Lost files buried in abandoned plugins for ancient software
July 26, 2024 12:23 PM Subscribe
Like many other filetypes (Office, OpenDocument, EPUB, JAR), WinAmp skins (WSZ) are secretly just ZIP files with specific contents and their own file extension. Jordan Eldredge, the creator and maintainer of the WinAmp Skin Museum (previously, again), investigated a variety of corrupt skins, and from there found a wide variety of interesting stuff, including text and audio files, images, a simple game, and other WinAmp skins, many previously unknown.
Eldredge's blog, by the way, is pretty good.
Eldredge's blog, by the way, is pretty good.
Some of this makes me wonder if there was an online service that’d host Winamp skins for free, and was being taken advantage of.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 12:49 PM on July 26 [3 favorites]
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 12:49 PM on July 26 [3 favorites]
`Standing around the hoop.jpg` is very good.
This whole thing is just full of the Best of the Web. And also Flintstones porn.
posted by sagc at 12:53 PM on July 26 [1 favorite]
This whole thing is just full of the Best of the Web. And also Flintstones porn.
posted by sagc at 12:53 PM on July 26 [1 favorite]
I think people would be surprised at just how many proprietary formats out there are just zips or pdfs with a different set of header values.
I do still wonder about the longevity of digital archives, but then again scrolls and books are susceptible to rot as well.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:05 PM on July 26 [2 favorites]
I do still wonder about the longevity of digital archives, but then again scrolls and books are susceptible to rot as well.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:05 PM on July 26 [2 favorites]
Wait they’re all .zip files?
Always has been.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:06 PM on July 26 [13 favorites]
Always has been.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:06 PM on July 26 [13 favorites]
This really whips the llama's ass.
posted by automatronic at 1:10 PM on July 26 [14 favorites]
posted by automatronic at 1:10 PM on July 26 [14 favorites]
cool.mp3 is the new ringtone for my Nokia 5190. This entire post is absolute white-hot gold.
posted by phooky at 1:58 PM on July 26 [1 favorite]
posted by phooky at 1:58 PM on July 26 [1 favorite]
This reminds me a bit of digging through all my CDs from the late 1990s and early 2000s: a lot of them had "digital bonuses" in a data session, and there were some strange things in there. Related to the WinAmp skins-in-a-WinAmp skins, I recall that at least one disc had an entire second album as MP3s on the data session.
(CDs have like 7 places where you can hide audio or data, and a couple of those are nearly impossible to read with off-the-shelf consumer hardware. For something so conceptually simple, CDs have an incredibly baroque format, and it is extremely difficult to archive them fully.)
Also, this makes me wonder what you would find if you took apart, say, all of the Flash games from a site like Newgrounds circa 2010, or all of the extensions in the Chrome web store.
posted by reventlov at 5:18 PM on July 26 [5 favorites]
(CDs have like 7 places where you can hide audio or data, and a couple of those are nearly impossible to read with off-the-shelf consumer hardware. For something so conceptually simple, CDs have an incredibly baroque format, and it is extremely difficult to archive them fully.)
Also, this makes me wonder what you would find if you took apart, say, all of the Flash games from a site like Newgrounds circa 2010, or all of the extensions in the Chrome web store.
posted by reventlov at 5:18 PM on July 26 [5 favorites]
This nice person I follow on Mastodon found that the microSD in a RaspPi used in an IoT device hadn't been produced so much as blindly copied from the developer's test card, including their dev history, their searches, their logins, etc...
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:55 PM on July 26 [3 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:55 PM on July 26 [3 favorites]
And that person is foone, who is all-around awesome!
posted by JHarris at 1:01 AM on July 27 [4 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 1:01 AM on July 27 [4 favorites]
This post got me to install WACUP and play with some of the skins here. I loved WinAMP skins back in the day, and even Windows Media Player had some really wild skins. I kinda miss that aesthetic, not so polished but so experimental.
posted by JDHarper at 3:50 AM on July 27 [1 favorite]
posted by JDHarper at 3:50 AM on July 27 [1 favorite]
foooooooooone!
posted by lokta at 3:56 AM on July 27 [1 favorite]
posted by lokta at 3:56 AM on July 27 [1 favorite]
foone rocks, and that thread is a great read.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:59 AM on July 27
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:59 AM on July 27
WinAmp? Pshaw. I was a dbPowerAmp user, to my bones.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:21 AM on July 27 [1 favorite]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:21 AM on July 27 [1 favorite]
When I was about 10 or 11, I had very strong opinions about computing, and one of them was that in the future, windows will not be rectangular, they will be free-form and circular. So I switched from Winamp (for my library of like 15-30 something MP3s that fit on my Rio PMP300 64MB MP3 player (it attached to my computer with a parallel port!) to Sonique.
My geometric UI pursuit the prior year had me conned at the local computer store, where this boxed operation system, that turned out to be a gag product on the shelf… called WinBlows 98 spoke to me: a screenshot on the - elliptical file manager windows - YESSSSSS.
I remember the man that worked there, he asked if I knew what this was, I said I sure do. “Windows sucks” he said, “I know!” I replied. “Ok…” Bless me I did not detect the euphemism or sarcasm from the box, and I saw the round apps on it and I was so excited to get it home and install it and it was all just a big confusing disappointment.
I was too embarrassed to go back to that store for months.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 9:52 AM on July 27 [5 favorites]
My geometric UI pursuit the prior year had me conned at the local computer store, where this boxed operation system, that turned out to be a gag product on the shelf… called WinBlows 98 spoke to me: a screenshot on the - elliptical file manager windows - YESSSSSS.
I remember the man that worked there, he asked if I knew what this was, I said I sure do. “Windows sucks” he said, “I know!” I replied. “Ok…” Bless me I did not detect the euphemism or sarcasm from the box, and I saw the round apps on it and I was so excited to get it home and install it and it was all just a big confusing disappointment.
I was too embarrassed to go back to that store for months.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 9:52 AM on July 27 [5 favorites]
operating system*
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 9:57 AM on July 27
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 9:57 AM on July 27
BOOM.
"WINAMP."
(Llama sounds).
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
"It really WHIPS the Llama's ass."
BOOM.
posted by hankmajor at 1:05 PM on July 27 [2 favorites]
"WINAMP."
(Llama sounds).
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
"It really WHIPS the Llama's ass."
BOOM.
posted by hankmajor at 1:05 PM on July 27 [2 favorites]
Re: JDHarper
posted by tranquility at 7:54 AM on July 28 [1 favorite]
[...] even Windows Media Player had some really wild skins. I kinda miss that aesthetic, not so polished but so experimental.Aww yeah, those WMP skins were out of this world! The skins + all the different visualizers made my music library super fun to play with as a kid!
posted by tranquility at 7:54 AM on July 28 [1 favorite]
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I do miss the era of 'skins' though!
posted by sudasana at 12:30 PM on July 26 [2 favorites]