Ever since a Winamp v5.8 beta build from October 2016 leaked in mid September 2018 (yes those dates are correct) I’ve kept meaning to do this post to put down my thoughts about it all. Since then, whether it was by an annoyed beta tester (fairly likely), a hacked account (side-effect of the official winamp twitter account being hacked) or as now seems more likely it was intentionally done by people still directly involved with Winamp to test the waters & build some hype (how sad if that was the case), we’ve gotten an announcement about the magical future the Winamp brand is going to have in 2019 along with a slightly newer version of what I kindly called “the leaky build” which is as taken from the “new” winamp,com site, “not an ongoing project” (that’s one way to keep showing contempt to the community).
In the meanwhile I’ve kept chugging along working on WACUP which despite what’s going on with Winamp ‘officially’, I’m not going to be stopping working on it. Some may not think that’s the right decision as we’ve got a bright new future of Winamp coming in 2019 & new ‘official’ beta builds but none of what’s been talked about (as I’ll cover below) is of interest to me nor is it what I want from my Winamp experience. Now I know WACUP is massively behind where I’ve planned for it to be (especially with intended release dates of non-beta builds) but as one person & having IRL stuff to deal with & changing plans based on actual user feedback, development has been taking a lot longer than I’d planned or liked but I’m still putting out beta builds to the registered beta testers & you can view the build changelogs if you’re not one but interested to see what’s been going on (especially after it took almost 10 months between one of the builds but the feedback was it was worth the wait & was progress).
So lets get onto what I want to cover in this blog post. For the tl;dr, as I’m likely going to ramble or you just want the highlights, WACUP development is going to continue whether you like it or not, Winamp v6 in 2019 is going to be a mess with their focus on mobile only (aka highly likely death of the ‘official’ desktop) & the v5.8 beta is not a lot to show for almost 5 years of fooling the community.