For many of us, our first experience with downloading music online included Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s Napster. Once you downloaded whatever it was you wanted from the file sharing service you probably used Winamp to play those MP3’s because it really “whipped the llama’s ass”.

The line about the llama was the audio file that came with Winamp as a way to test out the audio player, voiced by Dallas voiceover artist JJ McKay.

LifeHacker reported on Wednesday that after a 15 year run, WinAmp was shutting down on December 20th.

The company left this statement on their download page:

“Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release.
Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.”

Winamp was created by Justin Frankel and Dimitry Boldyrev in 1997 when the two former University of Utah students integrated their Windows interface with AMP (MP3 Technology) playback engine. By 1998 Frankel had started his own company, Nullsoft and they developed their own proprietary decoder called Nitrane abandoning AMP’s decoder. That was just in time as right after this move, Play Media Systems the company that merged with AMP sent Frankel and Boldyrev a cease and desist.

Just a year later in 1999 Nullsoft was bought by AOL for $80 million dollars, which in today’s world would be close to $400 million dollars. Winamp has been through 5 different iterations with the most recent update being Wednesday, which at the same time they released the update AOL announced they were sunsetting the product.

When Winamp was originally introduced, and for several years after that it was the biggest game in town for MP3 playback. In fact it was the goto media player for most people for four years before Apple introduced iTunes in 2001.