Winamp played an audio claming that as software it "kicked the llama's ass," upon startup. (via Winamp.com)

The digital music software Winamp will no longer be made available for download online as of December 20. As documented in a piece of long-form reporting by Ars Technica, the company had suffered within the organizational structure of new ownership since 2002, leading to its current closure as a project. Originally owned by Nullsoft, it was bought by AOL for a sum estimated to be no lower than $80 million only 14 years ago. Associated digital services will also see discontinuation.

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Winamp came onto the software scene in 1997, a time when few options existed for personal computer users seeking to manage and playback collections of digital music. The application proceeded to built a dedicated following among its users by offering flexibility still unparalleled among consumer grade audio interfaces.

It offered users thorough customizability, from plug-ins for playing obscure, high-resolution audio files to mods that changed the look of the basic user interface. Coupled with creators' oddball sense of humor and aesthetics, Winamp began drawing cheques of appreciation from users worldwide.By keeping the basic program's size down, while the increasingly ubiquitous iTunes application swelled by leaps and bounds, users with little spare space on their hard drives had a reason to stay loyal to Winamp. Under AOL's management, that fell to the wayside as leading users to install bundles of unrelated toolbars became a design priority.

Among the features pioneered by Winamp was the sonic visualizer. While an update for the software will likely never come again, the lights of these pulsing strobes will burn on eternally, leaving traces of the music player that could have been a contender.

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