New Winamp update adds features, fixes, and (sigh) support for “music NFTs”

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New Winamp update adds features, fixes, and (sigh) support for “music NFTs”

Winamp/Andrew Cun­ning­ham

If you’d asked me in Jan­u­ary to make some pre­dic­tions about what 2022 would bring, I don’t think “mul­ti­ple 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 ground­work laid by August’s 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new fea­tures to the rean­i­mat­ed music play­er. Most of these are straight­for­ward 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 (gleaned most­ly from sites like NFT Now that are focused almost exclu­sive­ly on the pur­port­ed ben­e­fits rather than the down­sides) is that music NFTs oper­ate like NFT images, except that the NFT pro­vides a link to a dig­i­tal music file instead of a link to a JPG. The ben­e­fits, accord­ing to advo­cates, are that artists can earn more mon­ey by cre­at­ing scarci­ty (releas­ing unique or lim­it­ed-run tracks, for exam­ple) and by get­ting a cut of sec­ond­hand sales of the NFT that hap­pen between fans.

But being an updat­ed ver­sion of a Win­dows 98-era music play­er, the sup­port for NFT music in Winamp is a bit round­about. Peo­ple with NFT music libraries will need to export them from what­ev­er plat­form they use and then import them into Winamp as an .m3u playlist. Winamp pro­vid­ed a video of this process, which we’ve includ­ed below.

“Winamp’s lat­est ver­sion lets music fans link their Meta­mask wal­let via Brave, Chrome, or Fire­fox to Winamp. It then con­nects their favorite music NFTs to their tried-and-true 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 is launch­ing this new fea­ture for Ethereum and Polygon/Matic protocols.”

Winam­p’s still most­ly out-of-date innards make down­load­ing and play­ing NFT music a clunky, round­about affair. Video cred­it: Winamp

This round­about process is a place where Winam­p’s cur­rent ambi­tions (cre­ator plat­form, NFT mar­ket­place) col­lide with its actu­al ship­ping prod­uct (a music play­er whose cul­tur­al rel­e­vance peaked dur­ing the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion). To direct­ly dis­play web­sites need­ed to down­load these NFT playlists, accord­ing to the release notes, would require an updat­ed ren­der­ing engine for Winam­p’s in-app brows­er, which is cur­rent­ly based on Inter­net Explor­er 10.

There’s still plen­ty here for lega­cy 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 streamed music, an update to OpenSSL 3.0.5, and a few oth­er updates for the under­ly­ing codecs and oth­er soft­ware that Winamp uses to do its thing. As for 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 install process or after Winamp is installed.

Per­haps antic­i­pat­ing that Winam­p’s remain­ing hard­core fans would not have a lot of fond­ness for NFTs, Rich­man also attempt­ed to keep com­ments in the Winamp 5.9.1 release notes thread on-topic.

“Please do not post any rants about NFTs in this thread,” he wrote.

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