Winamp, and the art of seeing music

Winamp, from 1997 to now

• 1997 Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev release WinAMP 0.20a as freeware, in April. Frankel founds Nullsoft the following January.
• 1998 Winamp 2 arrives in September: the compact, skinnable player most people remember, with plugins for everything from sound effects to visuals.
• 1999 AOL buys Nullsoft.
• 2002–2003 Winamp3, a full rewrite, ships in 2002. Winamp 5 follows in December 2003, built on the 2.x code: "2 + 3 = 5".
• 2013–2014 AOL announces that Winamp will shut down. Radionomy buys Winamp and SHOUTcast instead, in January 2014.
• 2015–2025 The owners change several times: Vivendi, then AudioValley, renamed Targetspot and later Llama Group, which becomes Winamp Group in 2025.
• 2024 The Winamp source code is published on GitHub in September under a "Winamp Collaborative License" that forbids distributing modified versions. The repository is deleted a few weeks later.

The visualizers

Winamp's main window always had a tiny visualizer of its own, a spectrum analyzer or an oscilloscope in a strip of pixels. Plugins took it to full screen, and two of them became legends.

AVS: Advanced Visualization Studio

Justin Frankel's AVS shipped with Winamp from version 2.61 in 2000. It was a studio more than a visualizer: a stack of effects, each one drawing, moving, blurring or blending the picture, nested in lists with their own blend modes, and scriptable in a small expression language. Artists shared their stacks as .avs presets, released in packs by groups such as AVSociety, Finnish Flash and VISBOT, and by artists like Steven Wittens (UnConeD), whose work shipped with Winamp itself.

In May 2005 Nullsoft published the AVS source under a BSD license, which is why AVS could outlive the Windows of its time.

MilkDrop

Ryan Geiss's MilkDrop arrived in 2001 with a different idea: every frame is the last one warped through a flowing field of motion, with waveforms drawn over it and smooth blends from one preset to the next. MilkDrop 2 added pixel shaders in 2007. Its source was opened under a BSD license too: version 1.04 in 2005 and MilkDrop 2 in 2013.

MScopes plays AVS presets. MilkDrop presets are a different format, played by the MilkDrop projects below.

What's a scope?

Music visualization began with the oscilloscope: an instrument that draws a signal over time as a glowing line. Feed it a song and the line becomes the waveform, dancing. Put the left channel on one axis and the right on the other and it becomes a vectorscope, the looping figures studios used to watch stereo.

AVS's best-loved effect took that idea and made it programmable. A SuperScope is a scope you write: a few lines of script decide where each point of the sound goes, so the waveform can become a spiral, a starburst or a spinning 3D shape. Countless classic presets are built from them.

That is where the name comes from: MScopes is scopes for music, on the Mac. Its Phosphor preset is a vectorscope that draws every sample like an analog beam, and the SuperScopes of the Winamp years run in it as they were written.

Where the presets live now

The classic AVS presets are still out there, kept by the community:

• The visbot archive: AVS packs released through the years, by artist and group.
• WinampHeritage, AVS presets: a Winamp heritage site with downloadable preset packs.
• Internet Archive: a snapshot of WinampHeritage's visualizations, kept safe.
• awesome-avs: a curated list of AVS resources, and the AVS forum archive for the history in the artists' own words.
• An old Winamp install: Winamp\Plugins\avs\ holds every preset you ever installed.

Many packs were Windows installers (.exe); The Unarchiver opens them on a Mac. Then point MScopes at the folder: in the Preset Browser (⌘B) choose Library, then Choose Library Folder. These presets are their authors' art, so MScopes plays them from your folder and never bundles them.

Keeping it alive

MScopes is one of several open-source projects carrying Winamp's visual side forward. MScopes is the Mac one: an independent reimplementation of AVS's effects in modern C++ on Metal, following the algorithms Nullsoft published under its BSD license. These are its relatives: