Winamp Skin Museum (Interactive) | Hacker News Reader

Winamp Skin Museum (Interactive)

skins.webamp.org

183 pointslord_sudo46 comments

A nice trip down memory lane. Older HN readers (like myself) will surely recognize and remember many of these skins, and we all know what comes after skins… MilkDrop :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilkDrop

Hint: https://webamp.org/ -- have fun with Milkdrop :)

Thanks! It even does fullscreen on mobile. Also surprisng how well the interface works for me on mobile. No hamburger menus needed to access basuc features, cause it is all there to be seen

Wow!!! Milkdrop on the web, with excellent performance and the ability to load mp3s locally. Thanks for the wasted productivity :-)

I wrote a blog post on the compiler I wrote to help make it fast, in case you are interested: https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-winamps-music-vi...

Thanks for your work, for coding all these and for your interesting blog posts, highly appreciated :-)

I was a fan of Electric Sheep.

I still use MilkDrop to this day!

There was also this 3d sexy Christmas dancers plugin. Remember as a teen was very impressed by the visuals :)

Milkdrop was super impressive.

I was also frequently amazed at the presets the community had made with AVS.

Mister Happy blew my kid mind.

Past related threads:

Winamp Skin Museum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373699 - Sept 2020 (264 comments)

Winamp Skin Museum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371210 - Sept 2020 (3 comments)

Winamp Skin Museum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366172 - Sept 2020 (4 comments)

Author here, thanks for (re)posting!

Happy to answer any questions.

My GtiHub repo for Webamp (the interactive, in-browser Winamp clone) can be found here: https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

Cool. They even included one of the skins I made (search bkaro). That's twenty something years ago.

Site author here. These types of comments make my day. Is this the one? https://skins.webamp.org/skin/ca2270b3513a831fb566b0867b0466...

I've never felt nostalgia from looking at old games, photos, tech I used to own or anything that I can remember. This is a first. Still miss winamp tbh...

Found Woodamp 2 there, probably the most pleasant Winamp skin that I've seen:

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/ffe4cbcdc31388ed51f94d3b4fd8c1...

Let's just agree that Pip-Boy 2000 / Vault-Tec are the best ones: they're stylish and usable. Some hi-tec designs, e.g. ‘Alpine’ or ‘Pioneer’ ones, are very neat, but somehow overly-clean looks felt jarring and empty on Winamp.

Many skins are just picture backgrounds. I stayed with the original ones, as they felt more coherent.

But there are rarities like https://skins.webamp.org/skin/06312f93d7b9499dc5dd0176133d6d...

It feels well designed as it's ready to read, and on theme.

Before that: Searches 'skin museum', very interesting but upsetting images found. Better to click the link in HN. (Yes, I often look for the links myself too see what other things I find on the topic)

They are but they kinda feel like late 90s/early 2000s time capsules. A lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion, FFX, Card Captor Sakura, Magic Knights Rayearth etc.

I recall QMMP on Linux (http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/) supports WinAmp 2x skins.

Going to try a few of these on my Linux box after work!

Very cool! the whole thing could use some zooming in, everything looks very small it todays high DPI displays. Its OK to be a bit pixealted, We've looked at these on 800x600 CRT monitors :)

To me many screen resolutions have gotten too small for comfort. Desktop large real estate is cool but sometimes I would rather switch desktops or run another monitor than squint my eyes to see another tiny window.

This did not happen on mobile devices although they are all also 4k now. I think the main reason being that our fingers aren't any smaller either.

There is a feature in Winamp (as well as QMMP) that lets you double the size of it's UI making your custom skins more legible.

Found titipoco again. I know I have a backup of it on a CD-R but no longer have an optical drive to read them..

I'm in the opposite camp, compensation of high dpi is nice for "main show" screen parts like the active editor in an IDE, but stuff like Winamp is just perfect in an always-on windowshade living in as few millimeters as possible of the titlebar region of the left screen (dunno why it's the left, Winamp has been the left screen for almost two decades)

On topic, where everyone mentions "their" winamp skin: for me, winamp is the pale blue of the inconsistently named trainatron/trinatron. Always on top, always minimized to shade, only expanded to toggle the playlist shade (but usually operated simply by drag&dropping album folders).

One time ordering was broken when windows stopped to supply files in alphabetic order so I had to make a plugin that took care of that (my files are certainly named with padded index prefix). That plugin might have been the most wonky piece of c++ routinely ruining on my system, but it did the job for quite some years.

I think phone OSes just do DPI scaling better, because they've always had to deal with highly heterogeneous physical screen sizes. Desktops were firmly in 96DPI land for quite a while.

I'd wager that if your screen pixels are "too small for comfort" you or your graphics setup hasn't gotten scaling right yet.

There do appear to be +/- zoom controls in the lower right corner of the page (on desktop).

Thanks for pointing that out. I just added it a few weeks ago. I wonder if it’s not visually obvious enough.

Right click -> Options -> Double size, just like in the original program :)

That said, it doesn't seem to center the scaled version in the window in Firefox so it's not very usable.

Meh. On Winamp and anime skins, once I got mp3blaster under Linux and tankoubon collections at MLDonkey/aMule, I stopped caring about appearance and reading all the mangas for true instead of having to wait for the TV schedule.

I had no CBR reader for Linux back in the day, but a script could do the tring well.

Altough Milkdrop was fun under XMMS.

Oh the nostalgia. I loved those anime-themed Winamp skins, which were admittedly of bad quality.

I still can’t understand what exactly people saw (still see) in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Okay, I’ll bite. Even if you just watch the mech battles, and ignore everything else about the plot… they’re pretty entertaining battles!

You have to live in a world where there is no Netflix and no Disney/Pixar yet. Where the standard for mass-media japanimation is Dragon Ball Z. People had to wait for each episode for days if not weeks. At that point in time Ideaki Anno was a name only known to relatively few people, but we knew he could deliver stellar stuff. Evangelion started hyper-well animated and characters resonated with many viewers. Cool music too. The story arc looked promising with dark brooding villains and misteries everywhere. It was really something at the time. Where it ended is another (controversial) story.

Correction: it's Hideaki

robots are cool soundtrack is amazing typography is great

Really? Even now it's still one of my favourites. Apart from the fantastic visual direction, soundtrack, and Anno's characteristic style, I love the way it plays with the viewer's expectations and I admire its authentic treatment of depression (Anno himself suffered from clinical depression at the time, which is reflected in the direction of the story.)

I can imagine coming away from it slightly disappointed if you didn't finish with The End of Evangelion movie, but in my opinion, the final two TV episodes are underrated.

I always preferred k-jofol for its diverse and weirdly shaped skins - well, until someone released a plug-in for XMMS that allowed you to use k-jofol skins for it, some of which were absolutely wild.

Previous discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373699 (694 points, 264 comments)

I remember some of those skins, especially the mass of Fallout ones. Yet I can't see the two I always used.

The nostalgia is great with this one

Wow, what a nostalgia! I wish somebody did this for Rainmeter of the early 2000s

This is fantastic. Also not sure how my browser is not crashing. Well done!

I made a clone in Observable in almost exactly 2 hours. Feel free to fork it and play around! You'll need to spin up a CORS proxy if you fork it, but it's otherwise straightforward from there. Feel free to leave comments here or on the notebook if you have questions!

https://observablehq.com/@iz/winamp

The height was messed up on this, so it got downvoted. It should be ok now lol

Author of the Skin Museum here. The Internet Archive search API supports JSONP, so you should (in theory) be able to use that to avoid the need for a CORs proxy.

Awesome thanks for the tip! I'll check that out. The scattered API docs took some wrangling. I screencapped my work on this and that's what I spent the most time on.

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