I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes

Very interesting article!

  • Menschlicher_Fehler@feddit.orgEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Oh wow, I never heard of the skin archive. This is fantastic.

    I still use Winamp 2.95, with a Pure Pwnage skin I download back in the mid 2000s. Added it to the archive.

  • vext01@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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    4 months ago

    This takes me back to a simpler time.

    A time of playing Total Anihilation and hanging on MSN messenger.

    Does anyone remember musicmatch jukebox with the jumping sheep visualisation?

    • LittleBorat2@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      4 months ago

      The Jukebox was better because of cataloging from online sources and library features. Don’t remember the visuals

    • el_abuelo@programming.devEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Oh god musicmatch was soooo good, it was my daily driver while everyone else was using winamp…something about whipping unsuspecting animals in the ass.

    • Junkernaught@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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      4 months ago

      This threw me for a sec because I was like “no way was someone playing Total Annihilation and not listening to that incredible OST”.

      • vext01@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Me and a friend used to love the menu background sound. Like a deep mechanical humming sound.

        We used to call it “indust”. My friend looped it for an hour and recorded it to minidisc.

        Maybe this is why I like dark ambient drone sounds so much even today…

  • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.devEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Such a lovely post, a nice distraction from all the doom scrolling articles! I wish we had more of this.

    …

    I should write a happy news moderator bot for my instance.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Eventually I figured out that the password needed to be lower case. Inside were a bunch of .avs files

    https://fileinfo.com/extension/avs

    … is a configuration file used by Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), an audio visualizer for the Nullsoft Winamp media player.

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    This is pretty cool, although it makes me feel old.

    I can’t imagine anyone younger than 30 would even get what this article is about.

    • wootz@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Actually, I’d love to hear from anybody younger than 30. Does this article make sense to you at all?

      • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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        4 months ago

        27, I dimly remember what Winamp was (never used it though) and extrapolated what Skins would be. I assume they’re essentially an archive of image files used to give a music player a custom look? Except they’re not technically restricted to image files and can apparently contain other files too, which I assume will make them invalid as skins, i.e. corrupted.

        How far off am I?

        Mind, I’m far from representative for my age group, given my IT expertise.

      • itsralC@lemm.eeEnglish
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        4 months ago

        I am not at all representative of my age group (I am on lemmy ffs), but yes, I do know what winamp is/was.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Yeah? Dude got some corrupt skins for the Winamp program back in the day that didn’t work and poked into the files to see what was in there.

        Makes me wanna check out WACUP, but last time I tried a skin with it that I at least remember working back in the day, it didn’t work.

        Idk maybe it’s because I’m not American so we didn’t have the latest tech at all times, but I’m in my mid-20s and my first OS was Windows 2000 (no I don’t mean ME). I remember my dad teaching me how to rip CDs with Alcohol 120% when I was 5 or so lol.

      • CommanderCloon@lemmy.mlEnglish
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        4 months ago

        I’m under 30, I have no idea what winamp is but I figured it’s some music software from the skins’ pics. I imagine it was popular for it to have a museum thing about user created skins

        (I haven’t googled anything yet)