After four years of work, Winamp has finally issued its first release candidate, moving the well-known media player out of beta.
We had to extract our music from CDs and play the generated MP3 files on a media player before music streaming services became popular.
Winamp was a well-liked MP3 player that included vintage skins and animated graphics that synchronised with your music.
Following the release of version 5.666 in 2013, Winamp’s development halted. That is, up until Winamp 5.8 was leaked online in October 2018, at which point the program’s creators chose to self-publish it on the Winamp.com website.
The creators have now promised a new version with cloud streaming support and other contemporary features. Finally, in November 2021, a new logo and a beta signup form were added to the Winamp.com website to let users know when new versions were available.
In the works for four years
Last week saw the debut of Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999, the media player’s first release candidate and the first new version in four years.
Although there are not many changes in the Winamp release candidate, the primary objective of this release was to convert the code base from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019. The team may now update the media player with new functions and features now that this is complete.
Since Windows XP and Vista are no longer supported, this update has the unintended consequence of making Winamp require Windows 7 SP1 or later.
“Four years of development since the 5.8 release have culminated in this. The changelog for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 mentions “two dev teams, with a pandemic-induced break time in between.”
“The largest and trickiest aspect was actually moving the complete project from VS2008 to VS2019 and getting it all to build correctly. To the end-user, it might not appear like there are a lot of changes.
“Now that the foundation has been set, we can concentrate more on the features. Whether fixing/replacing the current ones or including new ones.
Issues in the updated version
Ghacks reported that several VirusTotal antivirus engines identify the new version as dangerous when they first discovered the release candidate. The Winamp team, however, has acknowledged that these are false positives and has reported them to the antivirus software providers.
Users have already begun reporting issues to the Winamp forums, such as older plugins that are no longer functional because of a dependence on msvcr90.dll.
However, a user supplied a remedy that could be added to the manifest file of the application, which resolves the issue and will be present in the upcoming release of Winamp.
This release also has UI bugs, unexpected crashes, broken or missing functionality, and settings for the Milkdrop visualisation plugin that don’t function properly. The Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999 changelog contains a comprehensive summary of the changes and known issues.
Native support for the opus, ogv/ogm, TS, H.265, HLS, and VP9 codecs as well as support for additional web services are features that are planned for next versions.
Although there are a few problems in this release candidate, it functions well enough to use. However, you may try the Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP) for the time being if you’re searching for something a little bit more reliable.
