It’s hard to believe that Winamp will be celebrating its 10th anniversary next month, and they plan to do it in style! To mark the occasion they will be releasing Winamp 5.5 on 10/10 at 10:10AM, but a Beta version of the application has already been made available to testers.
Winamp 5.5 has been in the works for over a year, and I have to admit that the new Bento skin (pictured above) is among the best that I’ve ever seen for the media player. What makes this skin more unique is that it’s a single interface instead of being composed of several individual windows. I was a little skeptical of how nice that would be over the standard skin, but I quickly fell in love with Bento.
Here’s a list of the new features in Winamp 5.5:
- Winamp Bento (SingleUI Skin)
- Winamp Remote lets you access your media from anywhere via the web
- Unified File Editor, with Album Art tab (for mp3, m4a, wma, ogg, flac)
- Album Art window for Winamp Modern skin
- Global ‘playback thread priority’ setting for decoders
- Option to not show playlist item number in classic songticker
- Version History drop-down selector and Search (in About dialog)
- Multi-channel mp3surround support
- Tree Options tab in Media Library Preferences
- 3 pane view options in ‘Add/Edit View’ dialog
- Smart View Presets
- Album Art support/pane and retrieval service
- Toolbar buttons to control view options
- Winamp Playlist Generator (powered by Gracenote MusicID)
- New fields, configurable filter panes & columns, 3 pane view
- Album Art view & support for iPod and P4S Devices
- Separate view for video files
That’s not even the half of what’s changed since the last stable version. The list goes on and on with dozens of bug fixes and enhancements all of which will make your Winamp experience that much better.
And in case you’ve forgotten what started it all we thought it was time to open the vault to Winamp 0.2 (pictured to the right), which was released back in 1997. Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about that fine release:
Its windowless menubar-only interface showed only play(open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played.
…
The acronym "AMP" stood for "Advanced Multimedia Products".
Get Winamp 5.5 Beta - "it really whips the llama’s ass!" 
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Tags: Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Beta, Music
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I tested this out yesterday, it’s pretty cool. I know they are trying to emulate iTunes, and it actually works.
Winamp is and always remain my favourite media player, so much so that i use Wine to run it on my kubuntu installation. 3 cheers for nullsoft.
Let me try the beta and i will give you the verdict tommorow.
Geez another thing for me to test out and blog about! I’ve been using WinAmp since 1999 and love it. Sure has indeed come a long way since the first release way back when!
Except they are doing it better in my opinion.
I think you’ve got to be one of the longest-standing members.
Not bad, I like this new format. I’ll be doing a blog entry next week about this.
Wow - I haven’t looked at winamp for years. Hasn’t it changed, it seems great, very itunes like but better.
cheers,
- Goldcoaster
Looks great but I’ll just stick with foobar2000 just for this AvA config ( http://www.dawxxx666.neostrada.pl/ ).
Not even sure how I found it, likely Yahoo or Google.