If there is something that i use for the most of the time on my computer, it is nothing other than the good old winamp. The definitive mediaplayer for windows- the brainchild of the maverick programmer justin frankel- it continues to be the best voted player for digital audio. But being an ardent fan of winamp, i was a bit frustrated by the news that winamp is not going to have any further developments. Why because, the original winamp team has left AOL, the company that bought winamp from justin frankel. It's a long story about how justin as a university dropout started of the winamp saga at the age of 16. Winamp turned to become a stable and versatile player and even more popular than windows mediaplayer. It's estimated that justin frankel-through his winamp- has caused an annual loss of revenue to the tune of $2b to the music industry! That gives a rough idea about the mammoth user base of winamp. Then came a hefty $80m deal that saw the takeover of nullsoft (the company formed by justin and his friends for marketing winamp- he claims it to be a play on microsoft!) by AOL. Following days were evidently not so smooth for the happy-go erstwhile nullsoft team whose every activities were monitored by the eagle eyes of AOL. Justin was dragged in to a point of threatening when he released the file sharing program called gnutella (and that too hosted on AOL servers!) at the very time when AOL was partnering with Time warner inc. which turn in was waging a bitter legal battle with napster. Though he was forced to back off, the source code had already been leaked and that later did the groundwork for the file sharing clients like kazaa, morpheus, winmx etc etc.. A couple of stunts later AOL unceremonoiusly throwed out the nullsoft team one by one and before they reached justin, he voluntarily stepped out (one would do well to check out his blog at hotdog.com). As expected, winamp too suffered the repercussions. THe version 5.05 is supposed to be the final version for now. A sad demise for such a brilliant piece of work. I think winamp is destined for a fate similar to that of the media player sonique which too saw its downfall when the original team was expelled by lycos.