Almost four years after version 5.8, which was released as a beta in October 2018 and therefore not final, the classic media player Winamp 5.9 Build 9999 has been released as a release candidate. While the beta version was intended to ensure compatibility with Windows 10 at the time, Winamp 5.9 now works on Windows 11.
Classic media player for Windows 7 to 11
Due to the change in the Visual Studio integrated development environment, the classic version now works stably and completely under all operating systems from Windows 7 to Windows 11. Especially in Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, there were more crashes previously.
Winamp 5.9 is the first version in 9 years
The hugely popular Winamp media player, which was particularly popular at the turn of the millennium, emerged from American developer Nullsoft more than 25 years ago as beta software for Windows 95 and quickly established itself as the standard for playing MP3 files.
The “old” Winamp had its heyday with the advent of MP3 music and competed at the turn of the millennium with competitors such as AIMP and Foobar2000, which also had many fans.
But after more than 16 years, Winamp ended in 2013, and version 5.666 from December 12, 2013 remains the final release of the media player to this day. Now Winamp 5.9 is getting ready to inherit Winamp 5.6.
In addition to compatibility with Windows 11, the list of official release notes, among other things, improves the playback of audio streams and podcasts as well as support for VP8.
Winamp 5.9 RC3 Build 9999 Release Notes
Improved: Compatibility with Windows 11
Improvement: Turn on https://streams
Improved: Updated and arranged to generate html playlist icon
to improve: [in_mod] Play the .itz, .mdz, and .com compressed modules. s3z and . xmz
to improve: [out_ds] Display device information correctly in Unicode format
to improve: [ml_wire] New Worker Podcast Guide
to improve: [in_mkv] vp8 support
In addition, there are mandatory improvements and bug fixes that come with each new release.
The developers posted progress from RC1 to RC3, and RC2 was only published internally, in a separate changelog.
Switching from Visual Studio 2008 to 2019
In order to make the old “new” media player compatible with all operating systems from Windows 7 to Windows 11, developers had to update Visual Studio 2008 to version 2019 in the background.
To the end user, it might not seem like there were a whole bunch of changes, but the biggest and hardest part was actually migrating the entire project from VS2008 to VS2019 and having it all build successfully.
With the release of Release Candidate 3, the corresponding foundations for compatibility have been laid, which is why developers now want to devote themselves to an expanded feature set and minor bug fixes.
Despite the advertisement, Winamp 6 never appeared
In October 2018, Radionomy announced Winamp 6 as a complete relaunch, but has yet to deliver the final product.
With Winamp – the best media player, the company started the attack again in September 2021 and was actively looking for beta testers. So far, nothing has changed in this case and even the public beta is still not visible.
From the ComputerBase Forum community, once again comes a very useful addon for contributing editors, the venerable media player Winamp still kept with updates and additions.
The Winamp Community Update Project (“WACUP”) takes care of Winamp maintenance, making the Winamp 5.666-based plug-in package available via the project’s official website.
