Before the era of music streaming, many computer users relied on the Winamp application to play music. Now the legendary MP3 player is back after being missing for several years.
Winamp has just released its first release candidate after four years of development. Winamp development has actually been discontinued since the release of version 5666 in 2013, but this MP3 player had a comeback after Winamp 5.8 leaked on online forums in October 2018.
Since then, the developers have promised to present a new version of Winamp with cloud streaming support and more modern features. Finally, last week Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 was released and you can download it at the following link.
This new version of Winamp still looks the same as the application that was known from a dozen years ago. This application still supports playback of MP3 and various other music formats, complete with skins and visualizations that make it look more unique.
Although not much has changed, the main purpose of this new release is to upgrade the code from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. Once this upgrade is complete, the Winamp development team will add new features and capabilities to this application.
As a result of this change Winamp can only be installed on devices running Windows 7 SP1 or later versions. For Windows 11 users, don't worry because Winamp already supports Microsoft's latest operating system.
"This is the culmination of four years of work since the release of version 5.8. Two development teams, and a period of hiatus caused by the pandemic," wrote the Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 changelog, as quoted from Bleeping Computer, Wednesday (3/8/2022).
"To the user, it doesn't seem like much has changed, but the biggest and hardest part was moving the entire project from VS2008 to VS2019 and getting everything built successfully. The foundations are now laid, and now we can concentrate on the features. Either fix/replace the old one or add new one," he continued.
Since this is not the final version of Winamp, it looks like there will still be bugs and issues that users will report during the trial period. Some of the issues that have been reported include the Milkdrop visualization feature, various UI issues, and legacy plugins not working.
Going forward, Winamp will add several new features, including native support for opus, ogv/ogm, TS, H.265, HLS, and VP9 formats as well as support for new online services.
