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Winamp Skins Collection

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133 points6502nerdface59 comments

Early 2000s. Every myspace looks different. AIM profiles with colors, poems, quotes, and links. WinAmp skins, but also skins in desktops (WindowBlinds), wallpapers (DeviantArt), icons, ringtones, etc. To be cool, you'd make it yours. It all had a sort of gaudy messiness that never appealed to the artists and proto-hipsters, but they were the odd ones. And you could clearly tell what was business vs personal. Business was square and beige. Personal was colorful and round. It's all mixed together now. The moment when this flipped for me was the iPhone, because unlike Blackberry or Sidekick, this was a device that was meant for both work and play, and it pushed the design boundaries equally together. Facebook, Bootstrap, the death of RSS, the rise of streaming music services, etc. all happened around the same time. It felt fresh and modern! I remember. And it wasn't just surface-level design - the real change was in our personalities. Bring your whole self to work. Craft your personal brand. 10 more life hacks. Delete those facebook photos and that old blog. In 2020, hey now I even see your kitchen and your kids! There became no place to retreat to. Epitomized in any modern Apple ad. It elevated us, so we accepted it, but now deviate too far and mobs will attack you. Our age is an age of conformity. I'm reminded of a documentary called Helvetica from 2007. Has the world become less personalized? Even the word personalized doesn't quite capture what I wonder that was lost, because personalized would not be a word I'd have used then. What could cause this trend to reverse?

This fills me with such bittersweet nostalgia and, I dare say it, homesickness. The internet is such a different place than it used to, even our computers don't feel the same. I'm brought back to countless dark nights spent awake, roaming IRC and learning as much as I could about all the topics available online with such intensity you would think I was afraid it would suddenly blink out of existence. In a way, it did.

I just had a blast from the past... It’s 2am, I’m in my childhood bedroom on the Sony Vaio computer I received for my 13ty birthday. I’m hooked up to AOL on a 28.8 modem through a 50ft telephone wire connected to my older brothers phone line in the other room. I’m listening to Same In The End by Sublime through Winamp. I’m in an IRC channel with a bunch of script kiddies talking about building AOL Progz in Visual Basic. My computer is running a little slow because I’m burning some music on my 2x CDR through Roxio. I have a programming question so I try searching on Web Crawler. Just as the results come in I’m disconnected because my brother just got home and picked up the phone.

You lucky duck. That's quite a setup for a 13 year old!

Funny you mention IRC in a Winamp thread, one of the devs (Tag, Tag's Trance Trip) from winamp/nullsoft was active in a IRC that we used to stream/DJ on Winamp. At one point Winamp was developing a music streaming store/service way before Apple, Google, and the rest came along... some great memories of modifying cable modems to unlock more upload capability

Good memories. Also spent some time scrolling through https://skins.webamp.org/ and found some I'd never seen before that I liked!

Cambrian explosion of user interface creativity during that era.

Also worth watching: WinAmp Skinparty by Silvio Lorusso & Adriano Vulpio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJTUiO6f1-8

Also from that era was a design studio called 2Advanced - their homepage felt like it was a window into the future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkNkQoQY_8

I came across 2A in 2000 as a freshman in high school getting interested in web design and it was absolute magic. It was hugely influential on my excitement about the web and by extension my decision to do the work I do now. If I think about it, I can still hear the music loop from v2 in my head.

Yeah work of studios like 2Advanced and Hi-Res! was what got me interested in being a designer.

I used to spend 30 minutes a day on a 56kbps connection downloading a new one. I think I made a resident evil 3 skin too.

Honestly I've yet to see a skin that looks better than the default winamp 2 skin. There are a few that come close, buy not a single one that beats it out.

Here's a more visual website with built-in search: https://skins.webamp.org/

One of the best media players back in the day. I believe even to this date it still is, offering a level of customisation and playability unparalleled by modern players.

I have yet to this day to find a music player I like more than old school winamp with a good skin and visualizations.

Curious to see if there are any recommendations in this thread.

I really recommend trying out MusicBee.

I have really enjoyed the likes of Foobar, Clementine, Strawberry etc.

Milkdrop is still alive! Here is an epic collection of the best presets.

https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-coll...

Sadly the NestDrop tool in the article you linked is Windows only, and proprietary.

But Milkdrop is alive in open source cross-platform too. https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

This is a blast from the past. I remember using at least two of those skins. Winamp had easy to use advanced features. I remember choosing it over the windows player. I eventually picked up a Gigabeat and needed to use both players.

I still don’t know if I would go back to self managed music collections. There is an impulse to do it but I enjoy the near instant satisfaction from Apple Music. The desktop Apple music player however is lacking features and speediness.

I never moved away from managing my own music collection. Maybe I'm stuck in the past but I never saw the appeal of subscription services.

