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
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 that was the one to submit is beyond me.
Hey! I run the museum, and these stories of people finding things they created and thought had not survived, are so fun to read. Also, your skin is… incredible.
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.
Loading it from the URL on the page linked below, it mostly works! Impressed that most of the animations came across.
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 https://blog.panic.com/facing-forward/)
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”.
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".
So just fork it!
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.
Nullsoft TV was wild. I didn't even read any changelog or announcement, to me it was just there one day and it blew my mind. Like some other tech, it was maybe just to early, and not marketed properly.
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).
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...
I used Sonique for a while because when I downloaded Winamp the demo said “it really whips the llama’s ass!” and I was afraid my parents would take away my internet access if they heard such a scandalous thing.
Yes! I loved Sonique (and listening to Sonique[1] through it). It was my media player of choice. Personally, I liked its skins more than Winamp.
What a time! Technology felt exciting and so I was (and still am, honestly) an avid fan of Megaman Battle Network. Wild how that series predicted much of tech today.
Yes I was also team Sonique at that time, the skins were cooler and animated, with 3 sizes IIRC. I moved to winamp when it died I can't remember why, was bought maybe?
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 :'(
How is it that the Winamp 2.x visualizations from like 1999 are more badass than any music player I can think of today? I had no idea Webamp existed until today and now I'm thinking through how to make it my full-time music player.
Personally I liked very much the more standard car-DIN-form factor visual plugins. They could also be stacked with separate equalizer or playlist controls.
Readit News
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 that was the one to submit is beyond me.
https://skins.webamp.org/skin/7c0eec4cef92c0c801f4218cee83ca...
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)
Loading it from the URL on the page linked below, it mostly works! Impressed that most of the animations came across.
stephango.com/impulse
I still miss controlling my music through a little rocket-bike I drew. That was fun.
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".
So just fork it!
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 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...
It did have cool skins.
What a time! Technology felt exciting and so I was (and still am, honestly) an avid fan of Megaman Battle Network. Wild how that series predicted much of tech today.
—
[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0CuO2ZpqkBM
https://images.app.goo.gl/XY3baSW3ZRtwZcSf7
I can't remember the name though.