Winamp to stop whippin’ the Llama, will shut down next month

By Konrad Krawczyk Published December 9, 2013

Winamp, the music and video player that has been around since the 90s, is shutting down next month. Winamp made the announcements on its official website. Here’s the message in full.

“Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release.

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Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.”

Despite the rise of other players like VLC and streaming services like YouTube, Spotify and Pandora, the Winamp community has remained strong. One of the main selling points of Winamp is its user-made skins, which get posted on the official website. Some skins, like S7Reflex, have been downloaded millions of times according to the site’s counter, which is a testament to Winamp’s enduring popularity in the face of strong competition.

We suspect that many people will simply download every version of Winamp possible and make them available for download on their own websites. Still, it’s a sad day for those who like to add a visual pizazz whenever they fire up their favorite playlist from their Windows PC.

By the way, we included a pic of one of our favorite Winamp skins above, called The Silence v5.

Konrad Krawczyk

Former Computing Editor

Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…

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