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Feb 27

Download Winamp 5.5: New Skin, New Features

Posted in: Freeware, Music, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on September 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

It’s hard to believe that Winamp will be celebrating its 10th anniversary next month, and they plan to do it in style! To mark the occasion they will be releasing Winamp 5.5 on 10/10 at 10:10AM, but a Beta version of the application has already been made available to testers.

Winamp 5.5 has been in the works for over a year, and I have to admit that the new Bento skin (pictured above) is among the best that I’ve ever seen for the media player. What makes this skin more unique is that it’s a single interface instead of being composed of several individual windows. I was a little skeptical of how nice that would be over the standard skin, but I quickly fell in love with Bento.

Here’s a list of the new features in Winamp 5.5:

Winamp Bento (SingleUI Skin)
Winamp Remote lets you access your media from anywhere via the web
Unified File Editor, with Album Art tab (for mp3, m4a, wma, ogg, flac)
Album Art window for Winamp Modern skin
Global ‘playback thread priority’ setting for decoders
Option to not show playlist item number in classic songticker
Version History drop-down selector and Search (in About dialog)
Multi-channel mp3surround support
Tree Options tab in Media Library Preferences
3 pane view options in ‘Add/Edit View’ dialog
Smart View Presets
Album Art support/pane and retrieval service
Toolbar buttons to control view options
Winamp Playlist Generator (powered by Gracenote MusicID)
New fields, configurable filter panes & columns, 3 pane view
Album Art view & support for iPod and P4S Devices
Separate view for video files

That’s not even the half of what’s changed since the last stable version. The list goes on and on with dozens of bug fixes and enhancements all of which will make your Winamp experience that much better.

Original Winamp 0.2 And in case you’ve forgotten what started it all we thought it was time to open the vault to Winamp 0.2 (pictured to the right), which was released back in 1997. Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about that fine release:

Its windowless menubar-only interface showed only play(open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played.
…
The acronym "AMP" stood for "Advanced Multimedia Products".

Get Winamp 5.5 Beta – "it really whips the llama’s ass!"