Preserving Winamp skins for posterity at the Internet Archive

This post is the story of how I helped preserve over 100k Winamp skins in partnership with the Internet Archive, and how my Webamp player became one of the Internet Archive’s embedded media players.

The collection of Winamp skins at the Internet Archive was discussed on Hacker News in Dec. 2020.

One of the most interesting features of Webamp, my JavaScript reimplementation of Winamp 2, is that it can render all the classic skins that users built for that piece of software. Back in 2018, in order to validate my implementation of Winamp skin parsing and rendering I found myself trying to track down as many old Winamp skins as I could find. In the process I both acquired a relatively large collection of skins but also became acutely aware that the sites which were hosting these artifacts were starting to fall offline.

It occurred to me that these creative artifacts were at risk of disappearing and that maybe the Internet Archive could help. So, in March I posted a Tweet seeing if that was the case:

Do I know anyone familiar with the @internetarchive? I’m curious if they would consider helping to preserve a collection of Winamp skins. The old skin sites seem to be going the way of the dinosaurs.

Quickly Jon Banafato connected me with Jason Scott and we got to work. We cobbled together over 5,000 Winamp skins and got them uploaded to the archive.

On June 20th Jason Scott reached out again asking if I’d like to come visit the Internet Archive’s building. He also shared that he had proposed an idea to Brewster Kahle:

So, I went to the head of the Internet archive and proposed a possibility where your player is an option to play the MP3 inside of an item. I got a positive reaction to say the least

The idea was that Webamp could become an optional media player for their many bits of archived audio and announce it at their yearly in-person event in October.

On June 22nd I headed to their church building headquarters in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood where I met Jason. He gave me a tour of their eclectic space and also introduced me to their founder Brewster Kahle. I recall Brewster’s explanation for why such an obscure thing as my project had got him excited: “I love anyone who obsesses”.

On October 2nd the Internet Archive posted a blog post Don’t Click the Llama announcing the collection and the new Webamp integration and on October 3rd I once more headed to SF, this time with Chelsea, to attend the Internet Archive’s event. Sure enough, on stage they shared the new collection and the Webamp integration. I even got a shout out from the stage! Probably the only time in my life I’ll get a live ovation for my software projects. You can view the video of the event here:

The section about Winamp starts at 2:19:00

Seeing this collection on the Archive eventually inspired me to build a purpose built website for viewing these files called the Winamp Skin Museum. The addition of a bulk upload feature (which I wrote about here) has lead to the museum now containing over 100k skins. Of course as part of this upload flow I also ensure all of these skins get added back to the Internet Archive’s collection.

According to their metadata, items in that collection have been viewed over 12 million times, though I’d take these numbers with a grain of salt.

In my view, the Winamp Skin Museum is a great way to keep the skins accessible and alive, but the Internet Archive has a much greater chance of being able to ensure these works of art survive for the long term. And for that, I’m most grateful!