Winamp was the digital music player that many of us grew up with, and while it’s safe to say that in its basic form it wasn’t the most best looking app ever made, it was certainly part of the reason that MP3s grew into the CD-destroying format that it did.
Unfortunately, Winamp is now no more, and that makes us sad. With the growth of media streaming from the likes of Spotify and Rdio, and with iTunes being tightly intertwined with Apple’s music store, the need for a standalone music player has dwindled.
Thankfully, the two worlds have collided in pretty spectacular fashion with a Spotify compatible app being released that, for all intents and purposes, is the Winamp that we’ve all loved for the last twenty years.
Created in Gothenburg, Sweden by Ludde, Spotiamp lets people tie their Spotify credentials into the Winamp-like app and then listen to music as if it was the 1990s. Which is awesome, to say the least.
The Spotify team posted about the app on its blog, saying that it wanted to honor the work that went into building the original Winamp.
"To honor the engineering skill and passion that goes into building wonderful software that millions of people enjoy we would like to share a small tribute to honour the great legacy of Winamp."
We’re sure you were all as sad as we were to hear that Winamp would not be in development any more, and we’d actually thought it would be awesome to tie Spotify into the app in some way. Thankfully we weren’t on our own, and the end result is better than we could have hoped for.
If you’re a Spotify subscriber and have a hankering for much simpler days, then you’ll be wanting to download Spotiamp sooner rather than later.
We just wish there was a Mac version now, too.
If you want to jump in on the action, simply point your browser to spotiamp.com and download the relevant files from your Windows powered PC. And yes, you will need a Spotify account for this for the magic to happen, which makes sense too. And for good measure, the original Winamp visualization plugins do work with Spotiamp, which is an added bit of touch which you might’ve been craving from the get-go.
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