AOL Pulling the Plug from Popular Winamp Player Next Month, Merry F***in' Christmas

I will recognize there is still a loyal Winamp following out there, but with the advent of Apple's devices becoming more popular (you really have no choice but to use iTunes) and music streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, potential Winamp users have dramatically dropped.

I used to be a heavy Winamp user because it was simple, lightweight and got the job done. 3 iPhones, an iPod touch, a Shuffle and an iPad later my ENTIRE music collection has been migrated to iTunes; not to mention all the digital copies of movies I've received forced me to choose between Windows Media player (PC Only) or the more platform friendly iTunes (PC and MAC).

I also got into Pandora for a while which lessened my desire to use Winamp that much more. With the selections iTunes Radio has been giving me however, I've started using Pandora less and less and less.

Pandora is great and sometimes gives you obscure selections that you'll never find on iTunes Radio (especially in the Techno, House, and Electronic genres), but I have found that iTunes Radio gives you more mainstream popular songs that never show up on Pandora due to licensing disputes with Pandora.

Spotify is nice in that you can customize and pick and choose what you want instead of being subject to the whims of Pandora and iTunes playing randomly, but I have found that the Spotify desktop app has too much overhead and can really bog down your system when in use.

If you don't believe me, try running Spotify on a system with less than 8GB of RAM and low to mid range processor. It'll be fine if Spotify is the only thing running, but once you get two or three more programs running on top of it you'll quickly eat up all the system resources and begin to run slow as molasses on a cold day.

I use it daily. No other music player I've come across is as light & versatile as winamp.

If you want visuals, there's Milkdrop. Do you want DSP's Dolbly & DTS; Winamp has the plugins. Like to listen to 8 & 16bit game OST's; NSF, VGZ & RSN/SPC file support is right there.

Aol sponsored winamp, It's not is not however itself winamp.