Spotify pay tribute to Winamp with Spotiamp

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Today marks the death of Winamp, a beloved music player that it’s many fans during the Napster era would swear by. Sadly time didn’t treat Winamp well – it soldiered on despite tough competition from the likes of iTunes (it pre-dated the iPod massively) – and ended up being bought by AOL. Sensing time was up, AOL have now put it out to pasture.

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To pay tribute to Winamp and it’s legacy, the streaming music service Spotify have today posted on their blog something extremely cool: a PC app called Spotiamp, which looks just like the original Winamp used to, but that can play streams from Spotify.

All you need is a Spotify Premium account and you can use it to listen to your playlists – the eject button having been repurposed as a playlist selector (who uses a CD now?). You can even simply paste in the URL of a playlist on the main window using Ctrl+V and it’ll start playing.

Whilst clearly just meant to be a toy it’s pretty cool – it even supports Shoutcast servers for streaming audio out to other devices… just like the original Winamp did!

So if you’re a PC user, why not go and download it and relive the good old days of the late 90s, when the only things we had to worry about were Ross & Rachel, a solar eclipse in Cornwall, and allegations of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Goodbye, Winamp.

James O’Malley
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