Winamp greeted new users with a bleating llama and a boast about whipping its backside. Behind the joke was a real fix for a 1997 problem: MP3 playback strained weak desktop processors. University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev wrapped a simple Windows interface around AMP, an efficient decoding engine written by Tomislav Uzelac, and released it as shareware. They asked users to mail a $10 check if they liked it, and by 1998 those checks brought in roughly $100,000 a month.

This episode follows the player from dorm project to 60 million users and into its long decline. It covers the cease and desist from Uzelac’s PlayMedia Systems, the botched in-house decoder called Nitrane, the thousands of skins and the Milkdrop visualizer, and the $80 million sale to AOL in 1999. Then come the failed Winamp 3 rewrite, the founders’ exit, a 2022 feature for music NFTs, and a 2024 source release that exposed other companies’ code.

• Nullsoft answered the PlayMedia claim by swapping in Nitrane, a rushed decoder that ignored ISO standards and made music sound distorted, before licensing a proper one from the Fraunhofer Society.
• Winamp 3 was rebuilt on the Wasabi framework and broke compatibility with existing skins and plugins, so users went back to Winamp 2.
• Winamp 5 combined the version 2 engine with version 3 skinning, and the name was simple addition: two plus three.
• The 2024 code release on GitHub barred sharing modified versions and accidentally included proprietary code from Microsoft, Intel, Dolby, and Shoutcast before the repository was deleted.
• The planned Winamp 2027 is described as a subscription streaming service built on a white label platform from Deezer.