You can’t imagine it now, but we used to not use Spotify, but Winamp to listen to music on our computer. It did not contain standard music, so you had to download it first. And then those skins with which you could deck out the player… Step into the time machine with us, we go to the late 90s.
Winamp
The multimedia player Winamp was developed by Justin Frankel (and published by Nullsoft). You could listen to music with it, which is what it was most commonly used for, but watching videos was also an option. At least if it was MP3, WAV or AAC+. Winamp thrived on MP3s, because when it was launched in the late 90s we were all into digitizing music. One tried to make his CDs digital, the other illegally downloaded music via Kazaa or Limewire. There were many options, but whether you did it legally or not, Winamp was our friend when it came to playing that music.
Winamp was a fairly simple window that often sat in the background under all your other programs, but strangely enough it was still quite a hit to use a different skin. For example, at one point I used a bright pink one, much to the annoyance of my brother who sometimes had to use the same computer. It’s still fun to watch videos with the many different looks you could give Winamp: some – okay, most – were really, really ugly. But that is also because Winamp itself did not exactly excel in beauty. There were so many buttons, sliders, menus: it was made compact, but regardless of the color you gave it, it still remained quite busy.
Not so innocent
By the way, Winamp wasn’t so innocent if it doesn’t come across. Not only could you play music with it, you could also burn music onto CDs. That was of course super illegal: then you had those CDs with a green-blue back on which you put all kinds of music. Winamp Pro also had the ability to rip CDs, allowing you to save the music as MP3. So it seemed like a very innocent way to play music, but in the end it was also the tool with which music was ‘stolen’.
Winamp has been developed for quite a long time. From its launch in 1997 to November 2013, no fewer than 100,000 developments were carried out. Why this was stopped is unknown, but we can think of a few reasons: ripping CDs was no longer really necessary, people had smartphones by then and apps made Winamp no longer necessary. Five years ago, Winamp was revived a bit: there were reports of a new release in 2019, but ultimately it did not get off the ground. And we actually don’t mind that so much. Winamp with its crazy skins is still close to our hearts, but really from a nostalgic point of view. Wonderful to look at the skins again and think back to those days of ripping CDs. Although we are very happy that we can now stream music completely legally.
