Some saw this acoming, many of the early MP3 adopter will miss it.
Winamp 5.666 will definitely(? be the last release of the legendary,
15 years-old media player that revolutionized MP3 playback on Win95,
Win98, Win2K and XP. With Vista/Seven VLC and MPC HC took place.

Justin Frankel just announced the shutdown of the whole Winamp site on December 20th, 2013. Another fine player, taken down because a big company (in this case, AOL Warner) pulled the plug. Justin Frankel sadly announced the shutdown of the Winamp service during release of Winamp 5.66 on November 20th, 2013. 15 years where loyal users have always encouraged the whole programmer’s team to further develop on Winamp.

But what’s the real reason besides the fact, that AOL is no longer willing to keep Winamp online? Is it that the programmers simply don’t have the time to develop it anymore? Or has Winamp lost the connection to MPC HC / VLC Media Player? There are several speculations. Rumors say that Justin Frankel and his team simply doesn’t have the time anymore to work on Winamp against the competitors. Other rumors say that Justin Frankel didn’t want to have the AOL tag residing on his teenager dream project. Winamp once was programmed and published alone from the Winamp team until version 3.00. With version 5.00, AOL Time Warner has purchased Winamp and the team and further on released Winamp as a project of their portfolio while Justin Frankel is the origin programmer of Winamp.

So what does this mean to Winamp fans? Upon December 20th, 2013, the official site http://www.Winamp.com (and redirecting sites) will become unavailable. So if you’re going to get Winamp after  that date, you’ll have to bookmark this post or search for it via Google.

People who want to go Pro (and have the oppportunity to rip CDs out of Winamp and encode it to MP3/AAC out of the box) will want to register for a licence code before December 20th, 2013. Unfortunately you’ll have no legal method to unlock the pro features anymore except AOL/Winamp team will make Winamp Pro become free for all then.

Update – October, 22^th 2018 – Version 5.8 (Winamp Revived!)

Notes for (potential) Pro users: The shop however is already unavailable and thus there’s no possibility to obtain a licence key for Pro unlocking!
So if you want to grab the latest version which runs on 2000/XP/Vista/W7/W8,
get it here:

Download “Winamp 5.8”