Winamp was the go-to music player for Windows at the dawn of the MP3 era in the late 1990s. But after AOL bought the software in 1999, development stagnated for the next decade or so.

Now Winamp is back. The current owner has released Winamp 5.9 which brings modern features including improved support for Windows 11, the VP8 codec, and a number of other updates and bug fixes.

A company called Radionomy is behind Winamp these days, having acquired the software from AOL almost a decade ago. But development of new features has been slow going.

The last major release was Winamp 5.8, which came out in 2018 and brought support for Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11.

The new release builds upon those features… and doesn’t have a lot of user-facing changes. But Radionomy’s developers have modernized the software by porting it from Visual Studio 2008 to VS 2019. This paves the way for bigger changes which could debut in version 6.0 or later.

Perhaps most importantly, while Winamp 5.9 offers several skin options (allowing you to customize the look and feel of the software, there’s a classic skin for those that want to party like it’s 1997. And the first time you run the software, you’ll hear a familiar sound.

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4 replies on “Winamp is back, version 5.9 brings support for Windows 11 and VP8”

  1. all i have ever known has been winamp i got a new laptop for Christmas this year it runs windows 11 and i cannot get my winamp to work correctly on windows 11 it will NOT allow me to create a play list no matter what i try if any one has the answer on how to fix this problem i would appreciate the help

  2. Too little too late. Winamp was the go to mp3 player but after being pretty much abandoned I’ve long since switched to other media players mainly foobar2000 and VLC.

  4. I still use 2.95 version of WinAMP, and i will not upgrade to a later version. 2.95 works in everything from windows 95 to windows 11 just fine, it has faster song search than any newer version and in general is much faster overall.

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