Do you Remember Winamp?

For those who grew up with computers in the late 90s and early 2ks will know what Winamp is. It is a music player which was very popular back then. I have a lot of memory with this application. I did not have a computer at that time and I visited my friend's house to use his computer. The biggest memory that I have with Winamp is with one of my friends in the opposite house who used to have a playlist playing throughout the day on his computer. The attractive part was the different skins we used to have in this application.

There was a facility to get different skins for Winamp and even in the early 2000s when I bought my first desktop computer, I installed Winamp and used to hear many songs keeping it loud in the speakers. Whatever I do on my computer, I used to have my Winamp always on listening to music. I still remember playing games with Winamp on in the background. Wow, that was a cool experience.

I guess the skins made a huge memory because we cannot have so many options in our music player physically if at all we have one. But Winamp had lots of options where we could adjust the quality of the music we heard. The team did a great job in making the player look very attractive. Apart from listening to music, I think we all loved changing the themes quite often. I remember checking with my friends and exchanging themes with them. Then later we identified that we could also change the themes of Windows and I remember trying very hard to align my Winamp theme with the Windows theme.

I think after the Windows upgrade to a later version of Windows, which is mostly Windows 8 and 10, I did not need another music player. The Windows media player got a nice update and that itself was sufficient to create a playlist and play music. Some of my friends were also using VLC player to play music which was weird because it was meant for playing movies and video files.

Today I happened to browse some news on tech topics and this came up saying that Winamp is going open source. I guess this software disappeared for almost 15 years and now it is good to see it come back again. Looks like the company was acquired by AOL and it disappeared after that. Honestly, I don't know if people would care about Winamp anymore because they have already evolved and there are so many other options available for the users. I don't know if anyone would be still interested in using Winamp to listen to songs. These days I'm not even sure if people are listening to music on their desktops or laptops. There are many other options available to listen to music.

But this is a good thing and there will always be fans and users. I don't want to be negative here but let's see if there is an adoption. In the recent news, there was also something saying that they have also added support for NFTs making it attractive for the crypto folks.