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Comment by captbaritone | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I wrote a Twitter thread demonstrating many of its features. You can find it here: https://mobile.twitter.com/captbaritone/status/9612747140133...

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People in this thread might also enjoy this Twitter bot I wrote that tweets Winamp skins: https://twitter.com/winampskins

Super cool. Where are you finding the skins? I went looking for some skins I made and put up on deviantart, but the download links are all broken. Do you just scrape the web or are they your personal collection, or are you querying a specific site?

I found a massive zip file of ~3K skins somewhere. I’m selecting skins from that set.

Pretty cool stuff :D

Any plans to make this a PWA (by adding a serviceworker)? Would be awesome to be able to run this offline and in a dedicated window.

Does it decode the audio files (mp3, etc.) into the low level PCM audio samples and play those back? Or does it use a higher level browser API that lets you play high level mp3 files directly?

If the latter, how can you still implement the equalizer?

Web Audio supports it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/BiquadFilte...

See how it's used here: https://github.com/captbaritone/winamp2-js/blob/master/js/me...

This is great and brings back a lot of old memories. Something that would help this spread (perhaps if it was hosted somewhere dedicated to it), is allowing a URL of an MP3 or a list of other audio files to be included in the link so people can share a song "the way it was meant to be played."

Thanks for your hard work and for making sure it wasn't broken in Edge. It was really satisfying to pull it up on my Windows 10 Mobile without issue.

Alas, this is more complicated than just including a link. The mp3 needs to be served with permissive "CORs" headers, and most are not. I made the call, that it would be too confusing for users to try to support loading from URL.

Yeah, that makes sense. You would have to download the remote resource in the link and re-host it which can get expensive quickly. There are probably a few scenarios where DNS tricks would save the day, but not reliably.

Regarding Edge, all credit goes to the work the Edge team has put into the browser. I just made sure I was building to spec, and it seemed to work!

Nice! Was trying to find that video of the live drag and drop updating of the skin that I saw on Twitter last night. That's super slick.

Damn! Right in the nostalgia.

Now you just need shoutcast support ;).

For those who don't want to navigate Twitter for whatever reason (tracking, slows down your browser, bad UI, etc.), here's the content from the thread (the images and videos are still Twitter-hosted, by the way):

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It's done! Winamp2-js (https://jordaneldredge.com/projects/winamp2-js/) finally supports all three windows!

To celebrate, here's a list of some of the cool things it can do: (thread) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVcfDHBVQAAp3Tm?format=png

* Load any classic Winamp skin just by dragging it onto the main window. (Shoutout to @stuk for JSZip which lets us decompress .wsz files in the browser. (link: https://stuk.github.io/jszip/) https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961271636983820288/pu/v...

* Drag local audio files into the playlist to queue them up. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961271712238063621/pu/v...

* Visualize your music with the bar or line visualizer. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961271795725709314/pu/v...

* Adjust the fully functional EQ to pump up the bass. (Shoutout to @epistemex for cardinal-spline-js (link: https://github.com/epistemex/cardinal-spline-js)) https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961271880035389441/pu/v...

* Import/export Winamp's own binary EQ settings files. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272045177782275/pu/v...

* Export your playlist as an .html file. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272121270743040/pu/v...

* Save screen real estate with each window's "shade" mode. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVcf90bVQAALtl_?format=jpg

* See each file's title/artist as specified in its ID3 tags. (Shoutout to @aadsm for jsmediatags (link: https://github.com/aadsm/jsmediatags)) https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272266322407425/pu/v...

* If a skin specifies some transparent regions in its region.txt, they are respected. (Shoutout to @SaraSoueidan for (link: https://www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/css-svg-clipping/)) https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272327584403457/pu/v...

* Drag windows around, and easily align them with window snapping. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272384148815873/pu/v...

* Use hotkeys to control all major functions. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272440251822080/pu/v...

* Select/drag tracks to reorder them. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/961272499219587072/pu/v...

* "Double" mode (ctrl+d) makes the main and EQ windows twice as big. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVcgTW3VMAAgrdc?format=jpg

Getting all of this to work entirely in the browser has been a great challenge, and I've learned a lot. Thanks to @The_DoctorO for being an invaluable source of insider information. Thanks to @LuigiHann for catching many small places where I hand't perfectly recreated Winamp's handling of skins. Thanks to @ja2ke for the original retweet which I believe kicked this whole thing off more than three years ago. And of course, thanks to @JustinFrankel. ‍️

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(@captbaritone, I'm assuming you're ok with pasting the content here, but please let me know in case you have objections.)

No worries about copy/pasting. Twitter’s UI is not the ideal way to interact with this stuff, but it was the easiest way for me to put together all those short videos. Thanks for helping make it accessible.

Does it support m3u or playlists over HTTP?

It theoretically could, but the endpoint would need to serve the assets with permissive CORs headers.

That makes sense, I forgot about the pesky CORS situation. My thinking was maybe the <audio> or other subsystem that is capable of loading MP3s remotely (since they are media objects) could do the same for playlist data.

Cheers!

Yeah, CORs is a wrench in the works for this stuff. Even our audio source is subject to CORs because we want to be able to do EQ and visualization.

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