trans-neptunian object
wacup my beloved!!
a "brief" overview
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 and sharing skins and plugins arose on the internet, which used to be very en vogue in those ancient times.
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 you're not here for the flashy modern stuff, this is neocities. (and apparently radionomy has since pivoted over to streaming and NFTs, 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", having been updated to support modern file formats and with more fleshed-out features. as well as being free to download, it's compatible with skins and plugins from winamp 2.x (though you'll have to grab the x86 version specifically).
so if that sounds appealing at all, you can download wacup here.
skins and plugins
- 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
a handful of skins i personally like
i also made my own skin for wacup !!
my ramblings
as someone who's downloaded... let's call it a normal amount of open source / freeware music players for windows, wacup is, to me anyway, one of the better ones out there. so i'll elaborate on the specifics of what i like about it
- fast: even on my banged-up laptop, the program always starts up within a few seconds and runs well, unlike some music players i could mention (cough cough dopamine)
- customizable: so many modern (esp. proprietary) programs have few if any options for user customization :( considering the legacy skin support, wacup by contrast has literal tens of thousands of options spanning over multiple decades !!! not to mention the plugins
really the only aspect in which i'm left wanting is the lack of a more robust queueing system, like in foobar2000 or audacious -- specifically the ability to have multiple playlists / queues open at once, with their positions and play states being saved by default. if i knew how to program these sorts of things i might try to make a plugin. but alas 💔
ok bye