Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona, in 1997 by

Justin Frankel Justin Frankel (born 1978) is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates ...

. Its products included the

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

media player and the SHOUTcast

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

streaming media server. In later years, their open source installer system, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) became an alternative to commercial products like InstallShield. The company's name is a

parody A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its sub ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

. ''Mike the Llama'' is the company's

mascot A mascot is any human, animal, or object thought to bring luck, or anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name. Mascots are also used as fi ...

; this is frequently referred to in promotional material (especially for Winamp) citing

llama The llama (; ) (''Lama glama'') is a domesticated South American camelid, widely used as a meat and pack animal by Andean cultures since the Pre-Columbian era. Llamas are social animals and live with others as a herd. Their wool is soft ...

s. Frankel introduced the llama in Winamp's startup sound clip, inspired by the lyrics of

Wesley Willis Wesley Lawrence Willis (May 31, 1963 – August 21, 2003) was an American musician and visual artist. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1989, Willis began a career as an underground singer-songwriter in the outsider music tradition. Wil ...

: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!" Nullsoft was sold to AOL (formerly known as America Online) on June 1, 1999, and thereafter existed as a subsidiary of the company. After the acquisition, Nullsoft headquarters were moved to

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. Their later developments included the

Nullsoft Streaming Video Nullsoft Streaming Video (NSV) was a media container designed for streaming video content over the Internet. NSV was developed by Nullsoft, the makers of Winamp. The NSV format is another example of streaming video formats, offered by various co ...

(NSV) format, which was intended to stream media that used any audio or

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

. In 2002, the press reported a technology called Ultravox being developed by Nullsoft. Nullsoft created the peer-to-peer networks

Gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...

and

WASTE Waste (or wastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor economic value. A waste prod ...

. Although AOL tried to limit the distribution of Gnutella and WASTE, the Ultravox technology was reportedly used for some AOL radio services in 2003. A service called Nullsoft Television was announced in 2003 using NSV. Nullsoft released several new versions of the Winamp player and grew its monthly unique subscriber base from 33 million users to over 52 million users by 2005. Nullsoft's San Francisco offices were closed in December 2003, with a near-concurrent departure of Frankel and the original Winamp development team. Nullsoft then became a division of AOL Music. In 2013, some AOL Music sites were shut down and others sold to

Townsquare Media Townsquare Media, Inc. (formerly Regent Communications until 2010) is an American radio network and media company based in Purchase, New York. The company started in radio and expanded into digital media toward the end of the 2000s, starting wi ...

. In November 2013, an unofficial report surfaced that

was in talks with AOL to acquire Nullsoft. On January 14, 2014, it was officially announced that Belgian online radio aggregator Radionomy had bought Winamp and Shoutcast, formerly owned by Nullsoft. No financial details were publicly announced.

References

{{reflist

External links

Winamp
Companies disestablished in 2013 Companies established in 1997 Defunct software companies of the United States Former Time Warner subsidiaries Radionomy Software companies of the United States