Spotify pay tribute to Winamp with Spotiamp
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.
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.
