The program was famous for its customisable skins, with users able to choose. Though The Silence v5 and MassAMP are our two favorite Winamp skins, we’re wondering what your faves are. Launched in 1997, Winamp was the preferred media player for millions of millennials in the early days of the internet. MassAMP’s combination of blacks, greys and blues still retained that kooky quality offered by The Silence v5, while offering a completely different set of aesthetics that still gave me the spooky feel I was going for.
#WINAMP SKIN SKIN#
I also liked pairing a skin called MassAMP with another Alien desktop theme simply called Aliens the Movie. So, here’s how my desktop would often look growing up, when I combined The Silence v5 with a desktop theme dubbed Alien ’97 Commemoration.Īwesome huh? This wasn’t the only Winamp skin I was fond of. I love/loved Alien and Aliens, so finding an awesome desktop theme with a matching Winamp skin to go with all the other stuff going on in my room all those years was just gravy. Plus, usually I paired it with a matching Alien desktop theme. Not only did it sport an awesome green/black color combination, but everything down to the font at the top of skin made it look eerie. Though Winamp has plenty of awesome skins, my tastes led me to develop a love for two Winamp skins in particular. Picking an appropriate desktop theme to match with the Winamp skin I chose was also a must. I’d often go with a skin that would match the hue given off by one of my lamps. Picking a Winamp skin was part of this customization process. I made a habit of tricking my room out with lava lamps, candles and incense to go along with whatever Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd or song/playlist I was listening to at the time. Growing up, I not only developed a love for Winamp and its skins, but I also got into a bunch of other stuff you wouldn’t expect from a kid in the 90s and 2000s. That includes Winamp, the media player that’s been around since 1997, which offers its users the ability to personalize the player with user-created skins, along with a bevy of other features, including MP3 and CD ripping. I have an affinity for the 90s like few others do.
There’s metal, anime, minimalism, 8bit, psychedelics, and every stop in between. In what feels like an early social media and art phenomena, everyone had their Winamp styled in their own special way.Ī scroll through the Winamp Skin Museum is a shot of nostalgia and a kind of archeological dig for early clues of the ever-evolving internet aesthetic. Winamp allowed you to customize and share the player interface. Ask anyone who was around the internet at the time and the first thing that will pop to mind is the skins.
#WINAMP SKIN WINDOWS#
Before that, you were stuck with either Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, neither of which worked all that well.Īs Ars Technica explains, “none of those players could, in the mid-1990s, do something as basic as playlists, much less visualizations, and custom skins, nor were they as tightly and efficiently programmed as Winamp.” And there it is. The music player was initially released in 1997 and acquired by AOL for nearly $100 million in 1999.
But before iTunes, there was one choice for all your MP3 needs: Winamp. IPods were a big destination for much of that downloaded music.
Of course, you could buy music on iTunes, but the tides didn’t really start to turn to paying for music until streaming services like Spotify combined with the power of the new wave of smartphones that emerged with the arrival of the iPhone in 2008. After that, the next wave of P2P music services was led by names LimeWire, Morpheus, and BearShare. Napster was born in 1999 and was effectively gone by the end of 2001. Think back to the early-2000s internet and music is sure to play a big role in your memories.
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