Winamp Skin Museum And The Wonderful Chaos Of Late-’90s Computing

  • AUTHOR: anam
  • POSTED ON: September 12, 2020

Whenever individuals of a certain generation come across Winamp skins, they fall deeper into a catatonic state. There’s just something about them that takes us back to the late ’90s when the user interface used to be customizable and choosing a song from a playlist used to be like a battle against jumbled file names such as LINKIN_PORK-IN%THE%END(HQ).mp3.

If nostalgia hits you hard with the above description, you’ll definitely enjoy the Winamp Skin Museum. It consists of an unlimited scrolling collection of 6,000 Winamp skins, searchable and fully engaging. They also have a default playlist that has the “Llama Whippin’ intro”. You can even run audio files from your computer if you have any.

Previously, the skins were gathered on the Internet Archive but assembled into this latest format by Facebook engineer Jordan Eldredge.

He tweeted that he’s still taking collections for the project if people are willing to donate. He explained the collection as recording “an iconic moment in internet art history.”

Well, he’s not wrong. It carries all the artistic value of a national art gallery, especially focused on late-90’s aesthetics.

You will find anime skins, gaming skins, communist skins, sci-fi skins, artist-specialized skins and a treasure of unspeakable vibes in between on display.

The only setback of this museum is the format that doesn’t support the stranger skins to transform the size and shape of Winamp’s various elements.

With Winamp skins, you will feel like you have more control over your computers as you can customize not only Winamp skins but also your whole desktop, and obviously your music collection.

Updated September 12, 2020
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