The new version adds two new major features – Winamp Dashboard and Winamp Remote.
Winamp was, for a long time the world’s most popular media player for Windows. Not only it was a free alternative to the others, but it also had the widest range of features, plug-ins and themes, making it one of the most downloaded pieces of software for Windows operating system.
After AOL acquired Winamp in May 1999, the development of the media player continued and the media giant managed to keep Winamp among the top PC media players. Moreover, Winamp was still offered as free software, even though a Pro version with some feature enhancements was offered for about $20.
Building on the global popularity of Winamp, AOL today announced a new version of Winamp featuring enhanced media player capabilities, and 2 new major features – Winamp Dashboard and Winamp Remote. With over 57 million monthly unique users, Winamp has one of the largest and most active global communities on the web for users who love all forms of digital media, including music, videos and photos.
Winamp Dashboard enables users a unique ability to customize their experience within the media player, permitting each user to design a dashboard that best meets their needs. Users can pick and choose from a wide variety of widgets that contain both personalized feeds of their own top tracks and albums as well content about artists news and events, top shared playlists, top new albums, top stations, viral videos, and more.
Winamp Remote is a new feature enabling Winamp users to turn their broadband-connected PC into their own personal media server. Winamp Remote gives users the ability to access their personal collection of music from any internet-connected computer. Support for video and photo sharing and access from internet-capable mobile phones is expected soon. In addition, as part of Winamp’s continued push to be the best catalog of music and video on the web, AOL Radio is expanding its Winamp offering by adding 25 original music programmed stations to the hundreds of channels currently available. Both Winamp Dashboard and Winamp Remote are initially being released as beta versions.
“Winamp has had explosive growth over the last 20 months, growing from 33 million to 57 million monthly users. We accomplished that by a renewed outreach to our incredible community and by focused enhancement of the core Winamp experience. With this new release, we wanted to show that Winamp and its development community can deliver truly innovative experiences to consumers. Winamp Remote and Winamp Dashboard are the first in a series of major functional enhancements users will see over the coming months as we work to continue to make Winamp the right choice for serious music and video lovers,” says John McKinley, President of Digital Services and CTO for AOL.
Additionally, Winamp users will notice more portable media player support including iPods, direct-from-device playback for Plays-for-Sure devices, the ability to convert unsupported file types to a file type that the user’s device can play, more auto-sync options, increased speeds for CD ripping and more superior sound from encoding in AAC and aacPlus.
Winamp 5.3 can be downloaded from our software section.