10th anniversary edition.

• A Completely Redesigned Interface, including Album Art
• Multiple device support, including iPods
• Access and Share Your Music and Videos with Winamp Remote
• Play and Playlist the Best Music on the Web with Media Monitor
• Get Artist & Concert News, Videos & more with Smart Search
• Enjoy Dynamic Song Recommendations
• Experience MP3 Surround Sound Support
• Access to Thousands of Online Radio Stations, Videos and More!
• 50 FREE MP3 Music Downloads compliments of eMusic's 2-week Trial
• Auto-Tagger provides automatic updates to file information
• Control Winamp From Your Browser with the Winamp Toolbar

Full changelog inside.

Download Winamp 5.5 final:
http://www.winamp.com/player

Direct links:
Full | Bundle | Lite | Pro

Improved: Re-tuned and optimized classic Spectrum Analyzer[/quote]

Am I the only one who noticed that the analyzer is no longer accurate?With the previous versions you could tell just by looking at the analyzer if a lowpass was used , but in winamp 5.5 there are no differences between mp3s @ 128Kbps and mp3s @ 320Kbps when looking at the analyzer.

I smell a new AAC encoder test!

me too ! it will be nice to find out which is better aac encoder , nero or ct ?

Yeah, soon...

It's still accurate, it's just showing a different frequency range.

Does the latest Winamp support syncing to the new iPod classic? If not, is it planned?

The new bento skin looks amazing. Also task manager shows it's only using 12 megs of ram in full mode. The best and easiest to use media player just got better IMO.

ya , the new bento skin is amazing and the new auto-tag feature too . My best audio player just got even better .

It was about time. So far the analyzer looked nicely only for in_mp3 and mp3 format only.

Sorry for the chop job WaldoMonster.

Winamp 5.5 final:

