# Winamp Skin (Winampスキン)

> Sets of bitmaps that replace the entire face of the Winamp audio player, called skins, and made by amateurs on a scale of a hundred thousand and more. Everyone worked inside the same window dimensions and the same fixed control positions, so only the picture varied, running from chrome to anime to eight bit.

- IndexStyle No.537 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/winamp-skin
- Kind: Style · Family: Digital Retro · Era: 1997–2005
- Mood: Play, Rebellion, Nostalgia
- Color cues: #3F3F3F / #00FF00 / #000000 (cues taken from reference works, not a fixed palette)

## Defining characteristics

- Every skin shares the same main window size and the same button coordinates, only the artwork changes
- Parts drawn side by side on a single bitmap sheet and cut out per state at runtime
- A non rectangular outline that imitates the front panel of a piece of stereo equipment
- Three windows, player, equalizer, and playlist, snapping together into one vertical stack

## Best used for

- Rebuilding the feel of late 1990s desktop culture inside a screen for an exhibit or a video
- Designing a theming mechanism where a user swaps nothing but a folder of bitmaps

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: Draw letters as bitmaps rather than setting type. Lay digits and letters out at fixed width on one sheet and blit only the glyphs you need.
- Layout & structure: Freeze the coordinates of every control and change only the artwork. Split the interface into role specific windows and cut each silhouette from the transparency of a single image.
- Material & texture: Work in a small palette at one to one pixel scale with no resampling. Render both metal reflection and glowing readouts purely by how the dots are arranged.

## What to avoid

Because the coordinates are fixed, the louder the artwork gets the more the controls sink into it, so check the contrast between decoration and operable surface after the art is done.

## Application checklist

Before calling a piece an application of this style, check it against the defining characteristics:

- [ ] Every skin shares the same main window size and the same button coordinates, only the artwork changes
- [ ] Parts drawn side by side on a single bitmap sheet and cut out per state at runtime
- [ ] A non rectangular outline that imitates the front panel of a piece of stereo equipment
- [ ] Three windows, player, equalizer, and playlist, snapping together into one vertical stack
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Metalheart (メタルハート)** — Early 3D software gave this fin-de-millénaire style its chrome, liquid metal, aggressive bevels and lens flare. Dressed in techno and science-fiction imagery, it ruled rave flyers and games magazines around Y2K. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/metalheart
- **Pixel Art (ピクセルアート)** — Treats the pixel as an honest unit, building clear form from limited resolution and palette. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/pixel-art

## Further study

- Internet Archive の Winamp Skins Collection に集められた .wsz の中身
- 部品を並べた1枚の画像がどこで切り出されているか
- 同じ枠のまま金属、アニメ、極小へ分かれた作例の比較

## Reference works

- Internet Archive — "Winamp Skins Collection"（Jason Scott / archive.org、102,972点） — https://archive.org/details/winampskins

## Source of record

- Internet Archive — "Winamp Skins Collection"（Jason Scott / archive.org、102,972点） — https://archive.org/details/winampskins

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/winamp-skin
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/winamp-skin/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compose_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)