New Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP) preview released

Back in early 2019, a first preview of what the developers called Winamp Community Update Project was released; designed to improve the original Winamp music player through its extensive plugins system, WACUP did fix bugs, added features and updated existing features.

A new preview is now available that introduces another batch of improvements to Winamp. The new release is based on Winamp 5.666, like the previous one.

You can download an installer from the project website or a portable version. The installer will download Winamp 5.666 if it is not found on the device as it is the base requirement for WACUP. The developers recommend to install WACUP into a separate directory and not over an existing Winamp installation at the time of writing. A portable version is also available which will always be installed separately.

WACUP is not compatible with Winamp 5.8 Beta which was released by Radionomy, the current owner of Winamp, in 2018.

The first public preview of WACUP introduced lots of crash and security fixes, improved the performance of the player, made improvements to the plugin system and media format support, and added support for new skins.

WACUP Preview version1.0.20.7170 introduces changes, bug fixes and new features to Winamp. The changelog is divided into three sections that list more than 150 different changes introduced in the release.

As far as fixes are concerned, there are plenty in the new release. The latest WACUP preview improves stability by patching code that could lead to crashes or hangs, improves compatibility with certain plugins, and updates several DLL libraries to a new version.

Nothing stands out when it comes to new features introduced in the version, they all appear to be light changes or changes made in preparation of new features that will be added in future releases.

To give a few examples: Shuffle's session restoring can be turned off now in the preferences to restore classic Winamp functionality, a new Windows 10 preferences page has been added to disable on-screen media controls, and the Volume Logic output plug-in should now be usable with the new release.

You can check out the entire changelog here for a full rundown on all the changes, improvements and fixes in the new release.

Closing Words

WACUP is available as a preview only, and that means that it is beta software at this point. My initial reaction to the release still stands: it is an interesting project, especially for die-hard Winamp users, until a final version gets released. I keep on using AIMP and MusicBee for the time being though, as these suit my needs better.

Now You: what is your favorite music player, has it changed in the past two year period?