Surprisingly, the developing team keeps improving the player

Nov 27, 2013 06:59 GMT  ·  By

In another surprising decision, the AOL developing team working on Winamp has released yet another version of the media player, although it’s scheduled to be discontinued next month.

Last week, AOL officially announced that it planned to discontinue Winamp on December 20, 2013, but since then, the company rolled out several new improvements for both the lite and the full versions of the app.

While this is a bit surprising, it could also be a sign that AOL wants to fix all bugs it can find before retiring the media player, thus making sure that users would be able to keep running the app even after its demise.

The lite build was officially updated yesterday, so today it the full version’s turn to receive new improvements.

Winamp 5 Full 5.666 Build 3512 packs crash fixes reported by users in the previous releases, as well as an updated Portuguese language pack, as the developing team found a few issues in the original translation files.

At the same time, it also address glitches found in the some of the ATF methods, while also fixing oscilloscope line mode glitches causing this feature to be incorrectly drawn in dot mode.

According to people close to the matter, Microsoft is the tech giant that could actually give Winamp a chance to survive, as Redmond is reportedly interested in buying the media player.

Microsoft hasn’t yet commented on such rumors and such an acquisition wouldn’t make much sense, especially because the company already has its very own Windows Media Player and continues investments in Xbox Music.

Developers, on the other hand, are calling for AOL to make Winamp open-source, but in case this won’t happen (and chances are that the parent company will refuse to do so), a potential Microsoft acquisition would be the only chance for Winamp to live on.