A brief history of WinAMP

Remember the simpler days? Before iTunes tried to encrypt and obfuscate your music collection. Before Windows Media Player tried to re-arrange all your files and convert everything to it’s own format. Back when you downloaded your MP3 files one at a time via IRC !fileserve shares and dumped them into a C:\MP3\ directory, then loaded *.* into your WinAMP playlist? Cries of “My MP3 collection is so big I crash WinAMP trying to load it!”. Wrestling with the EQ settings to try and get more oomph out of your SoundBlaster 16 running some crappy little speakers.

If there’s any geeks out there who don’t get that tingly nostalgia feeling over the phrase “It really whips the llama’s ass”, then they’re probably lying about being a geek.

We stumbled on this nice little “Brief history of WinAMP” video, and it sent us on a trip down memory lane… so figured we’d see who else remembers the “good old days” of the MP3 revolution.

The video takes us from DosAMP through to WinAMP’s skinning and plugin systems, shows screenshots of all the versions from the original beta through to the EQ-equipped enhanced-playlist AVS-sporting later versions.

I still remember messing around in CorelDraw and Paint (zoomed in with pencil, of course) to try put together my first skins. Each time someone downloaded one of them from the Winamp.com/skins directory it felt like i’d gotten an A+ in my worst subject. I’ve got no proof to back this up, but I still believe WinAMP probably kicked off the whole skinning craze that swept the 90s, ending up with us skinning everything from IM clients to our MySpace pages. The idea of customising your app to suit your own tastes was almost as revolutionary as the idea of MP3s themselves.

My other favourite part of WinAMP was the J button. How has this not made it’s way into current programs like iTunes and Zune? At any time you’d just reach over, hit J, type the first few letters of a song, and hit enter. So simple! Yeah there’s search boxes, complex tag-querying engines, etc… but it’s just not the same. That involves grabbing the mouse and navigating menus, which isn’t as easy to do when you’re drunk, or up late in a dark room playing Descent on your other screen. Or both.

Which version of WinAMP did you come in at? What was your favourite skin? Got any screenshots from your own skinning attempts? What was your first MP3 you ever downloaded? Tell us in the comments.

Here’s a few more pics to finish off our little nostalgic venture:

To be fair, WinAMP is still around and is still quite popular… but in 1999 AOL bought them, and did a full rewrite of the codebase. Their “improvements” (heh) were things like a popup built in web browser that displayed ads to you, more emphasis on media streaming from AOL’s services, and a host of other new functions and add-ons. You can run it in classic mode, which “looks” like the old WinAMP, but with the iDevice world well and truly taking over MP3 playing, most people have switched to iTunes now.

WinAMP as it stands right now: