Things have been looking up for Winamp ever since the legendary MP3 player quietly survived its December 20 shutdown date.
The Radionomy connection was first noticed by a couple of people, including one Bryon Stout on the Winamp forums and Carsten Knobloch, who saw that Winamp’s nameservers, but not Shoutcast’s. Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014.
There had been rumors of a sale by AOL, but now TechCrunch reports that the sale is practically a done deal, with Radionomy agreeing to acquire Winamp’s software and Shoutcast music services.
I wasn’t familiar with Radionomy before, but it seems similar in purpose to Shoutcast. Both services allow users to create their own online radio stations, for fun or for profit.
Shoutcast is much larger, touting 45,000 stations, compared to roughly 6,000 with Radionomy, but Radionomy tries to make do-it-yourself broadcasting easier, with a web-based tool for creating radio stations and a licensed library of more than 80,000 songs. Radionomy is also getting more serious about monetization, and last month merged with Targetspot to create an ad network for digital audio. Bringing in Shoutcast’s user base and tools could be pretty interesting.
Winamp By Radionomy
None of that helps us understand what will become of the Winamp software. Winamp isn’t directly tied to Shoutcast — you can play Shoutcast stations straight from any web browser or from other media players including iTunes and Windows Media Player — so Radionomy may not have much incentive to keep developing standalone MP3 software. Still, there’s room to make Winamp more radio-centric, perhaps by adding a way to browse for stations directly through the software.
Radionomy Winamp Download
TechCrunch reports that the deal could be finalized by Friday, so maybe we’ll learn more about Winamp’s fate soon. In the meantime, you can still download the latest version of Winamp from the official website, or look to unofficial sources for an older version.