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If you were an early Internet kid you'll recall a little app called WinAmp that was, in short, the best MP3 player ever made ever. The little program looked like skeuomorphic stereo receiver with a full range of equalizer sliders and included an important MP3 that explained WinAmp's primary mission: whipping the llama's ass.
A programmer named Jordan Eldredge has created an homage to WinAmp in JavaScript. The widget allows you to create a standalone music player on any web page and it can be styled with themes straight out of WinAmp history. You can try it out here and download the code here.
"The original inspiration was a realization that Winamp skins were implemented in a very similar way to CSS sprites," said Eldredge. "I spent many hours as a teenager playing with Winamp skins. In fact, it was the first constructive creative work I did on a computer."
The emulator uses the Web Audio API to simulate almost everything WinAmp could do in its original incarnation.
Story at TechCrunch
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @02:54AM (5 children)
I can't speak to how it ran on your PC (it ran just fine on mine, FWIW), but "gaudy" it definitely was not. Not out of the box, at any rate. You had plenty of gaudy options to choose from in the many, many skins available, but those were 100% optional. The basic WinAMP UI was pretty vanilla.
Maybe you're thinking of one of the many other audio players that were around at the time. There were plenty of options available and many tended toward gaudy in order to distinguish themselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @03:07AM (3 children)
Might be talking past each other. WinAmp 1 and 2 used basically the same skin (2 was a shinier version of 1), as seen here [wikimedia.org] but WinAmp 3 threw that out the window with modern [wikimedia.org] version. It was so bad that they sort of did a backport of the skin to 3 (which didn't quite look right due to the GUI changes) and then made version 5 (the best parts of 2 + the best parts of 3) default to the "modern" skin but asked on first run if they wanted the "classic" one instead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by chromas on Monday February 12 2018, @05:11AM (2 children)
They skipped 4 so we couldn't have Winamp 4 skins 😢.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @12:17PM (1 child)
I always thought they went to 5 to signify merging the best(?) bits of 2 and 3, since 3 was utter trash to use and bloated. Personally I reverted to 2.91, I still have it installed although I don't use it now.
But your explanation makes more sense.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:29AM
They actually offered up both explanations, but yours was sort of the 'official' one. One cool thing WinAMP does (as does Foobar2000) is read archive files, so when I buttpirate a 'discography' rar, I don't even have to unpack it to load it into the player.
If you want a WinAMP2-alike (with skin support, even), there's XMMS [xmms.org] and several descendants, such as QMMP [ylsoftware.com], Beep Media Player(x) [beep-media-player.org] and Audacious [audacious-media-player.org].
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday February 12 2018, @06:40AM
QCD, later Quintessential Media Player. Still use it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek