Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of Time Warner. It is skinnable, multi-format freeware/shareware. It was first released by Justin Frankel in 1997. Current Winamp development is credited to Ben Allison (Benski), Will Fisher, Taber Buhl, Maksim Tyrtyshny, Chris Edwards, and Stephen (Tag) Loomis. Winamp grew from 33 million users in February 2005 to over 57 million users in September 2006.
Features
Playback Formats
Besides MP3, Winamp supports a wide variety of contemporary and specialized music file formats, including MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and Windows Media Audio. Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC, and Replay Gain for volume leveling across tracks. In addition, Winamp can play and import music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and can also burn music to CDs.
Winamp supports playback of Windows Media Video and Nullsoft Streaming Video. For MPEG Video, AVI and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Microsoft’s DirectShow API for playback, allowing most of the same video formats as Windows Media Player. 5.1 Surround sound is supported where formats and decoders allow.
Media Library
Winamp’s media library contains support for Unicode metadata for media files, and full Unicode filename support.
Podcatcher and Streaming Media
Winamp supports many types of streaming media. Its SHOUTcast technology provides free access to Internet radio and Internet television, and Winamp can also access XM Satellite Radio, and AOL Video content. It can access the Singingfish audio/video search engine, Winamp can also be used as an RSS media feeds aggregator capable of displaying articles and playing streaming media, SHOUTcast Wire provides a directory and RSS subscription system for podcasts.[6][7]
Media Player Device Support
Winamp has extendable support for portable media players. Device plugins are currently included for iPods and Creative NOMADs, Mass Storage Compliant devices, and the Microsoft PlaysForSure and ActiveSync technologies for devices such as those running Windows Mobile.
In more recent versions of Winamp, support has been added to allow users to share their media library to their gaming consoles on the same network through Winamp Remote. This was created through a partnership with Orb. The same extension allows users to access their media library anywhere with an internet connection.
Plug-ins
Winamp has extensive support for plugins. Input plugins allow Winamp to play additional media formats, while output plugins enable additional features such as sound effects (via DSP plugins) and visual effects (notably Advanced Visualization Studio, or AVS, and MilkDrop). Other plugins included in the installer bundle activate features such as global hotkeys. The plugins that can be enabled can be selected during installation due to Winamp’s use of NSIS to package the application.
The Winamp software development kit allows software developers to extend Winamp’s functionality through the use of plug-ins, which are categorized into the following seven types:
- Input plug-ins decode media data contained in specific file formats.
- Output plug-ins control the destination of decoded audio (such as the DirectSound device or direct-to-file writing).
- Visualization plug-ins provide sound activated graphics.
- DSP/Effect plug-ins manipulate audio (reverb, spacialization, equalization with preamp, compression, etc).
- General Purpose plug-ins add functionality or extensions to Winamp (Media Library, alarm clock, or pause when logged out).
- Media Library plug-ins add functionality or extensions to the Media Library plug-in (gen_ml, included with Winamp).
- Device plug-ins add support of portable media players to the Portable Media Player plug-in (ml_pmp, included with Winamp)
Easy development of specialized Input plug-ins contributed to Winamp’s versatility compared to monolithic media players. For example, popular video game music has driven development of plugins to play back game console music files, such as NSF, USF, GBS, GSF, SID, VGM, SPC, PSF and PSF2.
A wide variety of plug-ins are available on the Winamp web site.
Skins
Winamp is an early and popular example of application skinning. Winamp 5 continues to support Winamp 2’s “classic” skins (static collections of bitmap images) and Winamp3’s more flexible “modern” skins, which can be freeform with true alpha channel transparency and controlled by scripting.
Skins are aesthetic revisions of the graphical user interface of Winamp. Winamp has published documentation on skin creation, and invites contributors to publish skins on Winamp.com. Winamp 5.0 supports “classic” skins designed to Winamp 2 specifications, and “modern” skins per the Winamp3 specification. Modern skins support alpha channels, a docked toolbar, and other innovations to the GUI, but many skins found on Winamp.com still remain committed to the “classic” skin specification. Online communities of skin designers, such as 1001 Winamp Skins and DeviantArt, and the active forums on Winamp.com attest to the popularity of the feature and its flexibility as a medium for creative expression. As the number of independently produced works has increased, genre styles or categories of skins have emerged. Promoting celebrities, fashion models, films, cars, bands, brands, and other forms of entertainment remains a common staple of the medium. Artists have also created designs for their own sake: parodies of other interfaces, nostalgic emulations of old hardware and operating systems, hand drawn art, 3-dimension renderings employing transparencies, minimalist and high contrast designs, and clever implementations of vector graphics. The default (classic) skin of Winamp was invented by Steve Gedikian.
