New Winamp Version Will Arrive in 2016
We told you some time ago that there’s a chance that Winamp will be revived. Well, it looks like our reports were true, as the new owners probably plan to launch the new version of the popular player sometime in the next few months.
It looked like Winamp would become a history when then-owner AOL announced that the service will be shut down. But, when Winamp (along with popular Shoutcast platform) was sold to Vivendi Group, the new owners changed their mind about the fate of Winamp.
And now, Vivendi Group is believed to be preparing an update for Windamp, which could arrive in the coming months.
Former Winamp developer, Ben Allison explained in a post on the official forums that the real reason for the lack of updates was due to the fact that no development team existed while Winamp was under Radionomy, and that Vivendi group is now gathering the team of developers again, to work on the first update for Winamp after a couple of years.
But the new update shouldn’t bring any major changes, just some bug fixes and improvements, says Allison.
“There hasn’t been a development team. Although Radionomy certainly had goals and ambitions to release an updated version of Winamp, they have not had the resources to afford to do so. There will be a small release some time in early 2016. There will not be any new features; this release will be just be a small update to replace or remove software libraries that were not transferred during the sale (such as Gracenote),” the former Winamp developer explained.
This is surely a great piece of news for every Winamp user, but it also should bring benefits to the company, because Winam still has impressive user base, despite the lack of updates, and ‘reviving’ the software will only attract more people to use Winamp again.
