemium model, free account and 20 dollar senior account, but the latter to Winamp can only provide millions of dollars of income.

Of course, in this process, AOL still plays the negative role incisively and vividly, the capricious plan change, does not have the commercial development and the operation, to the Winamp project disregard makes this has the 15 years history the product to have been supporting to now appears so solemn and tragic.

November 20, 2013, Winamp 5.66 version of the small update, and calmly announced the one months after the shutdown of the message, and now Winamp global users only 30 million, in contrast,

In 2010, Winamp launched the Android version, which has been rumored since 2001 that Winamp will launch the Mac version, but so far it is still a rumor and will never come true again.

Throughout, Winamp has not yet launched the iOS version.

This article mainly refers to Ars Technica report and Wiki

Winamp User response:

I spent the years looking for Andy Lau's various songs on Winamp.

I literally ethically purchased Winamp, yesterday! WTF?

All of the developers and other contributors

This is so sad. I ' m using Winamp since Perton. I really moment-in dour I ' m shocked ...