Long before Spotify and plenty of other modern music streaming apps and services redefined our taste in music with their AI-based recommendations, there was a time when listening to music on a personal computer was considered no less than a luxury.
If you grew up in the early ‘90s and had access to a computer even before Orkut and Facebook became part of your daily vocabulary, you must have tinkered around with Winamp, a music player that was initially released for Microsoft’s Windows operating system in the first half of the year 1997.
Winamp Skin Museum
A Facebook engineer Jordan Eldredge has compiled a nearly endless collection of more than 65,000 Winamp skins. You can search for and scroll through your favorite skins and guess what, they are fully interactive!
All these skins carry a default music playlist including the “Llama Whippin’ Intro.” And believe it or not, you can even load your audio files into it. The skins were previously collected on the Internet Archive but thanks to Eldredge, they are now accessible in a whole new format.
Do you also want to contribute a custom skin to the Winamp Skin Museum? Because now you can! Eldredge also describes the Winamp Skin Musem as capturing “an iconic moment in internet art history.”
Finally ready to share the Winamp Skin Museumhttps://t.co/ryFQNj4yGd
Infinite scroll through 65k Winamp skins with instant search and in-browser interactive preview pic.twitter.com/JbCbtiFAw2
— Jordan Eldredge (@captbaritone) September 3, 2020
Apart from letting users load their favorite songs with a rather odd naming style, there is one more thing about Winamp that still stands out – UI customizability. For those of you who remember (and I’m sure you do), Winamp skins are as popular as the music player itself.
With the advent of music streaming services focusing extensively on the mobile experience, the popularity of Winamp on PCs and laptops started to crumble in the last few years. However, love and nostalgia for Winamp skins still continue to remain unaffected, especially for those who once used Winamp in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.
Read: How does Webamp online music player compare to the popular Winamp?
The Winamp Skin Museum has a whole host of skins to choose from. You can search for specific categories such as gaming, anime, sci-fi, etc. You can also search for particular artists. I searched for Mario and to my surprise, there were a dozen skins related to Mario.
Are you already feeling nostalgic? Do you want us to take you back to the golden era of the Winamp music player? Simply visit skins.webamp.org.
