The way people consume music has come a long way. During the 90s and the early 2000s, for example, songs weren't yet on-demand.
They were shared, but needed to be downloaded. This was when Napster popularized the peer-to-peer file sharing. But after one and another, technology evolves and the internet took off.
Eventually, people stopped carrying MP3 files in CDs and flash drives, simply because everything could be found on the web. Because the world has moved music to cloud-based services with apps like Spotify and others, which more or less reduced piracy, the music players people used to have years back became obsolete.
Winamp was one of the them.
The music player was originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev through their company Nullsoft in 1997. That before they sold it to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014.
But when the internet started kicking, Winamp slowly and steadily diminished its shine. And with poor reception in the early 2000s, Winamp slowly became a relic of the past, despite still living.
Winamp was an iconic piece of software.
What made Winamp unique, is that the software supports plugins and skins, music visualization, playlist, and a media library.
The software is also supported by a large online community.
What made Winamp unique is that, the software is feature-rich yet lightweight. Supported by a large community, it gave the musical experience adorn by millions, capable of capturing the definition of a seminal piece of software.
One of its most beloved features was the ability to personalize its interface with thousands of custom skins made by devoted artists.
The skins are literally bitmap files which change the looks-and-feel of Winamp. As of the year 2000, there were about 3,000 Winamp skins available for download on Winamp's website.
And here, Jordan Eldredge, a programmer and classical singer living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S., has given the internet a chance to again experience using those Winamp skins.
Enter the 'Winamp Skin Museum'.
Eldredge created it to host a massive collection of Winamp skins from the legendary media player. As of the launch, the website allows visitors to browser through its more than 65,000 different skins.
“The Winamp Skin Museum is an attempt to build a fast, searchable, and shareable, interface for the collection of Winamp Skins amassed on the Internet Archive,” said Eldredge, who is also a Facebook engineer, on site site's about section.
When accessing the site at skins.webamp.org/, visitors will be presented with an endless scrolling page that features Winamp skins put together in a grid.
Putting aside the large volume of skins available, The Skin Museum allows users to click on the skin they want, and it will preview them with the user interface of the skin, as if users have installed it on their Winamp.
Users can even play the iconic and memorable "It really whips the llama’s ass" intro by the mysterious DJ Mike Llama.
The site is especially meant for those users of the early days on the internet, at the time when cloud-based services were yet to exist. It was during those brief years that Winamp managed to capture the hearts of more than 60 million users.
And the Winamp Skin Museum here, allows those users to take a trip down the memory lane.