Winamp/Andrew Cunningham
If you had asked me in January to make some predictions about what 2022 would bring, I don’t think “more significant updates to the Winamp player” would have been on the list. But the release candidate for version 5.9.1 of the software builds on the foundation laid by August’s 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new features to the reanimated music player. Most of these are simple updates or improvements to existing features, but because it’s 2022, one of the only new features is support for music NFTs.
My rudimentary understanding (mostly gleaned from sites like NFT Now which focus almost exclusively on the purported advantages rather than the disadvantages) is that music NFTs work like image NFTs, except that the NFT provides a link to a digital music file instead of a link to a JPG. The benefits, according to proponents, are that artists can make more money by creating scarcity (releasing unique or limited tracks, for example) and by getting a cut of the second-hand sales of NFT that happen between fans.
But as an updated version of a Windows 98-era music player, support for NFT music in Winamp is a bit roundabout. People with NFT music libraries need to export them from whatever platform they use and then import them into Winamp as a .m3u playlist. Winamp provided a video of this process, which we’ve included below.
“Winamp’s latest version allows music fans to connect their Metamask wallet via Brave, Chrome or Firefox to Winamp. It then connects their favorite music NFTs to their proven player,” the company said in a press release provided to Ars. “Winamp supports audio and video files distributed under both the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards, and launches this new feature for Ethereum and Polygon/Matic protocols.”
Winamp’s still mostly outdated innards make downloading and playing NFT music a clumsy, roundabout affair. Video credit: Winamp
This roundabout process is where Winamp’s current ambitions (creator platform, NFT marketplace) collide with the actual shipping product (a music player whose cultural relevance peaked during the George W. Bush administration). To display the sites necessary to directly download these NFT playlists will require an updated rendering engine for Winamp’s in-app browser, which is currently based on Internet Explorer 10.
There’s still a lot here for older Winamp fans to like, and it’s nice to see that all the modernization work done in the 5.9 update is paying off in the form of faster updates. Among many other fixes, the new release includes a “memory footprint reduction”, a bandwidth increase for streaming music, an update to OpenSSL 3.0.5, and a few other updates to the underlying codecs and other software that Winamp uses to do its thing. . Regarding the NFT support, Winamp developer Eddy Richman (who goes by the handle “DJ Egg” on the Winamp forums) wrote that people who don’t want it can remove it, either during the installation process or after Winamp is installed.
Perhaps anticipating that Winamp’s remaining hardcore fans wouldn’t have much fondness for NFTs, Richman also attempted to keep comments in the Winamp 5.9.1 release notes thread on the subject.
“Please do not post any rants about NFTs in this thread,” he wrote.
