Well, one of the most venerable media players ever has now given up the ghost. The website and streaming services will go down on Dec 20, 2013, and downloads will no longer be available. This is not so much distressing news as it is just sad. It’s only sad because of the way that AOL mismanaged what could possibly have been what iTunes has become. AOL mismanaged just about everything regarding Winamp, and right from its acquisition in 1999.

What really made Winamp the best media player out there (and I still use it today, and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future) is that it was designed from the ground up with the intention of being simple to use, so non-technical people could use it and it made sense. But not only that, it was also an application that technical minded people could really dig into and get a very robust experience. It had management capabilities, you could edit the tag information of your MP3 files, it had visualizations (the best out there IMHO, especially after they integrated the MilkDrop visualizer), streaming services, and so much more.

While Winamp won’t be leaving my desktop any time soon, and will always manage to find a place on my Windows machines, it will now be a piece of software that younger generations don’t even know about, and likely won’t know about. This is about the last nail in the coffin of Web 1.0. Goodbye Winamp.