Winamp: Vivendi becomes major Radionomy Stakeholder

Martin Brinkmann
Dec 19, 2015
Music and Video
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24

The never ending Winamp story continues. AOL, the then-owner of Winamp announced back in 2013 that it would shut down the platform and software but changed those plans in early 2014 by selling its stake in Winamp to Radionomy instead.

While that was a positive development, things went quite shortly after the acquisition. Winamp is still available for download on the official project website but a new version has yet to be released by the new owner.

In fact, the last version released dates back to the end of 2013 when Winamp was still part of AOL.

It seems that Radionomy is still working on the application but development is slow considering that no new version has been released in nearly two years.

News broke on December 17, 2015 that Vivendi acquired a majority stake in Radionomy and thus also Winamp. The French multinational media company owns or has stakes in companies such as Dailymotion, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Universal Music Group or the music streaming service Deezer.

Vivendi acquired 64.4% of the share capital of Radionomy Group for an undisclosed sum. The company mentions Winamp and Shoutcast explicitly in the press release as well as Radionomy's core service and TargetSpot, a digital audio advertising network.

Radionomy is best known as an Internet platform that allows digital radios to broadcast and monetize their programs on a global scale. The platform also offers FM radio stations unique tools to develop and monetize their digital presence. Today, over 57,000 radio stations are using these tools.

Radionomy Group owns the streaming technology SHOUTcast as well as the iconic Winamp audio player. It also controls TargetSpot, the first digital audio advertising network in the United States and in France.

Vivendi plans collaborations between the company's existing audio offerings and Radionomy's digital audio platform.

Vivendi’s capital investment in Radionomy Group will provide an impetus for its commercial development, supported by the promising outlooks for the advertising and digital audio markets all over the world. Radionomy is also very well positioned to capitalize on the expected evolution of the digital audio market towards targeted advertising, thanks to its technical tools and its partnerships.

It is unclear what this means for Winamp or Shoutcast, and whether the move will hinder or improve development of the services or their operation.

While Winamp is still a popular music player choice, music players such as AIMP have filled the gap for the most part that the player's hiatus has caused.

Now You: Do you think the development is good or bad for Winamp and Shoutcast?

Summary
Winamp: Vivendi becomes major Radionomy Stakeholder
Article Name
Winamp: Vivendi becomes major Radionomy Stakeholder
Description
Vivendi acquired a majority stake in Radionomy recently which owns Winamp and Shoutcast.
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Comments

  1. Alan Hill said on January 4, 2016 at 1:59 pm
    Reply

    I purchased Winamp years ago. So I have the full version. I have it installed on all my machines from XP to Windows 10. It handles 60,000 tracks with ease. It searches and finds tracks very fast. It creates huge playlist easily. It converts files from one format to another. There isn’t a better music player. Because I have been using it for so long, I do know how to customize it to my liking, and it is not that hard. Every other player I have used is rubbish by comparison. Because it is so old, I do use mp3tag to tidy up my files. That is another free program (I also made a contribution to mp3tag. Why not?). I use Winamp for music files only. I like my life simple. For videos I use Kodi mostly. If Winamp comes back and I consider it an improvement I will definitely use it and make a contribution to the new version. May Justin Frankel’s creation rule !!!
    I have tried most players, so far ALL have fallen well below par. I am talking about serious libraries here. For a couple hundred tracks you can use just about anything. As your library grows just watch as they all fall over. Winamp has lasted for a reason.

  2. Rc said on December 22, 2015 at 6:22 am
    Reply

    VLC is the way to go !

    1. Andrew said on December 22, 2015 at 6:06 pm
      Reply

      For videos maybe, music libraries… not so much.

  3. Rc said on December 22, 2015 at 6:19 am
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    Bad… I quit win-amp back then….there was to much advertising being forced on me with streaming radio.. Shout cast I think it was And it was not possible to reinstall an older version …And that was goodbye.

    1. Andrew said on December 22, 2015 at 6:05 pm
      Reply

      What’s win-amp?

      Plus your not even sure if it is shoutcast that was advertising you, but you do know that it’s not winamp or shoutcast that was advertising, it was the streams you listen to.

      Not sure why you couldn’t install an old version (or how it would fix your “issues”), haven’t you heard of oldapps.com or oldversion.com?

  4. TSJNachos said on December 21, 2015 at 2:37 am
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    Back in the day, when I found WinAmp installed on my WIndows 98 machine (which used to belong to my mother), I instantly fell in love with it. It had everything one could have asked for in a music player at the time: plugins, a cool fun UI, lots of bells and whistles.

    But alas, WinAmp is old, past it’s prime, and will likely be abandonded. As great as WinAmp was (and still is), It’s probably time to move on.

  5. MdN said on December 20, 2015 at 5:31 pm
    Reply

    Nice choice of music there. :-) I saw them live when this album got released, good memories. Although the last album is kinda boring, maybe they shouldn’t have reunited…

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on December 20, 2015 at 6:17 pm
      Reply

      I find it usually the case that bands get worse with age, especially if they have disbanded and reunited at a later point in time.

  6. ZeN said on December 20, 2015 at 12:54 pm
    Reply

    Not dead, just resting…. zZzzZzz

    1. Giuseppe said on December 20, 2015 at 8:46 pm
      Reply

      After a prolonged rest! Its pining for Windows XP! LOL!

  7. Nebulus said on December 20, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    Winamp is kind of dead, so it doesn’t really matter anymore :(

    1. Chains The Bounty Hunter said on December 20, 2015 at 7:08 pm
      Reply

      The market for media players, both free and commercial, is oversaturated as it is. Winamp sitting essentially stagnant might as well have set it back multiple years as far as its peers are concerned.

