Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev[6][7][8] by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million.

Version 1 of Winamp was released in 1997, and quickly grew popular with over 3 million downloads,[9] paralleling the developing trend of MP3 file sharing.

Its developer Radionomy has since rebranded as Llama Group and launched a streaming service that allows users to support artists by buying perks or NFTs.

[21] In September 2024, Llama Group partially released the Winamp source code for Windows under a custom source-available license.

Winamp was first released in 1997, when Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev,[6][7][8] formerly students at the University of Utah, integrated their Windows user interface with the Advanced Multimedia Products ("AMP") MP3 file playback engine.

[57][58] Its windowless, menu bar-only interface showed only play (open), stop, pause, and unpause functions.

Within the standard Windows frame and menu bar, it had the beginnings of the "classic" Winamp GUI: dark gray rectangle with silver 3D-effect transport buttons, a red/green volume slider, time displayed in a green LED font, with track name, MP3 bitrate, and "mixrate" in green.

[62] Frankel formally founded Nullsoft Inc. in January 1998 and continued development of Winamp, which changed from freeware to $10 shareware.

[12] In March, Brian Litman, managing co-founder with Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products, which by then had been merged into PlayMedia Systems, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nullsoft, claiming unlawful use of AMP.

This also means that Nitrane was unlikely to have been based on the AMP software, and was more likely evidence of a hastily written MP3 decoder that didn't concern itself with standards compliance.

[30] The installer for Version 1.91, released 18 days later, included wave, cdda, and Windows tray handling plugins, as well as the famous Wesley Willis-inspired DEMO.MP3 file "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass".

The modular windows for playlist and equalizer now matched the player's skin and could be moved around and be separated or "docked" to each other anywhere in any order.

In May 1999, PlayMedia was granted an injunction by Federal Judge A. Howard Matz against distribution of Nitrane by Nullsoft, and the same month the lawsuit was settled out-of-court with licensing and confidentiality agreements.

Winamp 2.10, released March 24, 1999, included a new version of the "Llama" demo.mp3 featuring a musical sting and bleating.

Nullsoft relaunched the Winamp-specific winamp.com in December 1999 to provide easier access to skins, plug-ins, streaming audio, song downloads, forums, and developer resources.

It was a complete rewrite of version 2, newly based on the Wasabi application framework, which offered additional functionality and flexibility.

Winamp3 was developed parallel to Winamp 2, but "many users found it consumed too many system resources and was unstable (or even lacked some valued functionality, such as the ability to count or find the total duration of tracks in a playlist)".

During this period the Wasabi cross-platform application framework and skinnable GUI toolkit was derived from parts of the Winamp3 source code.

New features to the player included album art support, improved localization support (with several officially localized Winamp releases, including German, Polish, Russian, and French), and a new default interface skin called "Bento" which unlike the previous skins is a unified player and media library in one window as opposed to a multi-window interface.

[86] On November 20, 2013, AOL announced that it would shut down Winamp.com on December 20, 2013, and the software would no longer be available for download nor supported by the company after that date.

[89][90] However, TechCrunch has reported that the sale of Winamp and Shoutcast is worth between $5 and $10 million, with AOL taking a 12% stake (a financial, not strategic, investment) in Radionomy in the process.

Users are able to add music NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon to the media library by connecting to the Metamask wallet.

[101][102] The source code was released in a GitHub repository under the "Winamp Collaborative License", a license restricting the ability to create forks or distribute modified binaries (which is not considered free or open source[103]) and requires waiving ownership of contributions to Llama Group.

[107][108][109] The app was removed from the Play Store in 2014 due to a combination of factors, including a decline in user interest and the cessation of support from its parent company, AOL.

It was reported in 2018 by TechCrunch that a redesigned Android app was planned alongside the announcement of the development of Winamp 6.

An early alpha preview of Winamp3 for desktop Linux was developed in October 2001,[114] but support was dropped not long after.

[115][111] Winamp has historically included a number of Easter eggs: hidden features that are accessible via undocumented operations.

[119] XMMS, xmms2, qmmp and Audacious are free and open source music players created as clones of Winamp.

[120] An HTML5 and JavaScript-based web player resembling the graphical user interface of Winamp 2 was developed by programmer Jordan Eldredge in 2018.