14 DAY TRIAL // Winamp has a new owner that's reportedly very interested in keeping the application alive, so now there's word that a new version could launch sometime in the next few months for Windows users.
The world's favorite audio player one decade ago was sold by AOL to Belgium online radio service Radionomy in early 2014, but after nearly two years without a single update, there's now hope that the application will be brought back to life.
Vivendi Group, who owns either partially or fully companies such as Dailymotion and Deezer, is now believed to be planning an update to the app that could arrive in the next few months.
Small improvements and performance updates
Former Winamp developer Ben Allison explained in a post on the official forums that the lack of updates for the program was due to the fact that no development team existed during Radionomy's ownership. Vivendi is now working to put together a team of devs that would start work on Winamp in early 2016 and consequently release an update in the first months of the year.
But it won't be anything significant, he says, so expect mostly fixes and performance improvements.
“There hasn't been a development team. Although Radionomy certainly had goals and ambitions to release an updated version of Winamp, they have not had the resources to afford to do so. There will be a small release some time in early 2016. There will not be any new features; this release will be just be a small update to replace or remove software libraries that were not transferred during the sale (such as Gracenote),” the former Winamp developer explained.
And yet, this is still good news, especially given the fact that Winamp continues to have an impressive user base despite the lack of updates. Winamp will most likely get full compatibility with new Windows versions, such as Windows 10, but there's hope that new features and bigger updates could come in the next 12 months or so.