Winamp

Winamp was the MP3 player of the early downloading years: a small, skinnable window that sat on top of everything else and played whatever had just finished arriving from Napster, Kazaa, or a friend's burned CD.

Nullsoft released the first version in 1997 and Winamp 2 a year later. It became one of the most downloaded Windows programs of its time, with tens of millions of users by the turn of the century. Skins let people turn it into anything from a brushed-metal stereo to a cartoon, and visualisation plug-ins turned music into light shows on dorm-room monitors.

AOL bought Nullsoft in 1999 and, after years of neglect, announced in November 2013 that Winamp would be shut down. The player was later sold and revived by others, but the version people remember belongs to that first MP3 era.

AOL announced on November 20, 2013 that Winamp.com would close and the player would stop being offered for download after December 20, 2013. The brand was sold to Radionomy in 2014 and later revived, but the original Nullsoft/AOL product line ended there.