• New: Bento SingleUI Skin
• New: Auto-Tagger in File Info dialog (powered by Gracenote)
• New: Album Art support, including new window for Winamp Modern skin
• New: Fully translatable Localization support
• New: WLZ (Winamp Language Zip) filetype support
• New: Global 'playback thread priority' setting for decoders
• New: Media Monitor and MP3 Blog site scraper (in Bento browser)
• New: Option to set the number of lines to scroll in the Playlist
• New: Option to not show playlist item number in classic songticker
• New: Option to not show the playlist number in the Windows taskbar
• New: Redesigned Installer
• New: Run Setup switch, winamp.exe /REG=S
• New: Unified File Editor, with Artwork tab (for mp3, m4a, wma, ogg, flac)
• New: Version History drop-down selector and Search (in About dialog)
• New: Winamp Toolbar for Internet Explorer (optional)
• New: %family% ATF string for identifying filetypes
• New: $split() ATF function for splitting x/y disc & track strings
• New: [in_mp3] Multi-channel mp3surround support
• New: [gen_ml] Tree Options tab in Media Library Preferences
• New: [ml_autotag] Mass Auto-Tagger in Send-To menu (powered by Gracenote)
• New: [ml_local] 3 pane view options in 'Add/Edit View' dialog
• New: [ml_local] Smart View Presets
• New: [ml_local] Album Art support/pane and retrieval service
• New: [ml_local] Toolbar buttons to control view options
• New: [ml_plg] Winamp Playlist Generator (powered by Gracenote MusicID)
• New: [ml_pmp] New fields, configurable filter panes & columns, 3 pane view
• New: [ml_pmp] Album Art view & support for iPod and P4S Devices
• New: [ml_pmp] Separate view for video files
• New: [vis_milk2] Milkdrop2 Visualizer
• Improved: General misc UI/Dialog tweaks & improvements
• Improved: Re-tuned and optimized classic Spectrum Analyzer
• Improved: Surround indicator in Winamp Modern skin for multi-channel files
• Improved: Classic Songticker option for Winamp Modern skin (via Config drawer)
• Improved: [in_cdda] Conductor metadata support
• Improved: [in_cdda] Handling of multiple discs
• Improved: [in_flac/in_vorbis] ALBUM ARTIST & ENSEMBLE read support
• Improved: [in_flac] Advanced Editor mode
• Improved: [in_mod] Added support for more than 256 samples
• Improved: [in_mp3] Faster metadata gathering (also speeds up ReplayGain scan)
• Improved: [in_mp4] Smoother data sent to vis & other minor tweaks
• Improved: [in_wm] Faster WMA/WMV metadata gathering
• Improved: [gen_ff] General freeform skinning engine optimizations
• Improved: [gen_ml] Collapsed/expanded state of treeview items now remembered
• Improved: [gen_ml] Skinned scrollbars in Media Library for newer Modern skins
• Improved: [gen_ml] Reordering of treeview items (via drag+drop)
• Improved: [ml_disc] Better Unicode support & other misc tweaks
• Improved: [ml_history] Unicode support
• Improved: [ml_local] Customize Columns menu for top filter panes
• Improved: [ml_local] Option to show horizontal scrollbar for top panes
• Improved: [ml_local] New 'Podcasts' view (appears after downloading a podcast)
• Improved: [ml_local] Added ISPODCAST and PODCASTCHANNEL field names
• Improved: [ml_local] Added BEGINSLIKE comparison operator
• Improved: [ml_local] Dragging of headers to sort column order
• Improved: [ml_local] Redesigned Smart View Editor
• Improved: [ml_local] Star Rating display and selection
• Improved: [ml_pmp] 'Copy to Local Media' config separated from CD Ripping settings
• Improved: [ml_pmp] Portables "Sync" can now keep podcasts updated
• Improved: [ml_rg] ReplayGain calculation support for 64, 88.2 & 96 KHz samplerates
• Improved: [ml_wire] Optional automatic downloading of new podcast episodes
• Improved: [ml_wire] Multi-select, 'Send To' menu and other general enhancements
• Improved: [ml_wire] Podcast downloads now saved in channel subfolders
• Improved: [ml_wire] Updated podcast directory
• Improved: [pmp_ipod] Now uses the iPod's podcast menu for podcasts
• Fixed: 'All supported files' showing all filetypes in Open Files dialog