      I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that Vivendi either does absolutely nothing with Winamp or, willing to take a risk, uses the Winamp brand on some entirely different product.

  8. Andrew said on December 19, 2015 at 11:05 pm
    Reply

    I’ll make the same joke I made in the Winamp forums:

    “In other news… due to the recent acquisition and growth, the new release of Winamp will be delayed to 2017”

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on December 20, 2015 at 7:14 am
      Reply

      It is a good one, and may not even be a joke, who knows ;)

  9. jimbo said on December 19, 2015 at 7:44 pm
    Reply

    Poor Winamp. How It has suffered with no-one to look after it.
    It’s typical that it could possibly be compared to VLC.
    Does Aimp have the depth of options and community Winamp has (had?) ?

  10. Herman said on December 19, 2015 at 7:18 pm
    Reply

    Winamp? Seriously? I stopped using that six or seven years ago. VLC does a much better job. Picture shows the the stock skin from long ago. Its funny, I enjoyed changing the skins for it and you could even make custom ones of your own back then. I liked the proprietary one designed and created for the movie Frequency

    See: http://www.memlo.net/gallery/frequency.htm

    I really liked winamp, custom playlists equalizer but when the quality of my audio was diminished and it had more and more trouble buffering mp3’s, it was time to move on.

    1. Sabeel said on December 20, 2015 at 11:03 pm
      Reply

      I’m still using winamp with the Dynamic library addon.. 30M of memory print.. nothing more !

    2. Dave said on December 20, 2015 at 2:39 pm
      Reply

      Still using winamp to this day. The best music player for windows , light and had tons of plugins that are still unrivaled on anything else.

    3. Pants said on December 20, 2015 at 10:20 am
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      I’m with Andrew (above) on this one. I’m not saying “this is better than that” etc, everyone is free to use what works well for them … but I consider winamp to very very very lightweight (did I say very?), an extremely small footprint. This software has hardly changed in 8 or 9 years and could whip the llama’s ass on older systems – on new systems it’s even better.

      I have a quarter million song library, and a main playlist of 30k (which I can flip around and sort by 4 different metrics in about a second), not to mention the media library (yes I maintain one because my winamp has been portable for the last 3+ years so I can track number of plays which I find handy) – although I often just use “Everything” to locate a song and drag/drop it into the playlist.

      The portability issue is important for me. I also saved/kept an awesome skin and some other addons (such as one that displays the cover art, a kick ass equalizer, a lyrics displayer – all skinned by the theme). My music dir is a dedicated drive, so it will never change path. And the winamp folder, and my custom playlists are backed up in seconds.

      I have tried literally dozens of other players (and yup, most can be portable). I use VLC for visual media, not music – it just doesn’t compare in terms of what I want). I’ve got foobar2000, I’ve looked at aimp, 1by1, winyl (winyl portable kicks ass for a number of my clients as I have weened them off windows media player) .. audacious, clementine, amarok, songbird, and heaps more .. MediaMonkey Gold .. you name it i have looked at it, used it, tried it, played with it and customized it. When it came to the size of my library,. basically only winamp deals with it – all the others shit bricks, grind to a slow crawl, are useless at indexing/searching it .. whatever. And/or they lack customization features that I like.

      I have to admit, I haven’t tested anything new for about 18months. And as far as development, what more can be done in terms of playing (for me) just my mp3s – answer, nothing really.

      /sorry for the ramble guys :)

      1. Chains The Bounty Hunter said on December 20, 2015 at 6:56 pm
        Reply

        Songbird – there’s something I haven’t seen anyone mention in a long time. With good reason I’d assume, since the development on it also halted.

      2. Ray said on December 20, 2015 at 3:08 pm
        Reply

        I have to agree here. I am a loyal Winamp user for over one decade now and it still plays my massive media library without any flaw. You do get a few hiccups here and there but it still goes through my music collection (over 1tb). AIMP and Music bee did not fill my checkboxes for ease of use and customization. Even though Winamp has not been updated since before it was acquired, it still performs like a champ.

        The Vivendi acquisition will be interesting to watch. It was only last year that Winamp was acquired by Radionomy. Vivendi also owns Dailymotion and Deezer among others. So Winamp – Deezer integration??..

        It looks promising though.

    4. Chains The Bounty Hunter said on December 20, 2015 at 12:25 am
      Reply

      foobar2000 quickly became my go-to player on Windows. I’m not saying it’s “better” than x or y player, but in terms of something that’s still actively developed and improved vs. something that’s not even really on life support anymore (Winamp), I’m not finding any cause to complain.

      1. Alex said on December 21, 2015 at 6:27 am
        Reply

        I use Foobar for management porpuses rather than pleasure of listening, since as Carl Jung points “music are affections” that is that have an effect on the emtional level, I would expect the UI to go according to my listening mood. So for the pleasure of listening I use Winamp with MMD3 skin. But as I said before, in terms of management Foobar is ideal.
        If there was a complete and functional MMD3 skin port to another media player along with a plugin to restore playlist changes… and portable installation.
        I’m currently using two plugins in Winamp
        Playlist_Undo_v1_1
        Playlist_Autosave
        Currently there is a MDD3 skin for Xmplay but unfortunately it is no near complete…

    5. Andrew said on December 19, 2015 at 11:03 pm
      Reply

      Still use winamp, I haven’t found anything better in comparison for music. Not sure what issues you had, but it sure as hell doesn’t sound like it was Winamp’s issue, more like a system/hardware issue

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