Winamp's historic skins get their own online museum

Around the turn of the millenium, the coolest way to listen to music was with your own personalised version of Winamp. — skins.webamp.org/dpa

Once upon a time, when people still streamed music from their hard drives, there was a piece of software that almost everyone used to listen to MP3s: Winamp.

The best thing about this was that you could change the look of the interface – something you can't do with most streaming services like Spotify.

Many of these Winamp "skins" are now finally getting their rightful place in history books with the Winamp Skin Museum.

On this website, you do nothing but scroll through tens of thousands of these highly personalised Winamp statement pieces, and can even try them out to play songs.

The variety of skins was – and still is – so massive that the Californian developer Jordan Eldredge wanted to create a monument to it.

The site accesses the Winamp skin collection of the Internet Archive and presents a virtually infinite wallpaper of scrollable skins, all tightly packed together.

Eldredge has even made the skins fully functional, meaning you can click on them, play songs and tune the EQ, just like in the old days, with 13 sample tracks to choose from.

Click on "Open Files" – the eject button – and you can even play your own MP3s, should there still be some of these relics on your computer.

And if you have exciting Winamp skins that are not yet in the collection, you can submit them. Just click on the upload button with the arrow at the top right of the page. – dpa