Enlarge (credit: 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.

Enlarge / Winamp. Winamp never changes. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the days of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, there was an app called Winamp . People over the age of 30ish will remember Winamp as the premiere music player for people using Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa to illegally download Aerosmith MP3s to their Gateway desktop computers. (For anyone younger than that: it was like Spotify, but you needed to collect every single song you wanted to listen to manually and add it to the app yourself.)

Like a lot of influential Windows 95-era PC apps, it was eventually outpaced by newer software and business models and forgotten, but it's technically never actually been dead. Winamp's original incarnation petered out in late 2013 , shut down by AOL after years of mismanagement . A company called Radionomy bought the remains of Winamp from AOL in January 2014 and leaked an update to the app in 2016; a revised version of this build was officially released in 2018, and a major version 6.0 update was planned for 2019 .

This plan obviously didn't pan out. But last week, for the first time in four years, Radionomy released a new version of Winamp . The release notes for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 1999 say that the update represents four years of work across two separate development teams, delayed in between by the COVID-19 pandemic.