Winamp Kernel Streaming is a free plugin for Winamp that will let you bypass the Windows mixer and stream the output audio of Winamp directly to your sound-card or DAC. You can use this plugin instead of ASIO – and you don’t have to install anything else except the plugin, while in ASIO you need both a Winamp ASIO plugin and an ASIO driver (such as ASIO4All). Besides this, the Winamp Kernel Streaming plugin will play even on Windows 7, where ASIO may face some problems.

The project began as an attempt of the author to improve the stability of the existing Kernel Streaming plugin developed by Chun Yu Shien. After several revisions of that code, many people were asking for the addition of various features, particularly buffering. For these features, the existing codebase was no longer considered suitable, so that he rewrote the plugin from scratch.

The plugin is tested and is stable. Note that it won’t function if you enable 24 bit support in Winamp (you must leave it to 16 bit). Volume control through Winamp can be enabled or disabled without problems. Of course, you won’t have control of the volume through the Windows mixer.

• Download the Winamp Kernel Streaming plugin
• Project site

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