• Fixed: Esc key not working in Credits & Winamp tabs of About Box
• Fixed: Long filepaths corrupted when opening Winamp via Explorer context menu
• Fixed: Oversized preference pages with large DPI setting
• Fixed: Recurrence of multiple instances bug (previously fixed in 5.3)
• Fixed: Selecting 'No' for 'Physically Remove' prompt removes playlist/mldb item
• Fixed: TV button in video window not working
• Fixed: Windows showing if switching from modern to classic skin in minimized state
• Fixed: [ASX Loader] Recursive playlist loading & case-insensitive element matching
• Fixed: [ASX Loader] Handling of entries embedded within a REPEAT tag
• Fixed: [dsp_sps] DEP incompatibility
• Fixed: [gen_ff] "Can't unload script while in script" error when switching skins
• Fixed: [gen_ff] Remember ML size when switching between Modern & Classic skins
• Fixed: [gen_ff] Transparent docked toolbars for skins using alpha-blending
• Fixed: [gen_ff] 10% opacity not applying on skins that add items to rt-click menu
• Fixed: [gen_jumpex] Crash when loading multiple files via Explorer context menu
• Fixed: [gen_jumpex] Remove Duplicate Entries action broken in pledit
• Fixed: [gen_ml] %playcount% returning Comment on drag+drop from ML to pledit
• Fixed: [gen_ml] Shift+Insert (New Playlist) and F1 (Help) keyboard shortcuts
• Fixed: [in_cdda] CDDB crash when attempting to rip a CD in a 2nd instance of Winamp
• Fixed: [in_flac] General FLAC Editor quirks (Comments field, Enter key, etc)
• Fixed: [in_flac] 24bit files don't play when 'Allow 24bit' setting is disabled
• Fixed: [in_mod] Fadeout value goes below 0.0 sec in in_mod config
• Fixed: [in_mod] Interpolator 'division by zero' crash bug
• Fixed: [in_mp3] Crash on some mp3's with corrupt ID3v2 extended headers (rare)
• Fixed: [in_mp3] Crash on loading corrupt id3v2.3 tags of a later revision
• Fixed: [in_mp3] Negative bitrate in File Info for long mp3's
• Fixed: [in_mp4] Glitch when modifying metadata on playing track
• Fixed: [in_mp4/libmp4v2] Memory leaks
• Fixed: [in_wave/libsndfile] Crash on invalid .au files
• Fixed: [in_wm] Garbage characters when editing filetypes in config
• Fixed: [in_wm] Potential DRM lockup issue
• Fixed: [ml_disc] 0 byte temp files not deleted after ripping
• Fixed: [ml_disc] Double-click drive icon in Rip & Burn not selecting tree item
• Fixed: [ml_disc] Crash when using <trackartist> in playlist filename generation
• Fixed: [ml_disc] Drag+drop from Audio CD view to Playlist Editor
• Fixed: [ml_local] (no album) items adding to Album count in Artist pane
• Fixed: [ml_local] isempty and =0 queries now return same results
• Fixed: [ml_local] Add dir to 'Watch Folders' path truncated to 64 characters
• Fixed: [ml_pmp] Inserting extra period in filename when transcoding to mp4/aac
• Fixed: [ml_pmp] Sending ansi-converted titles instead of Unicode
• Fixed: [ml_pmp] Transfer caption building when Artist metadata is empty
• Fixed: [ml_wire] Subscription Updates setting always resets to 'Never'
• Fixed: [pmp_ipod] Potential incompatability issues with latest version of iTunes
• Fixed: [pmp_p4s] 'Error In Insert' when transferring to some P4S devices
• Fixed: [pmp_usb] Slow Winamp startup when external usb drive connected
• Fixed: [vis_milk] Milkdrop DEP incompatibility
• Misc: Winamp Remote is now an installer option (ml_orb.dll)
• Misc: Moved drawing engine out of gen_ff to tataki.dll
• Misc: Moved freetype font renderer out of gen_ff to freetype.wac
• Misc: Removed deprecated .LNG Language file support
• Misc: Removed db.w5s (replaced by new Gracenote database system)
• Misc: Removed Station Info window and Prefs page
• Misc: Removed unicows.lib/dll as we have officially dropped support for Win9x
• Updated: Gracenote MusicID/CDDB v2.5
• Updated: libpng 1.2.20
• Updated: [enc_aacplus] Coding Technologies aacPlus Encoder v8.1.0
• Updated: [gen_jumpex] JTFE v0.99.2
• Updated: [in_flac] FLAC 1.2.1
• Updated: [in_mp3] FhG Decoder v4.10
• Updated: [in_vorbis] libvorbis 1.2.0

