Welcome to Skinned®, an archive that houses some of my favourite winamp skins that I've made from '00 to '01. Originally just a sub section of astral tears, I have since decided that my winamp skins deserve a site of their own and made skinned® specially for them. As I no longer make winamp skins, this site will be in stagnant mode infinitely, unless I suddenly decided to add more old skins. Enough said; please enjoy the skins and site through the drop down menus above ^_^.
- Celestine
1st Aug '03
I can't remember exactly when I started the whole winamp skinning business. It was around '99, a few months after I started my first site, Celestine's World(now defunct). I remember starting off using a skinning program called 'skinnerz'. Basically, you load in a graphic, click a few buttons, and your winamp skin is done. Simple as A-B-C, but the skins churned out look... mundane. Dull. Generic. Same as the skins that 93170293 other sites on the WWW house. There was nothing special to these skins, and I couldn't even really claim that I made them cause I didn't. All I did was click a few buttons in a program. Now, who couldn't do that?
At the same time, I surfed upon a number of anime skins sites. The winamp skins on those sites were gorgerous; totally different from the 'skinner' made skins. I immediately embarked on a big search for more information on how to make skins like that, but couldn't find any leads. In the end, I decided to sit down and tear apart each winamp skin, hoping to find clues there. It was through this that I realise that making winamp skins manually is truly no easy feat. I started to make skins manually, using skinner only to help me cut up my main graphic. I didn't think that making a skin for a mp3 player could be this fun. Each attempt to make a winamp skin would only make the next one easier as I got more and more familiar with the skinning process and the different steps I could take to make it faster. The time taken to make a skin also became shorter and shorter. My average for a fully customised skin with equaliser and playlist was around 4-5 hours.
My interest in making winamp skins faded around the time when Nullsoft released Winamp 3. It was totally different from Winamp 2 and had a new skinning interface. I downloaded to try it and totally hated it. Used a lot more system resources than Winamp 2 and was just yet another attempt to screw up a perfectly fine program (word: ICQ 98). If it ain't broken, don't fix it. I'm guessing Nullsoft realised that since they recently released a Winamp 5 which allows you to change back into Winamp 2's interface.
Winamp skinning was fun while it lasted ^_^. Now, my interest lies more in making wallpapers, of which you can find @ astral tears. For winamp enthusiasts who would like to make their own skins, scroll down to the bottom of the page for links to some tutorial sites.
If you have any queries, or would like to comment on the skins/site, you can find my contact information over @ astral tears.
Want to link back to skinned®? It'll make me a very happy girl ^-^
skinned® is part of astral tears
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