Winamp skins (and other dead artforms)

[Sofly]

Oh hey hi

For a long time now i've been using WACUP as my main (and practically only) music player, and i absolutely love it; how you can toy around with each window, the ammount of options it has, the radio library and, of course, the skins

I've been downloading the skins i use now from the Winamp Skin Museum, since it's practically the only place on the web that archives that specific thing, however, there's one thing that annoys me quite a bit



My music taste and the fact that i like when Winamp covers my entire screen aside, you can clearly see that the skins only affect the main 3 windows, and this wasn't (necessarily) laziness from the skin creator

A lot of skins in the museum are like that, mainly because it wasn't up until later releases that winamp allowed users to change more than those 3 windows

So i thought "You know what?, i'm gonna make my own skin, i'll make it consistent across every window so that i won't be annoyed anymore, how hard could it be?", turns out, trying to cannonball into an art form with the best sources being sites that haven't been touched since 2008... turns out it can be really hard

Now,

[MrsMoe]

Oh my god, thank you so much for this! I didn't grow up with Webamp (we always used Microsoft Music Player.....with them funky psychedelic colors and everything) but I love early internet stuff, so I always wanted to use it. I tried downloading some other recreation of it, but it would never work on my computer. This one's working great!

[TheFrugalGamer]

I agree, WACUP is great, and I LOVE that it supports old skins! There's a zipped up tutorial on skinning floating around on the internet that I used when I did mine (which you can download here), but I can't remember where I found it. I'll have to start up my other laptop and see where I got it.

The best way I found to get the skinning right, though, was to work on it while I had the skin loaded into WACUP and then hit refresh (F5) to see what changed. Eventually, by trial and error, I was able to figure out where everything was and was supposed to be.

[SilkSkull]

WACUP is amazing! I agree, I would love to see a resurgence in winamp skins that fit the more modern layout (old winamp skins hold a special place in my heart but man they are smaller than I'd like) I'm currently trying to find a good piece of software and a good tutorial to learn how to make skins!

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

QMMP also supports Winamp Skins and is FLOSS :).
My favorite player was Foobar2k, though.

[Sofly]

(which you can download here)

Oh it looks amazing, i'll be taking a look at it, thanks for sharing!

Also

There's a zipped up tutorial on skinning floating around on the internet that I used when I did mine [...]but I can't remember where I found it. I'll have to start up my other laptop and see where I got it.

That would really help me, most of the skinning tutorials i found are quite old, files and images are missing, and the likes; if you end up coming across it, please let me know (no pressure of course)

[aztralsea]

Ooh, this looks really cool. I'd love to learn about this (it reminds me I need to get back into 3ds theme making, I like making skins for software that isn't meant to look particularly pretty)

[TheFrugalGamer]

Ok, I cannot for the LIFE of me figure out where I got my tutorial files. I think it was via the old Winamp forums, but right now Cloudflare is blocking everything from that site for some reason, and this is exactly why I hate Cloudflare so much. So for now I've just zipped up and uploaded the files I used to my own webspace. There's also an installer for the Winamp Skin Developer program, but I didn't actually use it myself. But it's there in case you're interested:

https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/src/Winamp-Skin-Tutorial.zip

There are also a huge number of links to tutorials and such on that forum thread, but since Cloudflare is being stupid, you'll have to access it via the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230603071902/https://forums.winamp.com/forum/skinning-and-design/modern-skins/254249-winamp-skin-development-pack-5-9-2022-08-22

I hope that helps!

EDIT: Ok, I found another thread from the WACUP forums that was also helpful. There are a ton of links here too:

https://getwacup.com/community/index.php?topic=307.0

[Sofly]

Ok, I cannot for the LIFE of me figure out where I got my tutorial files. I think it was via the old Winamp forums, but right now Cloudflare is blocking everything from that site for some reason, and this is exactly why I hate Cloudflare so much. So for now I've just zipped up and uploaded the files I used to my own webspace. There's also an installer for the Winamp Skin Developer program, but I didn't actually use it myself. But it's there in case you're interested:

https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/src/Winamp-Skin-Tutorial.zip

There are also a huge number of links to tutorials and such on that forum thread, but since Cloudflare is being stupid, you'll have to access it via the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230603071902/https://forums.winamp.com/forum/skinning-and-design/modern-skins/254249-winamp-skin-development-pack-5-9-2022-08-22

I hope that helps!

EDIT: Ok, I found another thread from the WACUP forums that was also helpful. There are a ton of links here too:

https://getwacup.com/community/index.php?topic=307.0

Oh i'm sure this will be useful, thanks a lot for taking the time to look for it <3

[TheFrugalGamer]

Oh i'm sure this will be useful, thanks a lot for taking the time to look for it <3

No problem! Always happy to help people rediscover old software