Technology @lemmy.world Interstellar_1 @lemmy.blahaj.zone 1mo ago

The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins

jordaneldredge.com The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins

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

Very interesting article!

86 comments

This is the Internet I miss!
- What? You don't like browsing the web, where everyone is shoving politics down your throat, and making violent hostile threats, and everybodys offended over baby names, and the web is like 3 websites big???
  
  You don't LOVE that?
  
  Please accept the cookie policy before any of that stuff...
  
  Name verified
  
  Try finding a nice desktop background picture of something specific. It's all just links to subscription based stock image sites.
  
  If anyone knows places to search for freely shared images that would be amazing. Just wanted a whale shark photo in 2K..
  
  Onboarding the general population was such a historic mistake
- It is still there, just not picked up by Google or Bing.
Nice find. Really whips the Llamas ass.
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?
- 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.
  
  Screenshot
- Musicmatch! I thought I was the only one!
- This threw me for a sec because I was like "no way was someone playing Total Annihilation and not listening to that incredible OST".
  
  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...
- Hell yeah!
- The Jukebox was better because of cataloging from online sources and library features. Don't remember the visuals
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.
- Actually, I'd love to hear from anybody younger than 30. Does this article make sense to you at all?
  
  I am not at all representative of my age group (I am on lemmy ffs), but yes, I do know what winamp is/was.
  
  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.
  
  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)
  
  *crickets*
  
  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.
  
  I'm 21, but people talk about winamp online all the time so I'm pretty familiar
This is like finding digital time capsules. Very interesting.
Oh for fucks sake, now the article itself has a misplaced mobile Wikipedia link and there's nowhere I can quickly see to put my copy paste about it.

copy paste for context:

Please, anyone who reads this, stop posting links to the mobile version of Wikipedia. It doesn’t switch automatically on PC, and I see it happen all the time. Just take the half a second to remove the “.m” from the beginning of the link, save everyone else from the pain of having to be surprised by it and taking the time to do it themselves.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirect-mobile-wikipedia/
  
  General infosec tip: keep your browser add-ons to the absolute minimum you can live with. Add-ons are attack vectors. The more you have - the more at risk you are. And only install the ones you have a reason to trust.
- People not having the Wikipedia app baffles me. Sharing from there gives you reasonable links.
  
  Why use an app when there's a web site? In case of Wikipedia I fail to see any functional benefit for an app.
  
  There's a Wikipedia app? I find that baffling.
  
  Yes that works, and you can also use something like URLCheck and just drop that path
Oh wow, I never heard of the skin archive. This is fantastic.

I still use Winamp 2.95, with a Pure Pwnage skin I downloaded back in the mid 2000s. Added it to the archive.
- You must be a l33t h4x0r!
  
  Boom! Headshot!
What a great read. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if a "KOOL" tube is a tube for smoking a cigarette out of (I remember that being a brand).
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.
That was truly strange, awesome
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.
If you want to see the Flintstones R34 image you have to the crack the file yourself.
This is a truly fantastic story. It reminds me of why the Internet is cool, if you dig deep enough, there's always treasure to be found.
what a great article
I think audacious can load winamp skins (and xmms skins).

Will try at some point.
- Qmmp can use them too.
That's really cool
Really enjoyed the ride, very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
I miss foobar2k
- Did it go somewhere?
  
  Nope, it's still great on Windows. Perhaps they went to Linux since it's still Windows-only.
nice findings!
An AMA with the kid whose dad got him a custom winamp skin would be neat.

86 comments