Winamp 5.9 Final released and it still whips the Llama's ass

Winamp 5.9 Final has been released after four years of development and includes numerous improvements, including Windows 11 support, playback of HTTPS:// streams, and various bug fixes.

Before online music streaming became prominent, people would rip song tracks from CDs and play them on a computer or portable MP3 media players.

One of the most popular MP3 players was Winamp, mainly due to animated visualizations and skins that users could use on the media player. As a result, Winamp achieved a massive following, with many users extolling how it "really whipped the Llama's ass" (yes, that's its slogan).

Winamp ceased development after version 5.666 was released in 2013. However, in October 2018, Winamp 5.8 was leaked online, with the developers announcing that they would continue developing the media player.

Winamp 5.9 final released

Today, Winamp 5.9 Final Build 9999 was released after four years of development since version 5.8 was leaked online.

"This is the culmination of 4 years' work since the 5.8 release. Two dev teams, and a pandemic-induced hiatus period inbetween," reads the release notes for Winamp 5.9 Final.

The most significant change in Winamp 5.9 is the porting of the application from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. However, this change caused plugin issues in earlier Release Candidates for users who did not have the Visual Studio 2019 Redistributable installed.

With this final release, the Winamp installer will check for the required Visual Studio 2019 files and prompt users to install them if necessary.

The Winamp changelog states that this release brings improved support for Windows 11, HTTPS:// streams playback, a new podcast directory, and support for hi-res playback.

While this release fixed many bugs, the developers state that quite a few known issues are earmarked to be fixed in version 5.9.1.

These known issues include bugs in the About dialog, Milkdrop, AVS Editor, ml_wire Podcasts, the Bento skin, and more.

However, those requiring the NSV VP3 decoder are out of luck, as the feature is now deprecated.

"We can't find the old On2 VP3 source code anywhere so we are officially declaring this format deprecated / EOL," the developers explain in the release notes.

The Winamp devs also plan on some new features for version 5.91, listed below:

Still ToDo (5.9.1 and beyond)
- Add native support for more formats (e.g. opus, ogv/ogm, TS, dash/iso6, H.265, HLS, VP9, etc.)
- Replace old Gracenote features (CDDB, Autotag, etc) with e.g. MusicBrainz or MusicStory
- Maybe restore a working NowPlaying service ?
- Add more default services to ml_online view (Lyrics, Jamendo, Hotmix, YT, Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.) ?
- More multithreading & progress dialogs for "Send To" features (e.g. send large ML view to a Playlist)
- Config for in_mod & out_wasapi
- View File Info dialog for in_mod
- Tons more 🙂

For those interested, the Winamp developers have posted a complete list of changes from the 5.9 Release Candidate to the Final version in this changelog.

The homepage continues to point to the wrong version of Winamp, but the final release can be downloaded from here for now.

Winamp 5.9 Final released and it still whips the Llama's ass