Effective December 20, Winamp

Effective December 20, Winamp will officially pass away. AOL is giving up on the media player it acquired in 1999, and will no longer host the software on Winamp.com. Winamp deserves more than that. Winamp let us play them. I recall taking great pains to prevent Winamp from installing extra toolbars and trialware onto my computer. To my surprise, installing Winamp 5.66 was painless. Listening to Winamp was all about building up a righteous play queue that evolved over time. Upon installation, I selected the classic Winamp skin for maximum nostalgia value. But any Winamp user knows it doesn’t end there. Downloading more skins was as much a part of the Winamp experience as downloading bootleg MP3s. Nostalgia value aside, Winamp in its current form actually strikes me as a good piece of software. Even if AOL hadn’t trashed Winamp over time, it’d probably still be in rough shape. Nothing beats a fully-integrated solution that plays music, sells music and synchronizes that music to the most popular portable MP3 player in the world. Winamp added some of these features over time, including a music store and an iPod sync tool, but it was never as seamless as iTunes was. Besides, desktop MP3 software is not as valuable anymore. AOL’s decision to kill Winamp might not be as terminal as it sounds.