There Is A Winamp Skin Museum
If you dare, there is a place you can go to see what we all got up to in the 90’s and 2000’s, with screenshots of tens of thousands of different custom Winamp skins. If you ever whipped the llama’s ass you might just recognize a few of them, and might even admit to having used one or two of them.
This is the brain child of Jordan Eldredge who delved into the internet archive’s library of Winamp skins, which is a thing that exists to create this huge database of usable skins. You can relive this era because Jordan also created Webamp, a web based version of the old Winamp program which is compatible with all of the skins in his collection. If you are feeling especially brave there is a random button to mash on to bounce through the archives.
If you have no idea what any of this means, you are probably best off continue to live in blissful ignorance and should avoid the site at all costs. On the other hand if you could hear that intro song when you read the title you could consider visiting the site and seeing if any of your old favourites made it in.
As Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN will warn you, this might not be the best idea as some of those old skins are more than a little tasteless, many are much, much worse.
It’s a simple website showing off a whopping 65,681 skins as you scroll down, down, ever down through ancient digital artefacts. But which will you admit to using?
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I LUV Winamp!, those were better days!, when the net still felt free and open. Still have a decent sized collection of only the very best skins
Many good memories of this time, and agree with M on the net feeling open then.
I first used Winamp on an AMD 5×86-133 OC’d to 160 MHz – just fast enough to play 128 kbps MP3’s and do some other basic stuff in Windows..
You had me at ‘tasteless’.
Im still using Winamp !
Did they ever get an official RealPlayer Plugin? I remember that being important once upon the long long ago far away time.
Also, after a quick google, REAL PLAYER STILL IS A THING?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? wow
Oh. That’s a blast from the past!
I remember spending hours downloading music from all sorts of sketchy places. Organizing them into folders and playlists – and getting all the metadata defined correctly – was a major nightmare.
I do look back on this time with some great memories. But honestly. Paying a few bucks a month for a music service is just soooo much more convinient…