I am really impressed by this Winamp release. The new Bento skin and album art support is awesome. And with my huge library of music, Winamp only uses 12 MB of RAM during playback where iTunes uses 80 MB of RAM. And Winamp Remote is also a really nice feature that I hope is developed even further. Winamp Remote works with my Xbox 360 like a dream and I have yet to see another media player able to stream to the Xbox 360 besides Windows Media Player and Zune software. Great job Winamp team!

@sTisTi: 5.5 should work fine with the classic (as i don't own an ipod i don't know what features exactly are supported within winamp for it so best you try it out, heh)

@j7n: totally agreed and considering there's been a few revisions of the code to get to this point which people have moaned about at every stage, this current code is a better reflection of things though as it's essentially just a gui gimmick as far as i'm concerned i think it looks alright

@Teqnilogik: Winamp Remote has been in there for a while now (though it's barely anything directly Winamp as it's just a rebranded version of orb's software from my understanding) and ignoring the lack of their tech support on their own sub forum on the winamp forums, for those people who get it working it seems to be useful so that's something i guess.

-daz

No problem.
The result looks good.

What's new with Milkdrop? Or rather, Milkdrop2?

Programmable pixel shader support.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of time to make new presets before the release, so it might be some time before the improvements become visually obvious

nice... i'll have to re-compare it to Lame's decoding. For some reason Lame's decoding & or Foobar2000's decoding [edit] sounds better to my ears [/edit] than FhG used in Winamp.

[edit]
and i'm going to prove that I can hear the difference. preparations to have a new blind ABX test of in_mp3 vs in_mad are under way. if you have not seen the first test started in 2001, check it out here:
http://ff123.net/madchallenge.html
apparently at least 1 admin, and whoever warned me, have not hear of this test.

also at issue for me is that several people in this thread, and a HydrogenAudio admin, claim that there is no difference at all between the two, without backing themselves up.... no warnings were issued. And someone in this thread even says in_mp3 is BETTER than in_mad, no warnings and nobody even replied about it. but, it's really none of my business who gets warned or not. I got warned for saying I think in_mad sounds better in my opinion (on my hardware, obviously) so I'm not going to split hairs here.

The ironic part is when I complete the blind ABX for this, if I am able to get statistically significant results according to whatever the rules end up being, it's still not going to prove one is better than the other period. It's only going to prove which one I like more. So I'm not really sure how this is going to get that particular warning removed from my account - so therefore, what is the use of warning me about my own opinion anyways? I don't know, and again that's none of my business. I have been doing my own ABX testing for the last 2 days, all statistically significant results (to some degree, as most if not all ABX tests are, i'm no statistician) in my favor, and I look forward to doing a blind ABX of it. It needs to be done for everyone who has made any claims about them being exactly the same, and for those who have the personal opinion of preferring one decoder over the other purely based on the PCM output.

nuff said, hopefully not too much said, for now.
[/edit]

I'm quite interested of how did you get this conclusion and what do you mean "better" here? As I know, all those mp3 decoding libs are compatible with the standard and consequently should not have perceivable difference.

The only changes were in handling of Intensity Stereo, which AFAIK is only used by the fraunhofer encoder.

There is also virtual memory used up. On my computer winamp.exe now shows 8,7MB under Mem Usage and 47,2MB under VM Size (View->Select Columns). This release seems amazing though. With all the changes & improvements they made one has to wonder why it is still called winamp 5 .

I don't have an iPod classic yet. I was thinking about the protection the new iPods have that lock them to iTunes for syncing. There seem to be workarounds e.g. with Foobar, but I'd love to continue using Winamp, so support for the new iPods is important for me.

Excellent news! But it still crashes pretty much every time I pause it on my work machine Or should I say stops responding....I reckon it's something to do with the external drive because it also jammed my file system until a track finished playing in Winamp.

Same here, went back to 5.35... Seems like another hurried release...

Which frequency range does it show?

Winamp doesn't support APE tags, correct?

How do you get that WINAMP AOL MUSIC window on the right to go away?

It doesn't. Download the MAD plugin in order to get APE support for MP3 files.

The installer (full) rearranged my desktop icons. Did this happen to anybody else? I'm running Windows XP Sp2.

Everything else about this release is stellar!

rajas

Same thing happened to me. I've never had an installer that did that before.

The MAD plugin does not yet support Unicode in APE. Critical for any special characters, even in your current codepage.

Good thing I never trusted installers. I just ran Universal Extractor over the installer and unpacked it. Winamp today comes bundled with a lot of BS, countless Sonic burning libraries, Gracenote commercial CDDB libraries ... could't let that get into my computer.

Nothing prevents anyone from disabling certain questionable features during installation. Not even Nullsoft's default setup system.

Besides, what are you guys doing to the poor installer, that makes it cause havoc on your systems?