I also still keep my own collection of music. But streaming is good for discovering new things, yet I'm not subscribed to any streaming service. Reason being that the software they provide is universally terrible.

What I'd really like to see is streaming services offer an API for 3rd party clients to use, so that you could for example have a plugin for a competently architected music player like foobar2000, instead of having to use the unholy abomination that is itunes, for example.

Spotify does provide an API. I've used it with various command-line clients on a headless linux box. For example, https://mopidy.com/

There is even a foobar2000 spotify component, though I haven't used foobar2000 in a long time, so cannot vouch for its quality.

Memories! Back in school days in early 2000s I was a basketball fan and also of course running Winamp 24/7. I was never good at drawing but got curious and started making skins themed with basketball clubs' colors and logos. First few were rather horrible, but I think the last ones I did are not that bad (even if pretty simple); they got quite a few downloads back in the day and I was really hyped!

https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Idea_Slask_Wroclaw_Am...

https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Lotos_VBW_Clima_Gdyni...

(Unfortunately they turned out not very future-proof; I used sponsor-based names and logos and sponsors are long gone; also the once top-European clubs are now barely functioning. Life.)

Those look pretty cool!

What's remarkable is that archive.org apparently embeds some kind of full-on Winamp emulator for demonstrating each skin.

It uses Webamp under the hood, which is pretty impressive on it's own.

https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

Winamp skins can also be used in Audacious.

And XMMS and qmmp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmmp#Features

I wish I could still compile XMMS from ports on FreeBSD. It seems to have been removed because glib12 is obsolete.

Thanks for letting me know about QMMP. Looks like it can be built from ports: https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/qmmp-qt5

This really kicks the llamas ass. Thanks.

Whips. Not kicks. Jeez, dude. :)

<Slapping forehead>. Yes, that's it!

Cool! I found the skin I made way back when, https://archive.org/details/winampskin_SpyAMP_Professional_E...

cool, the skin I made in high school made it in the archive good memories https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Apogee

I am certain I used this skin way way WAY back in the day! Thanks for making it and bringing back good memories!

great design!

I find it sad skins for modern widget toolkits and desktop environments are much less numerous and seemingly much harder to make. It was so simple and cool with WinAmp. Why can't we do it this way today?

Branding. Winamp was in a unique era where companies were just happy to have their software be used, and everything wasn’t about growing/expanding a brand for eventual sale to a megacorp.

I don't understand how does this particular thing prevent people from making more Qt and GTK themes though.

Always worth a follow on twitter for a daily dose of these https://twitter.com/winampskins

Why is this so heart warming to see, even though I wasn't a Winamp user. Skinnable software needs revival, we should let users have all the fun they can have.

Would be awesome if Spotify had a winamp mode that accepted winamp skins :)

I was just thinking this same thing except for Amazon Music. :)

Does anyone know what kind of UI library Winamp uses? I mean, if it's opensource, we can probably use it to build a lot more fun UIs since it's so "skinable".

The skins were bitmaps and all the controls had a fixed size and mostly-fixed position, I think, so it wasn't a very sophisticated theming engine.

That's true of Winamp 2, which was the most popular major version. Its skins were, as you say, basically just bundles of image files that were used to override the built-in assets.

On the other hand, Winamp 3 was a complete rewrite, with a much more flexible theming system based on a custom-designed GUI framework, complete with its own XML-based layout engine and scripting language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi_(software)

Unfortunately, it never really caught on, mainly due to the combination of performance problems and a lack of feature parity.

That's true for winamp 2. For winamp 3 you could pick the design including button positions and the skins got way out of hand.

Win32 API.

You are like 18 years late. Check xmms and Audacious.

"best skin nude skins" - 12 year old me

Is there a Winamp lookalike/workalike that can use these skins on OS X?

Audacious might work: https://audacious-media-player.org/

https://re-amp.ru/

This is why I love HN, fond memories

My favourite WinAmp skin is still Drone. I still use it on my windows box today. It has a great docked mode. WinAmp doesn't work as well on high-dpi screens though, sadly. It's still a solid media player though.

I always preferred good old Winamp Modern[1] and I also still use it on my Windows box. It's just clean and easy to see.

I don't have a high DPI screen, but I seem to remember there being a 2x mode, although I can't find that setting now so maybe I'm imagining it.

[1] https://archive.org/details/WinampSkinPack

Been a while since I last used Winamp, and only skin I remember by name is MetAmpMorphosis, which probably means I used it a lot. Can't find it on the linked Archive page, but here it is: https://www.fimble.com/staver/amp.gif

I remember using Woodamp. That's one variation of it: https://archive.org/details/winampskin_dj-designs_woodamp

It really whips the llama's ass. Ah the nostalgia. I'd cycle through so many and get frustrated and go back to the classic winamp skin.

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