Winamp, the AOL-owned mp3 player of yore, will close up shop for good on December 20th, which means you have exactly one month from today to use the service -- if you're still using it, that is. In addition to shutting down Winamp.com, AOL and co. will no longer offer downloads of the media player. It's hardly a surprising announcement, but it's a slightly glum one considering Winamp's popularity in the late nineties and early aughts. Go ahead, you have our permission to get nostalgic for a moment or two.

Go ahead, you have our permission to get nostalgic for a moment or two.

Winamp may be riding into the sunset today, but that doesn't mean you'll have to go without its classic interface in the future. Ludde is paying tribute to the jukebox software by releasing Spotiamp, a tiny Windows app that streams your Spotify playlists with Winamp's 1990s-era flair. The connection to the AOL-owned player isn't just skin-deep, though -- Spotiamp includes its own Shoutcast server, so you can send tunes to a Sonos speaker or anything else with native Shoutcast support. As long as you have a Spotify Premium subscription, you can take a musical trip down memory lane through the source link.

Winamp is coming back as an all-in-one music player

Oct 15, 2018

Winamp, the legendarily customizable music player, is being revamped as a mobile app that will give you one place to listen to all your music — including playlists, podcasts, streaming radio stations, and more, as reported by TechCrunch.

First released in 1997, Winamp was a popular freeware media player famous for its utilitarian music playback and its wealth of incredible community-made skins. It was acquired by AOL in 2002, then sold to Radionomy in 2014. The last time Winamp was updated was in 2013, so news that a revival is coming should be welcomed by longtime fans of the app.

“There will be a completely new version next year, with the legacy of Winamp but a more complete listening experience,” Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Radionomy tells TechCrunch. “You can listen to the MP3s you may have at home, but also to the cloud, to podcasts, to streaming radio stations, to a playlist you perhaps have built.”

Essentially, the plan is to update Winamp for both desktop and mobile so that it will be a single, searchable experience for all the audio you consume from different sources. Saboundjian declined to detail which services Winamp would support or how the new version of the app would integrate with things like Apple Music, Spotify, or other audio platforms.

There’s no further details about what this new version of Winamp will look like. And, while the idea of, especially on mobile, having a central place to aggregate and search all your audio is certainly an exciting one, it’s unclear how the company plans to pull this off. Not only does it sound like a complete departure from what Winamp used to be, integrating with all the places we get audio from is a massive ask.

The 5.8 release of Winamp will be coming this week to fix some bugs and compatibility issues, but the fully revamped version of the app, Winamp 6, should be released sometime in 2019.