In January of 2021 I was exploring the corpus of Skins I collected for the Winamp Skin Museum and found some that seemed corrupted, so I decided to explore them. Winamp skins are actually just zip files with a different file extension, so I tried extracting their files to see what I could find.
This ended up leading me down a series of wild rabbit holes.
I’m not going to spoil any of this.
I thought everyone knew that winamp supported zip files for skin compression. the zip files are just renamed to be able to be recognized in windows since windows does not use metadata for file-association but the file ending.
The archive contains (if proper) image files and three text files.
Incredible – what a great story! (Thanks for not spoiling).
Interesting choice of programming language. He wrote the code in TypeScript (see the last screenshot, notice the files with the .ts extension).
People who create skins, have always confused me. I used a skin generator once and it was fine. The default skin was fine. I never really cared that much about what winamp looked like.
Because you were not kewl.
Wait. You really find it confusing that other humans have different tastes/needs/personalities than yours?
Wow. Winamp that is a name I hadn’t heard in a while. Childhood memories from a more civilized simpler time.
Interesting read.