The Winamp Skin Museum is a beautiful homage to an iconic piece of software:
One of [Winamp's] most beloved features was the ability to personalize its interface with thousands of custom skins made by devoted artists — and someone has finally given us a chance to relive this experience in all of its glory.
[...] "The Winamp Skin Museum is an attempt to build a fast, searchable, and shareable, interface for the collection of Winamp Skins amassed on the Internet Archive," says Facebook engineer a Jordan Eldredge, who created the project.
[...] Putting aside the truly incredible volume of skins available, one of my favorite things about the Skin Museum is its live preview user interface that lets you preview each skin as if you've already installed it on Winamp. You can even play the iconic "It really whips the llama's ass" intro by the mysterious DJ Mike Llama.
Needless to say, each skin is available to download if you're feeling like giving Winamp a fresh look.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @01:16PM
He had some skin in the game.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @02:32PM (3 children)
And remember, XMMS uses Winamp skins so it isn't a dead thing yet, you can still use those skins!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @03:21PM (2 children)
Also Audacious uses Winamp skins.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday September 07 2020, @04:05PM
> Also Audacious uses Winamp skins.
Indeed, one of the main reasons I still use it. Gives quite the Nostalgia hit (Seconded only to an old CDR with Winamp 2.6 and some MP3s of the era that I found in my attic recently)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @04:48PM
I downloaded like a dozen skins from here last night just because of this. It's great.
I think there are a few other programs that support Winamp skins too, but I'm using Audacious.
The site having a fully working player is also really nice, because more than a few skins are a bit iffy to actually use or break in ugly ways when you do things like minimize a panel or move anything around, so you can get a proper test-drive to see if you'd actually want to use the skin or not. Just ridiculously cool.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Monday September 07 2020, @04:24PM (7 children)
It belongs in a museum. But I still have it installed on my computers, winamp 2.95, it works fine. It does all the things I want a music player to do. I'm not sure why I would want some other giant software package to play music. The player and all the plugins and skins (I use escalate.wsz) I want are just about 1.5Mb, all the settings are stored in one .ini file instead of nestling all over the register. So why would I update? There isn't going to be any upgrade needs to play mp3 files etc.
(Score: 2) by xorsyst on Monday September 07 2020, @04:46PM (2 children)
Using it right now, very latest version with "Windows modern" skin as I've never liked weird skins :) The only thing it's missing (for me) over other software is an opus plugin that supports album art. I've tried so many other players, but always come back to winamp as something that just works right and has the right options.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @08:55PM
Exactly this.
Even the visuals plugins are, still, pretty close to top-notch! Turns out those old cycle-wise hacker aesthetes wrote tight code that renders beautifully.
(Mostly - milkdrop! - but not always - lightning!)
The filesize of 2MB is like, right, this is an audio codec not a lunar mission.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday September 07 2020, @10:06PM
I don't like weird skins either, in fact the use of the word "beautiful" in the title seems odd to me, considering how ugly some of those skins are, but it takes all sorts.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Monday September 07 2020, @11:33PM
Yep - still my daily driver, with spyamp skin. Nothing else I've tried is nearly as convenient.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday September 08 2020, @03:53AM (2 children)
Same here. Only reason I upgraded from 2.6x (whatever came with Netscape 3) to 2.9x is because of support for the FLAC plugin. Only reason I have 5.666 on later systems is cuz newer Windows won't play nice with 2.9x anymore.... but I have it set to the old default classic look. Perfectly functional, non-intrusive, and zero trouble. And is completely portable.
One of the small annoyances with linux is that I can't find a proper WinAmp substitute. Some get close, but either have weird issues (what's with Qmmp not preventing system sleep?) or don't quite hit it. Finally gave up and just use WinAmp on XP in a VM.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2020, @07:44PM (1 child)
Oh shit 2.9 does FLAC? I couldn't find a plugin. Well I guess I'd better upgrade... two decades later...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 09 2020, @01:24AM
LOL, yeah, there's a plugin. Here ya go:
http://doomgold.com/pcstuff/WinAmp/in_flac.dll [doomgold.com]
Put it in the \Plugins directory. There exists an installer but that's all it appears to do.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Informative) by SvenErik on Monday September 07 2020, @06:13PM
Webamp [github.com], a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript, also use Winamp Skins.
"Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only free when it asks nothing." Sir Bertrand Russell
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @08:52PM (2 children)
Ha! Yeah these! I remember downloading dozens of these! Some of them had incredibly unintuitive UIs. It was kind of a game - are the horns and spikes the levels? Are those propellers graphic elements, or interactive? The red snake eye - clicking that is play/pause?
Taught me a lot about art and UI - mostly learning from their mistakes, but still.
I still use Winamp. Sandboxed, of course, because it's riddled with security holes and does still try to call home if the wrong subwindows are opened. And with the default skin, because it's usable in a way that godzilla's face, using nostrils for prev/next, is not. But it's lightning fast, and the UI quirks/bugs (non-resizing 'add new files' window?! etc) aren't the worst.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday September 08 2020, @10:34AM (1 child)
This. Enjoy the nostalgia but, for pity's sake, don't confuse these atrocities with good design (...and if you want art for art's sake then keep it in the visualiser and away from the control panel, for God's sake).
...which, maybe, was the sort of thing that caused the backlash against "skeuomorphic" user interfaces and led to the current horrible trend of flat interfaces. Of course, the "backlash" completely missed the point (the problem wasn't the pseudo-3D - it was that the form failed to suggest the function and that UI designers forgot how important convention and consistency was to the success of GUIs) so we ended up with flat mystery meat instead of 3D mystery meat...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 09 2020, @01:30AM
Good insight. -- Tho I'd rather have the 3D mystery meat than flat featureless brutalism; mystery 3D is no more confusing and far less ugly.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 07 2020, @11:03PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JntDcqOxMsM [youtube.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2020, @11:34AM
...is because it is perfect. I still use it to this day. I've used dozens of media players on Linux and Windows. For music, nothing beats winamp