Winamp, which is a subsidiary of Timer Warner, is a media player with a restricted use. It was written by Nullsoft and is a multi-format freeware or shareware. Justin Frankel first released this software tool in 1997 and presently its development is credited to Ben Allison, Will Fisher, Taber Buhl, Maksim Tyrtyshny, Chris Edwards and Stephen (Tag) Loomis. The minimalist version of Winamp, WinAMP 0.20a was released on April 21, 1997 as a freeware. On March 31 in 1998, the 1.90 Version of Winamp was released with the general purpose of audio playing and was documented on the website winamp.com as a support for plugins including the two input plugins MOD and MP3 and also a visualization plugin. By now Winamp has released many versions like 1.90, 2.0, 2.10, 3 and 5.
Winamp 5 has come with three versions, which are ‘Lite’, ‘Full’ and ‘Pro’. The ‘Pro’ version requires registration and has features of unlimited speed music ripping and CD burning and MP3 encoding. Support for the iPod synchronization is done from the version 5.2. On the tenth anniversary of its first release, the 5.5 version of Winamp was released which has features like album art support, improved localization support, unified player and also a media library. The Windows 9x can support this version. Together with MP3, Winamp supports music file formats like MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and Windows Media Audio. Winamp can also play and import music from audio CDs and can burn music to CDs. From 33 million users in February 2005 Winamp grew to over 57 million users.