I know I made a bunch of terrible barely functioning Winamp skins as a kid. I could not remember for the life of me if I had ever submitted any of them to Winamp.com<p>This inspired me to do a little research. Sure enough, this unusable piece of garbage is made entirely from my like 16 year old baby face from 20+ years ago. Why I thought <i>that</i> was the one to submit is beyond me.<p><a href="https://skins.webamp.org/skin/7c0eec4cef92c0c801f4218cee83ca70/donatJAMPv1.wsz/" rel="nofollow">https://skins.webamp.org/skin/7c0eec4cef92c0c801f4218cee83ca...</a>
Love this project and I've been following 'winamp skins bot' on mastodon and Twitter previously for a while. Fun blast to the past: <a href="https://indieweb.social/@winampskins@botsin.space" rel="nofollow">https://indieweb.social/@winampskins@botsin.space</a><p>Potentially a small correction, I think the 'new' skins were introduced with Winamp 3 not 5. 5 was released because 3 was disliked, and incorporated both features from 2 and 3 (2+3 = 5)
OMG! I have been hoping Jordan would work on this. It's the first time I have been able to re-experience a skin made in 2004 called Impulse. I can't even remember when I last used it.<p>Loading it from the URL on the page linked below, it mostly works! Impressed that most of the animations came across.<p>stephango.com/impulse
I wonder how many of these skins are ported from other apps. I'm pretty sure the big green face shipped with SoundJam, and the one after it is definitely from Audion. (see <a href="https://blog.panic.com/facing-forward/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.panic.com/facing-forward/</a>)<p>I still miss controlling my music through a little rocket-bike I drew. That was fun.
> In the end, I had to admit that my approach was stalled out and his approach, while different than my own, had forward momentum. I opted to just try to get out of his way and “let him cook”.<p>I commend that dude for doing that. Too many cool github projects just slowly die in a half-baked state because the author moved on, but also doesn't accept PRs because they're either completely unresponsive or just don't want a different style/approach in "their baby".<p>So just fork it!<p>Well that's what everybody does then, with the result that there are now 34 forks with different features, Bugfixes, often to the same couple issues, because of course none of the people tried to talk to each other before hitting the fork button. So you come in and try to fix this by creating another fork and merging as much stuff from the other forks as possible. Now there are 35 forks...
I reviewed 1000s of skins and plugins at nullsoft before aol so many of them tie to a time in my life. Feels odd seeing them sometimes. Nullsoft tv was the most fun back in the day. Long before twitch and justin.tv even YouTube who now uses the parts of the old on2 encoder.
Does anyone remember Sonique? It had freeform skins years before Winamp 3, and I remember being fascinated by them. The player itself wasn't that great, and it always paled in popularity compared to Winamp, but those skins made it stand out like nothing else at the time (late 90s).<p>I do miss that era of computing, beyond just nostalgia. The web was still in its infancy, and the dot-com bubble was booming. There was a huge momentum of experimentation in tech, as trends haven't yet been strictly defined. We had all kinds of quirky software and hardware. MS Bob/BonziBuddy/Clippy, Tamagotchis, MP3 (CD) players, P2P software, PDAs, beepers, early cellphones, etc. When smartphones came along all of this got consolidated into a single device, for better or worse, and the experimentation happened digitally in the form of apps. That was fun for a few years, but the experience wasn't the same. Now there's a growing sentiment of dissatisfaction towards these devices, and we're finding that technology is only driving us further apart. Anyway, old man yells at cloud...
Apropo of nothing, for all of Spotify's UX changes, I feel like skins and visualization of the music are missing from their desktop/web client. For desktop they've taken away the full-window playlist view in favor of a sidebar-only playlist. That's one thing I miss about being able to use Winamp or Windows Media Player to play music on a desktop :'(
I remember my two favorite skins: working iPod 4G and iPod Nano 1st gen. With functional scrollwheel and menus.<p>Was it really since Winamp 5? IIRC, I installed them on Winamp 3.<p>Edit: I just fell into a nostalgia spiral reading Winamp forums. It still has posts from 2000.