5.3 one uses appox 17770 KB mem while this one uses only ~17000KB on my computer, slight improvement

Mildrop2 now support Pixel Shader 2 and 3, very nice

well, quite an interesting release , too many great new features, ReplayGain, Ogg and FLAC encoding support, and the album art panel... well... i don't know what's more is in there, simply because no matter what i try to do, Winamp is freezing, halting, crashing and jamming with no mercy ... i'm having too much trouble and script errors with the new Bento skin, i reverted to the Modern so, thank God it's no more crashing, it's only freezing now and having some conflict with Babylon Dictionary v 6.0.0 so they both go frozen until winamp is terminated...
and the File Info box/editor is still limited, i hope we would see some native APEv2 tags support in the near future, and maybe an extended one like the "special" File Info box/editor in Foobar2000...

the release seems to be a bit so buggy, but that doesn't mean it's not still awesome

only hoping to see a version 5.51 soon

The goods...

1) Very nice new UI
2) Native Album Art support for my MP3s
3) Fixed non-English issues with the font renderer. Now Unicode tags are displayed properly
4) Nice ID3v2.3 support (My files are all displayed correctly, including BAND which is displayed as Album Artist).
5) I like the info box in the top middle during playing music
6) The performance is pretty good, at least on my machine.
7) Milkdrop effect is awesome.
8) I like the Dashboard when I start playing the music

The not so good...

1) no native cuesheet support yet (I know it is still on the wishlist, and for some time already.)
2) High memory usage in terms of "Private Bytes" and "Virtual Size" shown in Process Explorer, "Working Set" is reasonable though.
3) Milkdrop does not support Unicode characters correctly.

This is what I got for now.

Hmm actually this does seem rather good and wow nice look and low memory useage, but I love my Foobar

Also is there anything I can do that renames my files based on the tags within Winamp, like the ever so useful file options in Foobar???

well, i'm gonna stick to my foobar too for now at least ... i'm still having these "hangs" or freezings with Winamp, when i try to configure the CDDA Sonic plugin Winamp freezes but continues to play, unfreezes automatically after about a minute and opens the Sonic plugin box...

the Dashboard and all those Internet supported gadgets and stuff are turning Winamp into a personal hell for me!! the player goes frozen!! it consumes my connection (i'm still using a 33.6 dial-up!!!), well, i want to disable it in a way but i'm still getting frozen in almost each step for now!!! well, surely that doesn't mean that it's not a great thing to have !!! but, not for a dial-up user !

i'm leaving Winamp for the support of the files that Foobar does not support for now, and for playing Midis as i always loved the Winamp+Microsoft Synth support

still waiting for some bugfixes though or a better tuning, CUE sheets and Extended ID3v2/APEv2 Tag support are on my wishlists too, though, still lovin it

Glad I'm not the only one....it's made it unusable for me

Have you tried a complete uninstall of the former version from your system (including the files that remain in x:/program files/winamp) and a fresh reinstall of the new one?

It has solved most of the issues of that kind for me.

No hangs here. I love it. Bye-bye foobar and Mediamonkey.

I'm actually quite happy with the new Winamp but what it lacks is a file renamer like the one included with Foobar, where it renames according to meta tags. Or am I being very dumb, it only crashed on me once so far and I was mucking around with milkdrop

The good:

- Winamp actually looks attractive now
- Audioblog support
- Winamp Remote sounds like a cool concept

The bad:

- No support for multimedia keyboards (play, pause, etc.)
- No Windows taskbar control like WMP11 does on Vista
- Audioblog support kinda poorly implemented. Couldn't tell where the music was being downloaded to
- Kinda hard to tell if the metadata lookup (auto tagging) feature works or not when you apply it to a particular file
- Album art search results just really bad or nonexistent

I guess this release would be cool for Winamp users, but it won't pull me away from my current WMP/Foobar combo.

Multimedia keys just need to be configured with Global Hotkeys plug-in.
http://www.niversoft.com/products/wac <- Winamp Advanced Controls, Vista compatible

I'd prefer in_mpg123 over in_mad. with mp3infp you can have Unicode APE tags and shell extension for editing tags.

