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.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments