Winamp Skin Museum

I'll have to spend some time trying to find it if it's on there, but I had one at one point called "Pimeer" where the text was rendered in such a way to look like a Pioneer stereo. Fooled me at the time.

captbaritone6• 20 days ago

Looks like that was a "modern" Winamp skin, which are unfortunately not displayed in the museum: https://winampheritage.com/skin/pimeer-v2-2-ultime/142664

jihadjihad2• 15 days ago

Wow, indeed, this is it! Great sleuth work, detective!

rebyn• 20 days ago

Yesterday someone put a Winamp-vibe radio player on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.54 LCD. Now if only these skins can be ported to that too. I’m in awe!

a34729t• 20 days ago

I always though the skin model would be a great UX paradigm for an OS to follow. Pity we have gone the opposite direction and it is turtlenecks and "user delight" all the way down.

VikingCoder• 20 days ago

I don't want to use it, but I would laugh if someone made Visual Studio Code look like Winamp...

deadbabe3• 20 days ago

If someone is looking for an insane project, please make Winamp player as a tactile real world physical device, with all the same features. Maybe with a little E-ink display too.

captbaritone6• 20 days ago

This is an idea that 3D artists have been playing with for years. I've collected 63 different artists imaginings of this here: https://jordaneldredge.com/physical-winamp/

deadbabe3• 20 days ago

…yea, so why doesn’t someone build one?

geephroh• 20 days ago

Take my money!

netsharc• 20 days ago

E-ink would be too modern, needs an analog matrix display, like https://i.imgur.com/wgnCKrh.png (but miniaturized).

zthrowaway2• 20 days ago

The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.

altmanaltman• 20 days ago

I wrote a blog on this focusing on the frutiger aero style and how/why we moved from making the desktop look like a real/character-filled space to the whole "best ui is no ui" and flat design thinking. Fortunately, it seems like style is coming back in... style.

The blog post: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/genz-and-frutiger-aero/

ktosobcy2• 20 days ago

I like the customization of the OS but I hate when the app developers are feeling creative and can't fit into (my OS of choice) Look&Feel :/

DaanDL4• 20 days ago

The thing is, back then, it worked, because every app looked completely different from each other, and so it was a clusterfuck anyway :-D

cyril_st_john• 20 days ago

One of the great things about Winamp 2 skins in particular is how simple the format is - basically just a bunch of BMPs in a zip file. Pretty much anyone could make one. You didn't need any special software or code knowledge to inspect an existing skin and see how the pieces fit together. You could make one in MSPaint if that's all you had, as I did for my first couple skins.

(There were also a few INI-style config files, mainly to define colors of dynamic things like text. For most skins you would just need to copy the defaults and maybe change a few color hex codes.)

captbaritone6• 20 days ago

Author of the Museum here. Agreed! That was true for "classic" Winamp skins which are what is shown here. I also took a stab at "modern" Winamp skins which were fully dynamic and scriptable and wasn't quite able to bring that to the browser. I did a writeup of that work here: https://jordaneldredge.com/webamp-modern/

panzi2• 20 days ago

Yeah, back in the day I made myself one from screenshots of the in-game GUI of Chrono Trigger. It wasn't very good, but hey, it was mine!

DaanDL4• 20 days ago

It was really wild, out of the box you would get: sound themes, color themes, icon themes, startup sounds, wallpaper themes, different loading animations, am I forgetting something? :-D

amarant• 20 days ago

Custom, sometimes animated, mouse pointers!

I remember them for rendering my computer almost unusable by eating up nearly all of the available compute... But my gosh it was pretty!

pooploop64• 20 days ago

Custom css email themes aka "stationary", which other people can see on emails from you. These are still a very prominent part of email but I don't see anyone expressing their individuality with it anymore. It feels like a huge blast from the past to get one with any kind of theme that doesn't look like something a bank would use.

There was also "smileys" but I never used those because smileys were considered tacky. Yet it's the thing that stuck harder than anything else.

atonse• 20 days ago

Omarchy seems to be doing a really good job with just that. But like you said, Linux.

cosmic_cheese3• 20 days ago

On the Mac side of the fence, Kaleidoscope schemes were even more capable in terms of deep desktop theming, giving the artist full control of just about everything (window chrome, controls, icons, fonts, desktop pattern/picture). Even better, they didn’t require any installation step: double-clicking a scheme file was all that was needed to radically transform your desktop. Nothing matches its capability and ease of use even today.

Artists did some wild stuff with it. A few fun examples:

https://macthemes.garden/themes/c7005c70d044-Wrecked-Angles/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/2852d54a73a3-Windows-98/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/0219829f8a23-HolySmoke/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/8405ec7f05e4-MacPlaza/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/92b39d18db52-MammaMia/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/9a95c2efce50-Scanline/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/64bd1a86e9e6-Onyx/

zthrowaway2• 20 days ago

Wow that's cool! I had no idea about these back then.

eitally• 20 days ago

This was also true on the comms apps sides. Back in the days of ICQ & Jabber, there was a huge ecosystem of chat apps, many of which (like my favorite, Miranda IM -- which has been revived for Windows as Miranda NG: https://miranda-ng.org/about/) were also fully customizable.

1gr14• 20 days ago

I remember how "true" guys did their own Miranda from scratch (which as I remember even ICQ or Jabber was needed to be installed manually as plugins). But most of us (me also) used ready builds, which was also awesome

sharts• 19 days ago

Cheetah Chat!

ErroneousBosh• 20 days ago

You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back.

All of these Winamp skins work perfectly well in Audacious.

Go on. Do it. It's not like you were doing anything else. Get it installed.

panzi2• 20 days ago

Even Linux DEs have it less now than they used to, but there are renewed efforts to bring a better universal theming engine to KDE at least.

It's more difficult now than it was back then for KDE I guess, because with Qt Widgets, QML, and Plasma you basically have three times as much to support in a theme/theming engine. And then back in the day better KDE themes also provided themes for Gtk, so that Gtk apps integrated nicely. How many concurrent Gtk versions are now used that you would all have to support? And sometimes (especially non-Qt programs) take some colors from the theme, but not others, breaking everything when you want to customize your theme (you get e.g. black text on black background). So I appreciate the renewed effort, but I'm not holding my breath.

jimt1234• 20 days ago

Maybe it's me, but I've kinda lost the desire to personalize my OS/apps. It's probably because I'm older and lazier now, and I have other things to do now. But also, I feel like it's not as fun to tinker with this stuff anymore. Everything is so connected now, I feel like all my OS/apps are watching me - like, if I added a Buffy bitmap to the background, I'm gonna get some sort of notification: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer is owned by The Walt Disney Company. You are violating the terms of service of your app. Blah blah blah." I'm probably just old and paranoid, but honestly, it just doesn't feel the same these days.

The Museum is great, though! Thanks!

zen928• 20 days ago

I think its commonly cited how we "used to have so much customization" and now we dont, and i see that more as an issue with motivation over missing proper functionality. Android phones and iphones to an extent are extremely customizable in almost every facet of how you use the phone, and yet outside of social influencers selling an aesthetic no one really cares to take the time to customize. Even when entire theming libraries are available to swap fonts icons colors window styles etc at a tap, even navigating and selecting a pre-made is out of the minds of most people. Despite the availability, there will still be calls to "how phones used to have personality and style" and refer to old hello kitty flip phone designs, despite being able to accomplish everything it does on a modern device without needing to buy a specific piece of hardware to achieve it.

Why? Because I dont think most people ever actually cared about it. It became a "cool thing" to customize your MySpace or winamp, not something actually motivated by individual user behavior. The people calling for more customization options ignore the plethora of options available because what theyre wanting is a cultural shift, but everyone's attention is so divided that it feels like a waste of time to devote to something that doesnt bother you. You "miss" what you had despite never doing any work to understand it.

SoleilAbsolu• 20 days ago

One thing I loved about WinAmp was its ability to use audio plugins that were if not full VST (a Steinberg-originated format), a very close VST subset. So I could use the same plugins I would in my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for music production to apply custom EQs beyond the built-in graphic EQ, compression/limiting, and lowpass/highpass filtering.

I had a job where I was stuck at a desk 4-6 hours a day and this let me have the best possible sound out of cheapo soundcard and speakers. This made a significant improvement to my work experience and state of mind. Allowing standard plugins to snap-in is a brilliant move, and lets those who have the time/need to do so without the app developer having to spend their energy creating native custom EQ, compressors, etc. This philosophy has carried over to REAPER (Winamp dev Justin Frankel's DAW).

shmeeed• 20 days ago

What I'm missing is the leisure, energy and attention span I had in my teens to care about customizing a program as an end in itself. Back then, Winamp was something you just spent a lot of time with anyway, hearing your newest mp3s and playing with plugins, showing off your cool stuff to your buddies... it was a thing.

marginalia_nu2• 20 days ago

Big thing that allowed this degree of personalization and skinning was that everyone was running fairly homogenous display equipment. When you don't need to deal with a whole spectrum of aspect ratios, input affordances, and DPIs, skinning and customization is something you can do in any image editing software.

DaanDL4• 20 days ago

Correct, and the same goes for webpages, they were built for 15" and/or 17".

cosmic_cheese3• 20 days ago

It could still be relatively simple if the industry could agree on a few standard DPIs for screens. While still a substantial amount of extra work, raster images with clean 1x, 2x, and maybe 3x variants are a lot more flexible and easier to produce something good looking with than trying to fight vector formats that will end up looking “fuzzy” 70% of the time due to lines landing on half-pixels and such.

marginalia_nu2• 20 days ago

Can't really put the toothpaste back in the tube on that one. Too many monitors that are like 30-40% off any clean integer scaling in the wild for that to be viable now.

nivals• 20 days ago

one of the best desktop apps ever made, should be in the software smithsonian along with winzip, netscape, a few others from that era.

wpm• 20 days ago

The Mr. Bean one is amazing

captbaritone6• 20 days ago

Oh! Author of the project here, but not op. Happy to answer any questions.

The code for the Museum as well as the Webamp player that powers the interactive preview can be found here: https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

You can also find a blog post I wrote about the project here: https://jordaneldredge.com/winamp-skin-musuem/

ntoskrnl_exe2• 20 days ago

I have a question: It seems that all the preview PNGs and the WSZ files themselves are fetched from hxxp://webampskins.org. When I go to that website directly, I get redirected to some shady looking website pushing crypto and gambling. Can you give me some background about this?

captbaritone6• 20 days ago

Interesting! I've only ever actively used subdomains of webampskins.org, however during early testing I set a hard coded IPV4 IP as the A name for the root domain. Now it looks like that IP has been handed off to someone else who is hosting a spammy site.

Thanks for flagging, I removed that A name record.

mghackerlady• 20 days ago

The amazing foss music player audacious supports winamp skins in case anyone wants to use these on a modern cross platform program that's actually foss

tjpnz• 20 days ago

Why can't we have nice things anymore?

lysace• 20 days ago

Jony.

coreyburnsdev• 20 days ago

ah, brings back memories. third one from the left was my favourite.

Getchowned• 20 days ago

Winamp is a blast from the past!

dethos• 20 days ago

So many memories. We definitely lost something along the way.

Winamp Skin Museum

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