Winamp was the most downloaded and most loved media player for the Windows PC users until AOL purchased it. Back in late 90s and early 2000s everyone had Winamp in their computers. But then AOL decided to put a stop to all the development related to Winamp and after that it had almost faded away from the memory, that is, until yesterday when someone dumped a relatively new version of Winamp on the internet.
The new version is 5.8 which is newer than the last known released version of Winamp (version 5.66). This has started a turmoil all over the internet and people are discussing whether Winamp has made a come back, if they are still developing it or perhaps a new release is about to be announced and so on.
But if you check the files included in the Winamp 5.8, they are all dated October 2016. If a freshly compiled version was to be released, then files would have been from the year 2018. This shows that no development progress is being made. Perhaps one of the Winamp developers (known as DJ Egg) decided to release the beta binaries from 2016.
The user interface, skins, plugins and other things look similar to the what we already had in the older version Winamp 5.66. There seems to be no visible difference. Some bloggers are claiming that Winamp supports Windows 10, but Winamp 5.66 was already working smoothly on the latest version of Windows 10.
On the flip-side, it could also mean that the developers have started to work on Winamp once again and just wanted to release the old beta to move on to newer versions. In this case, we would be seeing new updates in the future.
The new beta version of Winamp is not released through its official website. Rather it is a leak and was posted on a third party download site. Neowin broke the news about this leaked version of Winamp beta which can be downloaded from https://anonfile.com/c4Wf2eh3b4/winamp58_3653_beta_full_en-us_exe.