trans-neptunian object
wacup my beloved!!
i love this thing so much you have no idea
maybe you've heard of winamp. maybe you haven't. maybe you're even old enough to have used it when it first came out! (i'm not lol.)
for the uninitiated, winamp is a music (and video) player that was first released in 1997, nearly 3 decades ago, and pretty much immediately amassed millions upon millions of users. a whole culture of people making skins and plugins arose on the internet, which was very en vogue at the time.
there's a newer version released by radionomy, the company that bought winamp back in 2014, but it sucks (i installed it a while back and then uninstalled it about 5 minutes later) and apparently radionomy is all about streaming and nfts these days, so fuck that.
wacup is, in the words of the developer, "[a] media player that's made to emulate some of your favourite media players from the past & bring them into the future". as well as being free to download, it's compatible with skins and plugins from winamp 2.x (though you'll have to get the x86 version specifically).
if you like web 1.0 / 2.0 and software that is only mildly inconvienent, you should definitely check out wacup!
useful links:
- winamp skin museum ⬩ a browser for all the winamp skins compiled on archive.org (compatible with wacup, and also just fun to scroll through for a hit of that late '90s - early '00s internet)
- winamp heritage ⬩ janky as fuck and hard to navigate, but has a substantial collection of skins and plugins
some skins i personally like:
you can also preview / download a skin i made from this page.