I hope Winamp stay alive. It's been part of the internet for so long, it would be a shame to see it disappear.

Things have been looking up for Winamp ever since the legendary MP3 player quietly survived its December 20 shutdown date. There had been rumors of a sale by AOL, but now TechCrunch reports that the sale is practically a done deal, with Radionomy agreeing to acquire Winamp’s software and Shoutcast music services. I wasn’t familiar with Radionomy before, but it seems similar in purpose to Shoutcast. Both services allow users to create their own online radio stations, for fun or for profit. Shoutcast is much larger, touting 45,000 stations, compared to roughly 6,000 with Radionomy, but Radionomy tries to make do-it-yourself broadcasting easier, with a web-based tool for creating radio stations and a licensed library of more than 80,000 songs. Radionomy is also getting more serious about monetization, and last month merged with Targetspot to create an ad network for digital audio. Bringing in Shoutcast’s user base and tools could be pretty interesting.