Winamp was taking a little too long to release an update for version 5 for some. It was leaked and in good form the people working on it cleaned it up and released 5.∞

It is what you would expect from a Winamp release, the features of winamp 2 and 3 mashed together. That is why they skipped Winamp 4 to bring us this, the culmination of the two major releases and I suppose it was worth it.

Trivia question for this post is, why did they skip Windows 9? The answer is at the end of this post.

So why do we care about R4? Well for home users, it just looks cool. You can adjust frame rates and resolutions, visualizations and effects. My favorite thing is being able to do text overlays for script notifications using the web front end and it just looks great. For commercial users who buy a licence you could announce promotions, news or updates on products while playing music without the need for a video feed.

The downside for me was that the R4 experience is broken in Windows 10. Mainly due to permissions. People with UAC turned off are not effected but there is a simple workaround for getting this going without making too much of a mess.

R4 wouldn’t even load without being able to write to a log file in the data folder and was unable to save any changes in the session without write access to this folder so the quickest and easiest solution was just to give users full control of the folder.

Have fun, play safe and if you want to call Windows versions 95 and 98, make sure your condition for checking the version doesn’t start with a 9!

http://www.winamp.com/
https://www.rabidhamster.org/R4/download.php