It was the star software in 2000 for listening to music: Winamp. Today he is trying to come back. The opportunity to return to the origin of its name.
It was probably your favorite audio player in the 2000s when you listened to MP3s. But yes, remember! These were the most popular files for music and we were going to grab them from Napster, KazAa or eMule legal download platforms. Winamp, after years of absence, is making a comeback.
Born in 1997, Winamp is truly the witness of an era. A bit like software, services and expressions like Caramail, MSN Messenger, “ASV” and “wizz” were. Developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, via their company Nullsoft, Winamp was bought two years later by AOL. It was only in version 2, but already widely used on the net.
But Winamp’s luster eventually faded during the 2000s. One reason among others: the emergence of music streaming via dedicated platforms, such as Deezer and Spotify, which offer their own listening software solution — on the computer and on mobile, with applications. This turn of the smartphone, Winamp somewhat missed it.
A portmanteau between Windows and an MP3 decoding tool
Winamp’s return to the news, with the release of a new version, offers a good opportunity to ask the question you may have already had in mind: why the hell is Winamp called Winamp? The elements available on the net indicate that it is in fact an assembly between Windows (“Win”) and “Advanced Multimedia Products” (“AMP”).
This mixture is explained by the fact that Winamp is a software which was developed above all for the Windows operating system – like… Windows XP, an OS today very largely obsolete, whose support ended in 2014. As for AMP, it refers to a tool used to decode MP3 files, which was developed by Tomislav Uzelac.