I'll give it a go when I get back to work next week...

Count me among the casualties. I'm back to running 5.34. Maybe next time.....

Can you guys give me more detailed steps about how you're making things crash/hang so I can look into it?

Sorry, I know this is not the right place to post bug reports...

I just had Winamp crash (stopped working warning). I simply tried to rescan my library as I noticed Winamp did not import all songs that I have. "Half way through" I simply got a window saying Winamp has stopped working and option to report it to Microsoft. I'm using Vista and Winamp is clean install (Installed Vista last night) with default skin/settings.

It also caused issue right after installing last night. It consumed 99 - 100% of CPU time on first launch (no playback just imported files and left it running). After I ran it I noticed my CPU fan started spinning frantically, I noticed it was Winamp. I closed it but forgot to check to see if process has been terminated. It hasn't. It remained running for another 30 minutes. I manually terminated it and computer returned to normal state. There were no other programs running.

This is the first time in 8 years I've used Winamp that caused issues or has crashed. I don't know if this is Vista only related as 5 - 5.35 releases ran almost flawlessly on XP.

Edit: Just tried it again as I thought it might have been random but it happens every time just by rescanning watched folders.

ok, in details, lets start with Milkdrop2:
i have WINXP SP2, VGA is MSI with ATI RADEON 9550 with Driver Packaging Version 8.33-061220m-040997C-ATI, Intel P4 3.0GHz, MB is ASrock P4VM800 with Intel D865PERL chipset, dunno what else you need to know...

on the initiation of Milkdrop2 with the Modern Skin, default settings used, and then customized but wit no avail...



and when i press the left button, the main window/equalizer/VIS windows disappeared, and at the first other click it crashed.. while at the second try Winamp reverted to the Classic Skin after another script error -the numbers are different each time but it's all of vis.maki of course- with ONLY Main window and EQ window open!? and when i pressed the "PL" button, it opened the playlist with no skin, but the shape of the classic skin and the colours of the modern!!! and when trying to check the skin, it said it was still "Modern", i selected "Classic" and the n "Modern" and everything went fine and Milkdrop2 played fine in the vis panel...tried selecting Milkdrop 2 again.. it displayed the same Script error message then crashed...
another trial, switching from AVS to Milkdrop2 caused the exact things, selecting Milkdrop2 and starting it would first show a vis panel popping out of winamp, and then it hangs, and gives the same script error message, left click, back to classic skin, then switch back to modern and it worked, the playing of music wasn't interrupted at all during any of the errors, then i tried to switch to full screen, it worked perfectly!! and when switching back, it gave a script error but with different code number:


though running Milkdrop2 with Classic Skin, Bento & Big Bento had no problems at all!!! perfect smooth transition from full screen to windowed, and even when changing from modern to Bento..

i'll try making a new clean install of winamp later and try to confirm this... though the last 5.35 versiom i had was installed a clean install, with no additional plugins or add-ons added at any later time!!! 5.5 was installed only 5-6 days after the clean install of 5.35 here...

hope that this info could help though

oh...

and TRULY LOOVVVEEE THE NEW MILKDROP !!! dunno how much difference it would show on my 9550 though, but it is still awesome

Hails...
H.Q.

Installed it on a fresh XP Pro SP2 install (in a VMware machine) and works like a charm even with removable storage, no hangs whatsoever, now before switching from 5.35 to it on my main OS having lots of desktop icons I'd like to know if there's a way no to have it mess them up besides extracting the files from the installer (can be done with 7-Zip, no need for Universal Extractor), thanks.

EDIT: Grammar + 7-Zip part.

If I quit Winamp 5.5 with a .tak file as the last last item selected in my playlist, it will give similar errors to those mentioned above and won't let me start Winamp. When I delete the playlist file created in Winamp's folder it allows me to start again. Mind you, actual playback of .tak files is no problem. It's just quitting with one selected in the playlist.