One of the must downloads of the early days of the internet, Winamp, is shutting down. End of an era for sure.
Personally remember the Windows 98 days of using it and downloading sometimes ugly skins to go with it, it lost its way when it was bought by AOL and became less and less relevant as we entered the cloud era.
Update: Please read the links to petitions and the other good points made by commenter smaragdus http://www.rgdot.com/bl/2013/11/20/end-era-winamp-shutting/comment-page-1/#comment-49138
AOL (like Yahoo) destroys anything it touches- first Netscape Navigator, then ICQ, now Winamp.
There are two petitions for open-sourcing Winamp:
PETITION – SIGN NOW to ask for Winamp to go open source
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=373763
AOL: Keep Winamp alive or let it go open source
https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/aol-keep-winamp-alive-or-let-it-go-open-source
Winamp is not my default audio player but I still have it installed because it can play virtually all audio formats, either natively or via plug-ins since most audio codec developers create a plug-in for Winamp since Winamp is still (perhaps) the most popular audio player. For example Lossless Audio (LA) format files can only be played by Winamp since the developer of Lossless Audio created LA plug-ins only for Winamp and foobar2000 but the foobar2000 plug-in is so outdated that it is not compatible with the modern versions of foobar2000. In fact AIMP can also use some of Winamp’s plug-ins (including in_la.dll).
AOL, the evil company, is not only discontinuing Winamp but is planning to shut down the Winamp site, which is outrageous. There is a huge Winamp community, an enormous number of threads inside Winamp forums, an incredible number of plug-ins and skins and all that would be lost.
I don’t care for the cloud, what I need is to be able to play my enormous audio collection stored on my PC and on external drives which contains almost all popular audio formats- mainly lossless ones- FLAC, APE, WV, LA, OFR, M4A, and some lossy too- MP3, OGG, MPC, AAC, WMA, and Winamp can play all these formats.
Many audio players have been already abandoned- Apollo, Vu Player, Quintessential Media Player, Spider Player, ALSong, Zinf, I wonder which one will be the next after Winamp.
Thanks for the info. I especially agree with your Yahoo and AOL points.