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Winamp Skin Museum

94 pointsby sarah-robiintoday at 12:58 PM53 commentsview on HN

Comments

zthrowawaytoday at 2:58 PM

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.

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captbaritonetoday at 3:35 PM

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/

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nivalstoday at 3:35 PM

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

mghackerladytoday at 3:40 PM

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

marginalia_nutoday at 3:26 PM

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.

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VikingCodertoday at 2:41 PM

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

goodwillhuntingtoday at 1:12 PM

OMG, you just catapulted me back to being 12 again!

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jihadjihadtoday at 2:14 PM

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.

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a34729ttoday at 2:31 PM

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.

hobscuretoday at 2:07 PM

It took me a while to realize that they are fully working if you click on it.

rebyntoday at 2:29 PM

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!

Getchownedtoday at 4:57 PM

Winamp is a blast from the past!

coreyburnsdevtoday at 3:55 PM

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

wpmtoday at 3:35 PM

The Mr. Bean one is amazing

datakantoday at 2:01 PM

The first internet memes were just winamp skins

deadbabetoday at 2:50 PM

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.

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red-iron-pinetoday at 1:03 PM

something something slaps llama something

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tjpnztoday at 3:45 PM

Why can't we have nice things anymore?

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