14 DAY TRIAL // There was a time when Winamp was installed on almost every single Windows computer, as it was considered a must-have app for anyone who wanted to listen to music on their devices.
Tech-savvy users probably know what happened next. After the parent company got new owners, the development of Winamp stagnated, so the application kind of lost its coolness, especially because of the lack of modern capabilities.
However, the Winamp project lives on, and not a long time ago, a beta build showed up out of nowhere with a series of rather subtle refinements.
Now the same improvements are making their way to the first stable update in so many years, as Winamp 5.9 is now available for download.
As said, Winamp 5.9 doesn’t come with any breaking changes, and one of the most notable is the full support for Windows 11. In other words, if you plan to run the app on Microsoft’s most recent operating system, Winamp should now feel at home after installing the latest update.
The team working on Winamp, however, has more ambitious plans for the future, as the next updates should bring even more refinements to the media player.
- Add native support for more formats (e.g. opus, ogv/ogm, TS, dash/iso6, H.265, HLS, VP9, etc.)
- Replace old Gracenote features (CDDB, Autotag, etc) with e.g. MusicBrainz or MusicStory
- Maybe restore a working NowPlaying service
- Add more default services to ml_online view (Lyrics, Jamendo, Hotmix, YT, Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.)?
- More multithreading & progress dialogs for "Send To" features (e.g. send large ML view to a Playlist)
- Config for in_mod & out_wasapi
- View File Info dialog for in_mod
You can download the latest Winamp stable version from Softpedia using the link in this article, but needless to say, you shouldn’t notice any substantial changes from the version we knew and loved a long time ago.