What’s the best Winamp alternative now that it is shutting down?

[ShyWriter]

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What’s the best Winamp alternative now that it is shutting down?

 

By Martin Brinkmann

on November 21, 2013 in Music and Video

 

If you have visited the Winamp website recently, you may have noticed a banner at the top of the page stating that Winamp.com and associated web services" and "Winamp Media players" will be shut down as of December 20, 2013.

 

What this means is that AOL, the current owners of all Winamp properties, has made the decision to shut down the website, all associated services, and all versions of the media player Winamp as well.

 

Winamp was the go-to program back when it was first released and a lot of years thereafter. The music player had a lot to offer back then, thanks to its great list of features, plug-ins and skins support.

 

AOL acquired the Winamp team and technology in 1999 and things started to go downhill from then ever since. Updates were still released for the player, and a professional version was created to earn revenue, but innovation more or less stopped.

 

It was clear though that the player was neglected for the most part, and while it did earn AOL some money -- Ars Technica mentioned of $6 million annually --  the player lost market share and users to other services and programs.

 

The shutdown won't have an immediate effect on Winamp installations on user systems. The player will work fine for the most part even after the deadline has passed. Updates however won't be released anymore for it, which means that bugs or security issues won't be fixed anymore.

 

It is therefore best to look at Winamp alternatives instead.

 

Winamp alternatives

 

The following alternatives are divided into Winamp-like media players,  full music management solutions, and other solutions. (More...)

 

Read more about various alternatives with screen shots and information at: Winamp alternatives

 

/Steve

[coconutnut]

IMO, foobar. I have been using it for quite sometime already. Foobar has custom support in which you can add additional plugins. Other than that, the UI is fully customizable. I would say that foobar is something like Ubuntu in certain aspects

[GT500]

The article doesn't mention aTunes, which used to be half-ways decent for a multi-platform music manager. There's also Media Player Classic, SMPlayer, and a lot of other free media players.